Against civilization

What Hacker News says

1. null4bl3Jun 2020
   I would recommend John Zerzan's "Against Civilization".

   It is in the same ballpark

   https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=9780922915989&i=stripbooks&link...

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2. ulkramJun 2018
   You should check out the article "The Case Against Civilization: Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?"

   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-again...

   And the book it cites "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States".

   Few quotes to whet your appetite:

   > The first is that, for thousands of years, the agricultural revolution was, for most of the people living through it, a disaster. The fossil record shows that life for agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers.

   > there is a crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples; it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states... Only grains are, in Scott’s words, “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became “the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a hegemonic agrarian calendar.”

   > War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing... writing was used exclusively for bookkeeping: “the massive effort through a system of notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.”

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3. peisistratosApr 2019
   It says "Against Civilization" is "spreading versions of his message", meaning Kaczynski. But "Against Civilization" was written by John Zerzan, and Zerzan was saying these things before "Industrial Society and Its Future" was published.

   In fact, while Kaczynski was more militant, Zerzan is more radical, he sees the problems not starting with industrial capitalism, but with the original agricultural slave empires of the Middle East.

   Defining primitivism by Kaczynski is like defining Zionism by Baruch Goldstein, or the anti-abortion cause by Scott Roeder or so forth. Or US patriotism by the torture in Abu Ghraib.

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