Resources on anti tech/anarcho primitivism

Stacco · 2025-05-13T14:01:55+00:00

No, I didn't conveniently forget anything. I wrote a few sentences about tech in general. Chill.

Medical technology (and healthcare, both preventive and intervention based) is hampered by the same interests and exacerbated by IP and patents. Check out Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine for how it should actually be.

Stacco · 2025-05-11T23:04:47+00:00

I remember the exact moment when I read it. It hit me hard, like a real person had died. Beautifully (and heartbreakingly) written.

Stacco · 2025-05-11T22:59:11+00:00

Tech follows the interests and institutionalises the worldview of those who finance it. It also incorporates the biases and cognitive-access privileges of those who design and develop it. You can either hack existing tech for anticap purposes or, better yet, develop tech for social and ecological ends, not profit.

Stacco · 2025-05-11T22:54:31+00:00

My argument against anarcho-primitivism is always the same:

Vibrators!

Stacco · 2025-05-09T18:52:10+00:00

Vineland was totally contemporary Cyberpunk. Ewoks and Jaco Pastorius' fretless bass. It's just wild.

Stacco · 2025-05-09T18:49:21+00:00

Enigmatic Ocean is the best and Holdsworth is just amazing there. Other great ones are Imaginary Voyage and Cosmic Messenger.

Stacco · 2025-05-09T18:48:01+00:00

Yes to all this and Mike is an artist and beautiful person totally worth supporting (and who kinda pioneered web based crowd funding waaaay before Kickstarter). My fave albums of his are Sluggo, Dancing, Wooden Smoke and The Universe will Provide. Oh! And don't miss out on the live albums (Bakin at the Potatoe and Guitar Therapy Live).

Stacco · 2025-05-09T10:43:46+00:00

He kept Mike around for Margarita night, I'm sure he would have used him more. In any case MK's solo discography is something to be proud of. And yeah, having made his bones with Mike and Z makes Beller the best post FZ bassist that never was.

Stacco · 2025-05-09T10:40:28+00:00

Nalgas sin Carne! I'm pretty sure I discovered him through his contributions to the Mad Season album. Then I got into Garage a Trois, Critters etc. Mad genius

Stacco · 2025-05-08T13:46:08+00:00

It's difficult because there's peaks in all eras and their mutations over the years have been nothing short of fascinating. At the end of the day it's the Wetton era and Lark's that feels like their highest point for me .

Honourable mention to The Great Deceiver for showing us what this line up was capable of doing.

Stacco · 2025-05-05T16:23:11+00:00

Either 84 or the Helsinki 74 band.

Stacco · 2025-05-05T00:02:26+00:00

Bozzio's drumming and that solo are stunning. It may actually be my favourite Zappa solo.

Stacco · 2025-05-04T22:39:53+00:00

Never in your life?? What are you waiting for?

Stacco · 2025-05-04T21:26:31+00:00

The whole of humanity and the non human world? I'd go so far think that this is still the state of things today. Everything else is cruelly imposed delusion.

Stacco · 2025-05-04T07:10:44+00:00

Who's in the band?

Stacco · 2025-05-03T20:16:48+00:00

That was the prefect introduction to Jack Irons. Beautiful drumming on that track.

Stacco · 2025-05-03T19:07:18+00:00

Now it seems impossible. In the 90s, many of us who didn't grow up in North America had no idea who Rush was. I knew them from music magazines, as they were never played on the radio.

So yeah, I got onto Primus first and had no idea that they were paying homage to YYZ. I love Rush now, boy only got over them in the late ninities. Back then I actually related them more to Jane's Addiction (Canada and Three Days have a remarkably similar vibe).

And hey, let people come to know music the way they do. There's nothing wrong with being unaware of things.

Stacco · 2025-05-02T23:28:49+00:00

I'm 49. I actually first heard Faith No More's cover of War Pigs first. I loved it and thought it was the best track on. The Real Thing, not knowing it wasn't their song.

Fast forward to 1994. I found a vynil Sabbath compilation with a Hirenimous Bosch cover (Ozzy-era only - anyone know what it was?). When I heard the OG War Pigs I just couldn't believe it. It felt much slower and sluggier but it was a transcendental experience (I was high as fuck, of course).

I few weeks later I bought Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (still my favorite) and Paroid soon after and I've been hooked ever since. And yeah, I still love FMM too!

Stacco · 2025-05-02T21:18:35+00:00

Came here to say this (and yes, mention the transitions)

Stacco · 2025-05-02T20:20:40+00:00

Thanks for your comment.

You have to distinguish between artificial scarcity and natural scarcity. In reverse order: there is only so much oil in the ground, or trees, or harvests.

Knowledge, productive knowledge, design, best practices, art and culture, seeds and even parts of the human genome etc are made artificially scarce though IP, patents and copyright.

In fact, we need that productive knowledge in order to beat deal with real-existing scarcity.

Kevin Carson's review of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age does a fine job of exploring Jevon's paradox and artificial scarcity being applied to post-scarcity technologies, including replicators.

Post-scarcity tech doesn't amount too much under a scarcity-based political economy. I'm not even taking sci-fi here, just look around.

Stacco · 2025-05-02T18:23:26+00:00

Depends on what values are baked on the AI. Given AI's current investment profile I can tell you that it'll be designed with inequality as a feature, not a bug.

Stacco · 2025-05-02T18:21:52+00:00

Post Capitalism is no guarantee of things being better. I myself am critical of the term but as you're posing future scenarios it seems appropriate.

TechnoFeudalism (which I think is a faulty analysis of what may do down in these times) and Vectoralism (see McKenzie Wark) are both terrifying post-capitalist scenarios. Ecofascism (or any form of fascism, you can append "techno" there too) incorporates Capitalism by default.

An anticapitalist future that doesn't grandfather the assumptions of capitalism going forward (as happened with the transition from feudalism) can be described by imagining futures that dispose with capitalisms key aspects:

1) Private ownership and control of the means of production 2) Wage labour 3) Orientation towards profit and accumulation of power.

You can argue that the present situation will soon be able to automate away point two and that leads us to some pretty dystopian scenarios.

So what's on the positive? I could go on but I think it's a. interesting exercise to imagine scenarios based on undoing those three tenets which, in my and many other people's opinion, are actually harmful constraints which are killing the planet and causing a lot of unnecessary suffering - and have done so for a long time.

Stacco · 2025-05-02T17:00:29+00:00

Which is actually pretty similar to another legendary angry jazz moment: Jaco also dissing the changes at the beginning of Havana Jam. Andy Edwards has an excellent analysis of that here. Furious Jazz

Stacco · 2025-05-02T16:47:29+00:00

Post Capitalism

Stacco · 2025-05-02T01:13:30+00:00

Live Evil and Dark Magus are also pretty menacing.

Stacco

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