Instead of focusing on reduce, reuse, recycle, we must resist, rebel, and rewild ourselves.
Here is the eighth text in the series by Mark Boyle, author of The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology (2019), where he recounts his experience living without industrial technology. In this article, he explores the urgent need to resist the industrial system and embrace rewilding.
You can read the other texts by Mark Boyle here:
1. Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it
2. Lessons of living like a prince outside cyberia
3. Bored? No way. Ditching technology makes life complicated and beautiful
4. Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more
5. Living without technology taught me about life in society;
6. You don’t need modern medicine to be healthy;
7. Living without technology is not romantic;
8. We must resist, revolt, and rewild ourselves;
9. Disconnecting from the industrial world helped me discover what reality really is.
__________
My advice after a year without tech: rewild yourself
Having once been an early adopter of tech, I was an unlikely early rejector. But it has now been over a year since I have phoned my family or friends, logged on to antisocial media, sent a text message, checked email, browsed online, took a photograph or listened to electronic music. Living and working on a smallholding without electricity, fossil fuels or running water, the last year has taught me much about the natural world, society, the state of our shared culture, and what it means to be human in a time when the boundaries between man and machine are blurring.
My reasons for unplugging, during that time, haven’t so much changed as shifted in importance. My primary motives were – and still are – ecological. The logic was simple enough. Even if used minimally, a single smartphone (or toaster, internet server, solar panel, sex robot) relies on the entire industrial megamachine for its production, marketing and consumption.
The consequences of this ever-intensifying industrialism are clear: widespread surveillance in our pockets; the standardisation of everything; the colonisation of wilderness, indigenous lands and our mindscape; cultural imperialism; the mass extinction of species; the fracturing of community; mass urbanisation; the toxification of everything necessary for a healthy life; resource wars and land grabs; 200 million climate refugees by 2050; the automation of millions of jobs, and the inevitable inequality, unemployment and purposelessness that will follow and provide fertile ground for demagogues to take control. I could go on, but you’ve heard it all before.
Read the full version:
Join the resistance.
ATR is constantly welcoming and training new recruits determined to combat the technological system.