Notes from the Underground

It occurred to me a few minutes ago that events may just have taken a turn I didn't expect, and should have. It's one thing to be blindsided by events; it's another thing, and a mortifying one, to realize that you had all the necessary pieces of the puzzle in your hands and still didn't manage to see how it all fit together -- or rather, in this case, how close it was to falling apart. 

Back in 2013, in a series of posts on The Archdruid Report that ended up becoming raw material for my book After Progress, I described faith in progress as the established religion of our time. That suggestion fielded a lot of pushback, mostly among people who thought of "religion" as something only primitive people believe in and wanted to shield their own belief in progress from comparison with it. It didn't help that I pointed to Communism, among other things, as another example of a secular civil religion, since back then Communism was a fringe ideology that nobody in American society believed in. 

I still think I was quite correct to identify blind faith in progress as a civil religion, and indeed the established orthodoxy of modern American society. What I should have realized, and didn't, was that it would collapse suddenly and not slowly, the way Communism did. 

That's what we're watching now, in real time. 

Over the last few weeks popular rebellion against the next duly anointed strides in the onward march of progress has come surging in off the fringes and started seizing the headlines. Grand juries have begun refusing to indict people who chop down Flock cameras. Tech journals are admitting in print that most people distrust AI, not to mention the sleazy corporations that are pushing it on the rest of us, and are even drawing connections between that distrust and the soaring popularity of old technologies and "old school cool" among young people. Comments like the one I've posted on the right have gone from weird to normal. 

All this caught me completely by surprise. Just a few weeks ago, in fact, I was laying the groundwork for an anthology of old tech, the Technonomicon, in the serene conviction that it would be a fringe publication with the same kind of readership among outcasts and rebels that most of my other books have attracted. I'd even noticed that the frantic pushback I used to get when I mentioned that I don't own a television or use a cell phone had gone away, replaced by a sort of wistful envy among people who'd begun to notice that most technologies introduced since 2000 or so had made their lives significantly worse...and I'd somehow failed to draw the obvious conclusion. 

I suspect part of what happened was the very substantial revival of interest in actual, theistic religion that's been building in the US for the last few years. People who turn to the Divine, however named or described, to meet their religious needs don't need to do it in a hole-and-corner fashion by loading theological expectations on progress. Part of it, too, is the simple fact that so much of the latest technology really does suck, and that so much of it makes no secret about giving all the benefits to overpaid techbro billionaires while piling all the costs on the rest of us. 

One way or another, though, here we are, with faith in progress collapsing around us the way that faith in the gospel according to Marx imploded a few decades ago across the Eastern Bloc. If I'm right, we're going to see those same techbro billionaires flailing around like the leaders of Communist parties after the Berlin Wall came down. It should be entertaining. 

Beyond that? Well, we have a future to build, and with any luck it can be less embarrassingly stupid and toxic than the one that techbros and corporate enablers tried to push on us. I'll do my best to get over my embarrassment and see if I can offer suggestions. In the meantime, the Technonomicon project continues, please read this blog post if you missed it, and consider contributing essays and ideas via this post here on Dreamwidth.