Had a kind of interesting conversation with a friend of mine today–it was very awkward and I felt like a goddamned buffoon for most of it. ~~the tenets of rationality~~ say that I should try and focus on whatever makes me feel confused or conflicted, because that’s where I’m mostly likely to be wrong, yet I’m fairly certain that I basically always feel confuslicted; oh well.

We talked about a lot of things, but the thing that I felt most unsteady about was technology. It’s a hot take, but I think technology is….good. It’s beneficial to me. I would not be able to survive without it, due to the genetic illness that I have. I also would not be able to know nearly as much about the world around me without it; most of my education is derived from the internet and pirated ebooks (which is pretty evident in how I communicate, if we’re being honest.) I know that postindustrial production requires the unsustainable and unethical extraction of rare-earth minerals, but I also don’t know if it logically follows that an infrastructural collapse is….inevitable? Desireable? This is the question on everybody’s lips, granted, but isn’t it possible to create a pedagody/practice/school of technological recovery?

The specific things that I want to find out, discuss with others, and come back to, are as follows–

• Is it possible to create wireless, digital architecture–internet or similar–using only metals which are ubiquitous and relatively benign to harvest?
• If not, have enough rare earth minerals been harvested to supply 10,000,000,000 people with, say, a smartphone and a laptop? (Also, holy shit, the earth has so many people. fuck.)
• Even if so, is it possible to reduce our use of those materials aaanyway?

I also have some complicated feelings related to the….ethics, I suppose, of technology. (I’m unclear on the difference between ethics and morals–one is fake and the other is not, obvs, but which one is which seems to be Controversial.) This is explored deeper in the manifesto for subversive cybernetics, but there is an obvious need for people to regain control over technology. To lift the veil of production, naturalize the motive by which technology is created, and develop stronger roots of entanglement/interfaction with the mechanisms by which technology works. Or, to put it in non-asshole terms: in times of industry-state conspiracy that rotates around technology, is in the interest of “the people” to learn how to control the technology that surrounds them; fixing, destroying, creating, modifying, and using; phones, cameras, displays, vehicles, circuits, etc. In light of the impending hard times (read Desert if you haven’t already, lmao) this seems to be more of an obvious need than it might’ve been a couple decades ago.

I don’t feel like any of that is a particularly hot take, all things considered; I do think that I’m more likely to fight hard for some kinds of technology (eg, bacterial manufacturing of human-genome derivative enzymes) due to how my life, ykno, depends on those technologies. So it goes! Cold take tho it may be, however, I do feel that it bears reiteration, as most folk who I speak with in passing seem to absorb a more and more damning or complacent view of digital technology–either being deadset against it, or not giving a lot of consideration to the sociopolitical context in which smartphones occur. Whatever. The point of this is to establish that I think there needs to be a second layer to anarchist practices of technological rehabilitation. No deep thoughts yet, but–it’s not enough to know how your smartphone works (a 21st century exploration of the infraordinary may be in order), you also need to know the impact of what you do with it. Here’s my knee-jerk feelings on the matter:

• Video games are usually bad and designed for addiction/complacency, but can sometimes be good.
• Social media is usually bad.
• In point of fact, media that captures you for a long-term period of time (upwards of four or five hours) and imposes a minimum of analysis (lacks depth, has little narrative, weighs heavily on unsubstantiated propaganda, whatever) is usually bad.
• However, a large part of why these things are bad is due to how they reproduce social alienation–they are designed to distract you from actions which are entangled with the physical/material world surrounding you, and to perpetuate existential dissatisfaction while also encouraging superficial satisfaction. In instances where these devices have been preceded by the alienation, they can actually be beneficial. (I spent two years as a child stuck with my abusive household in the alaskan tundra with no physical means of leaving the square mile around my house for any social purpose. Video games and social media preserved my sanity, and could not have contributed to my alienation from society, because that alienation was already there.)

I don’t have a clean point to any of this, other than what my friend said earlier tonight–that building our own smartphones won’t matter if we still have facebook on them (and it doesn’t matter who’s running facebook, either.) Frankly, this blog is partially an exploration–on my part–of potential ways to see how digital interaction can be actualized in actively subversive ways. We’ll see how it goes~