Gifts of civilisation (or, how did we get here?)

In my Free-dragging Manifesto I talk about de-civilising activities aimed at mitigating civilisation's brutality. Composting plays a big part, as does the dispersal of cities (the word 'civilisation' comes from the Latin word civilis meaning centre or city). Derrick Jensen's massive two-volume tome Endgame: The Problem of Civilisation played a large role in the forming of my manifesto, especially his idea that any centre large enough to rely upon the importation of resources can never be sustainable. If you haven't got time to read Jensen's or my work then this little film, that I found today, is a micro-summary.



I close the screen and pick up David Graeber's book Possibilities, and the first thing I read is:

This leads to the interesting suggestion that, from the perspective of Medieval psychological theory, our entire civilization...is really a form of clinical depression. p67.

Mashed (elegy for the city)

Our elders are sick. Written on the wall of a child's tree-house by a Scottish poet.

Since Plato we have been conscious of the ill-logic of our cities but struggled to do away with them. Now for the first time in human history there are more people in cities than in rural areas. It is no wonder, therefore, that human existence is at its most abstract, most violent, most 'civil', most veiled, most mediated, most toxic, most insane.

Jason Workman gave me permission to do a mashup of WorkmanJones city interventions between 2006 and 2008, which I've just finished. The main track is by Esmerine, who I think are a Canadian band that don members of godspeed you! black emperor.

The Australian

To the Letters Editor:

I bought your paper today for the first time in years. Reading it was like sneaking into a black tie dinner at a men's only club. Wow! I thought, people still think like this, but of course I was joking, you're just representing what we all think, right?

What I found since my last read (back in your glorious Howard years) was an even greater ramping up of heroic capitalist rhetoric, finer crafted greenwashing, and a border-line sociopathic hyper-mediated psyche, with the subtext embedded dispassionately: 'power invents a mask for powerlessness to wear' (TS). All this, despite the writing on the wall signaling the end, thank fuck, of capitalism.

Knowing a little of the territory marked by your bullish jock journos who champion pop-fascists like Rupert Murdoch – why wouldn't you, he's your boss right? – I should hardly have been surprised, but to witness again the dogmatic clutching on to an economics based upon profit growth and the refusal to advocate for a commerce that mimics ecological systems illustrates your bloody-minded stupidity and out-moded ideology.

Even after the nature crunch (which will make the sinking global-pool-of-money seem like just another family holiday spent at home), your paper (in the unlikely event that it survives) will no doubt once again twist the story of capitalism's failure to one of triumph. But capitalism's real triumph will be our extinction.

Your newspaper, to borrow McKenzie Wark's words, is a shopping guide where news breaks up the commercial page and filters the right stock advice throughout it. Your newspaper preaches the reliance upon the importation of resources when we know this to be our species' death wish. Therefore, your paper is illogical.

Luckily for me, my money is not totally wasted in buying today's, nor the material you print your capitalist propaganda on as it will go nicely in my compost, and feed the worms who enrich the soil to grow the food that is in walking distance to my home.

The Blogatron

Derrick Jensen's core premise, that industrial civilisation is not and can never be sustainable, is central to my move towards a post-industrial poetry. Together with friends, neighbours, the garden and a four-year old, de-logoed blogatron on Wi-Fi (above), we move towards a digi-primitivism; de-industrialised and de-capitalised.

Industrial civilisation is a toxiculture – from every modernised (genetically vulnerable) wheat seed to the next (carbon dioxide producing) Man Booker Prize novel. Yes, the blogatron too!

Part of the solution is permaculture, an antidote to the toxiculture that is capitalism.