If Brave New World points us towards the emerging Total System of the Machine, then, it also points us towards the alternative. That alternative, according to both Huxley and Scott, has always been the same, for millennia, all over the world. It is living within limits, refusing to consume for the Machine, refusing to give the Total System what it

What we see here, then, are two potential escape routes from Machine culture: one outside, one inside. Shatter zones do not have to literally be in the hills: they can be within our homes and even within our hearts. My heart soars whenever I hear of some remote monastery or surviving rooted community with no online access or even electricity, whose

In ancient China, the state distinguished between two different kinds of barbarian outsider: the raw (sheng) and the cooked (shu). A twelfth-century document detailing the relationship of the Li people with the Chinese state speaks of the ‘cooked Li’ as those who have submitted to state authority and the ‘raw Li’ as those who ‘live in the mountain

Scott calls the ‘state-repelling characteristics’ of the Zomians, we could call ‘Machine-repelling characteristics’ today. There is no easy or standardised answer to the question of how we can cultivate them, but there is one question it might be useful for each of us to ask: What kind of barbarian do I want to

This is why I find the notion of the jellyfish tribe so intriguing. Any attempt at building utopia will fail—but utopia should never be a goal. Some form of free survival is the goal: survival in order to live a life unconformed to the dictates of the Machine, and to uphold the values of a true human life.

labour. All of this applies today to the state in which I live, including the last one. The slavery and forced labour now takes place far from the core of modern Western states, in places like central Africa or China, where the poor mine our smartphone components or sew our cheap clothes in regimented workhouses, but that doesn’t make them any less

The bottom line is that I don’t think I really understood the nature of power until that happened. And now that I have seen, along with other coddled people in the Western bubble, what that nature can amount to, I have come to agree with the anarchist philosopher Pierre Proudhon, who saw it all coming a long time ago: To be GOVERNED is to be

The upshot, says McGilchrist, is that ‘we no longer live in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it’.[2] There is no territory in this new world, only map. Those who can see this, and try to point it out, are dismissed as ‘romantics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘reactionaries’ or ‘dreamers’. The left hemisphere’s world is taken to be

Still, on this issue as on so many others, the Orthodox monks remain the conservatives. In Buddhist Japan, things are much further ahead, as you would probably expect. They don’t just have smartphone monks there; they have robot priests. One, named Mindar, has been working at a temple in Kyoto for the last few years, reciting Buddhist sutras with