Frequently asked questions to ATR

“Technophobe” is an absurd expression since human beings cannot live without technology, just like many other animals that learn and pass on techniques from generation to generation.

We are opposed to the knowledge and technical means of the industrial age only. The vision of the world that gave birth to the industrial system, the power and gigantism of the technical means of our time are incompatible with the ideals we defend: local autonomy, freedom, democracy, dignity, caring for the earth, fulfilling and rewarding work, etc.

The so-called “modern” lifestyle that emerged with the first industrial revolution is based on growth. Supplying energy and maintaining the artificial ecosystem of machines at the foundation of the modern world requires:
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· To extract ever more raw materials;
· To artificialize more and more land;
· To release more and more toxic substances into the air, water and soil.

Let's give an example with the train, which is often presented as an ecological means of transport. According to ADEME :

“SNCF Réseau is the owner and manager of the national rail network. Each year, regeneration and maintenance generate significant deposits throughout the country: more than 120,000 tons of rails, more than 2 million tons of ballast, more than 60,000 tons of wooden sleepers, more than 300,000 tons of concrete sleepers, more than 3,000 tons of cables and catenary contact wires.

On railways, the ballasted complex is the base layer allowing the distribution of loads on the ground and in which the crosspieces are embedded. It consists of massive, angular and crushed rock aggregates. Subjected to strong mechanical pressures, this material has a lifespan of the order of 15 to 40 years, depending on the tonnages circulated and the speed. Thus, with the renewal and maintenance of the tracks every year, nearly 2 million tons of used ballast must be recovered.”

To extract and move such quantities of materials, it is essential to use innumerable machines, which themselves consume a great deal of resources and energy.

Modern medicine is totally dependent on the techno-industrial system and therefore on oil, whether for transport (ambulances, helicopters, logistics), equipment and materials in hospitals (machines, single-use objects, packaging, omnipresent plastic, etc.) or the manufacture of medicines. According to a study, while “approximately 3% of oil production is used to manufacture pharmaceutical products, [...] nearly 99% of pharmaceutical raw materials and reagents come from petrochemicals.”

On the other hand, modern medicine, like many modern scientific disciplines studying living things, has a tendency to consider the human body as a machine composed of gears and parts that need to be repaired or changed. It is an extremely simplistic view of health.

According to Ivan Illich: “The analysis of morbidity trends shows that the general environment (a concept that includes lifestyle) is the primary determinant of the overall health status of any population. Food, housing and working conditions, the cohesion of the social fabric, and the cultural mechanisms for stabilizing the population play the decisive role in determining the health status of adults and the age at which they tend to die.”
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To go further on the subject of health, we recommend the following texts and books:

— “L'obsession de la santé parfaite” (French only) by Ivan Illich, Le Monde Diplomatique, 1999
— Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, the Expropriation of Health (1974) by Ivan Illich
— Civilized to death: the price of progress (2018) by Christopher Ryan
— The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease (2014) by Daniel Lieberman
— Homo confort: Le prix à payer d’une vie sans efforts ni contraintes (2022, French only) by Stefano Boni
— Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children (2016), by Angela J. Hanscom

In general, people who ask this question either think :
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- that technical progress is inevitable, that it is a natural force to which it would be useless to oppose resistance;
- or that the system should be dismantled, but are resigned because of the general apathy, or the enormity of the task.

In the first case, this opinion is based on the assumption that technical progress would be neutral. But that is not true. Each culture, each civilization develops techniques that are specific to it according to its conception of the universe, its way of considering relationships with things and beings. Technology is always political, it is never neutral.

In the second case, it is enough to study the historical resistance movements, from the French resistance under German occupation to Mandela's ANC, the Russian or Irish Revolution, or even anti-colonial resistances in Vietnam and elsewhere, to see that the current situation is nothing new. Regardless of the time and place, the resistance fighters always belonged to a minority of the population at the beginning.

We don't want anyone to die, our organization is non-violent. No one knows how many people depend on the technological system for their survival or how many could live on Earth without it. According to the economist Hélène Tordjman in her book Green Growth Against Nature (in French only):

“Small-scale agriculture produces 70 to 75% of the food consumed worldwide on a quarter of cultivated land, while industrial agriculture produces 25 to 30% on three quarters of cultivated land.”

As we have already mentioned elsewhere, the Terre de Liens association believes that the territory of France would be sufficient to feed the indigenous population.

In theory, it would be possible for the leaders of states, industries, political parties, unions, and administrations to agree on the vital need to stop technoscientific development and then dismantle the industrial system. Governments would then put in place a plan to dismantle infrastructure, distribute land and gradually delegate their power to local communities. In practice, we all know that will never happen. Even in the very hypothetical case where a political leader succeeds in being elected on such a program, there would always be organizations to sabotage its achievement or eliminate the leader in question. This implies a relationship of power with power. The more his hegemony is threatened, the more violently he will react.

It is simple, either we open the debate on dismantling the industrial system and start discussing the best ways to proceed to limit the hazards that would ensue; or the pursuit of technoscientific development will make the Earth more and more hostile to life, and will almost certainly cause the death of billions of human beings and probably the complete disappearance of most complex life forms if the biosphere were to be too damaged.

These are the kind of lies that are still being peddled today, in 2022, by People who claim to be environmentalists. A technically advanced society seeks power, so it cannot be egalitarian or democratic, let alone sustainable in terms of resource consumption. It has never been the case in the past, and it will not happen in the future either. Most of the alleged “progress” made with industrialization is in fact an improvement of a situation that was initially degraded by the rise of modern states, commercial capitalism and then industrial capitalism.

For us, “barbarity” means using explosives, excavators and giant trucks to pull tens of billions of tons of material from the Earth's crust every year. For us, “barbarism” means covering the earth's land with concrete and asphalt and replacing living and diverse landscapes with uniform industrial monocultures. For us, “barbarity” is the contamination of human and non-human fetuses with perfluorinated components, plastic and nanoparticles. For us, “barbarity” means destroying autonomous peasant communities from all over the world in the name of “progress” and “development.” For us, “barbarity” is slavery that has never stopped growing (40 million people affected, mainly women and children) and the forced labor that affects 160 million children in the world.

It is mainly for this reason that the anti-technology movement must become global. That is why we invite our Russian, Chinese, Indian, Indian, Brazilian, American, etc. brothers and sisters to join forces to fight the technological system in their respective geographical areas.

Recall that maintaining the industrial system and modern nation states leads us right to a military clash between great powers that are competing with each other for global hegemony. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is a simple appetizer. Do you want to be the first humans on Earth to experience a nuclear winter?

Our organization rejects the classic opposition between left and right, because it keeps us in an industrial rut. Obsession with the quest for power to push the exploitation of nature to its peak, the desire to liberate ourselves from the terrestrial human condition by technical means, or even blindness to the neutrality of technology, all shared characteristics (left and right) that explain why we reject conventional political divides (see the Principle No. 9 of the Resistant).

From the extreme left to the extreme right, we find the same Cult of technology. Assimilating earthly existence to a burden and starting from the misleading assumption that technology would be politically neutral, the former dream of using technology to emancipate themselves from the human condition. Obsessed with power, the latter dream of enslaving people and nature by appealing to technical power.

We are aware of that. We do not pretend to provide a solution that can magically solve all the world's problems. The aim is to prevent humanity from self-destructing and to lay the technical foundations that will promote autonomy, democracy and freedom.

While we share many of his very lucid analyses of the technological system, we absolutely do not condone his actions. Attacking isolated individuals will not change the deadly dynamic of the technological system in any way. Kaczynski himself admitted that he acted impulsively, without really thinking, without trying to build a political force. Having learned from his mistakes, he now encourages his readers to organize themselves politically in his book Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.

ATR is a non-violent organization committed to legal activities. That said, we understand that exasperated activists and persecuted local communities around the world are using violent means to respond to the violence of power.

To sum up, we are neither for nor against violence. It is not our role to dictate their attitude to individuals facing a tragic situation on their own land. You would have to be both extremely arrogant and incredibly naive to imagine being able to impose a uniform way of fighting the system.

A world full of life, a world where the incessant noise of machines would be replaced by the song of birds, the melody of the stream, the howl of wolves and the roar of the deer. And if you lack imagination, all you have to do is find out about the indigenous peoples and peasant communities of the global South, some of whom still live far away from global trade flows. Their daily existence is (very) far from resembling the ordeal described in the dominant civilizational narrative bludgeoned in the West since elementary school, and throughout life by the media and the entertainment industry.

We advocate for the reappropriation of livelihoods by local populations. We want people to be able to eat properly by themselves, in complete autonomy, by freely choosing ways of subsistence adapted to the resources available in their geographical area. Agro-ecology, agro-forestry, forest and permaculture gardens, hunting and fishing using traditional techniques (low tech), pastoralism, small livestock, etc., the possibilities and combinations are endless.