The Endings Machine - Technology & Teleology (Patreon)

The Tower of Babel, from the first book of the bible, tells the story of a united human race coming together to build a “city and a tower with its top in the heavens”, and being struck down for their hubris. The almighty, whose reasoning is not elaborated in the story, responded with the collective punishment of different languages to confuse and divide everyone making such collaboration impossible in future. God did a war crime on us because tower too big.

When I say God’s reasoning wasn’t explained, of course the general understanding is that the big man is none too pleased with the human race threatening his cosmic top spot:

“And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

The Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the elder depicted the tower of Babel at two different stages of construction, reaching past the clouds and progressively eclipsing the surrounding landscape. 

At the same time, Bruegel shows the earlier stage of the tower surrounded by a dense city and the later stage among much sparser, less populated land. This is a little curious, since it would make more sense for the region to get more built up and dense over time.
It may well be that these are just two different imaginings of the city and the tower - as well as different semantic readings - but the effect can also be read as population disappearing inside the tower, as though Babel were hoovering up all the people of the Earth into one united project to conquer the heavens.

The hubris of mankind is brought into a visually familiar context by the architecture of the tower which Bruegel has based on the Roman colosseum. Rome, once the heart of empire, the ambition of the caesars rendered in marble, brick, wood and stone, sat at the centre of an expanding extractive force, sucking up people and places and culture into one unifying project, building the glory and might of a powerful few ever higher.

Part 1: The Endings Machine

I think it’s a good moment to talk about technology and how we appear to be acting like it’s going to save us. It’s not. Techno-optimism, unsupported by actual science, economics or basic feasibility has been rampant for a few years now, with claims more and more disconnected from reality escalating as the crises that the inventions must solve worsen and the contradictions heighten. From the eternal elusive Carbon Capture and Storage magic box with a fan on it that will somehow reverse climate change to AI to Elon Musk’s Mars Colonisation to UBI to eco-cities, lots of people are putting all their eggs in the basket of one technological or technocratic solution that has more or less merit to solve a problem that no matter how much merit a scientific discovery or invention has, must be solved by some amount of change in how we fit together socially. This is not to discard the benefits that can be wrought from any of the things that I have listed: I want to talk about how technological solutions are frequently inapposite, occasionally impossible, but without a more robust understanding of reality simply incomplete.

In an interview with the New York Times, Andreas Malm, the author of How To Blow Up A Pipeline said that his next book, Overshoot, will examine the current model that technology-focused plans to combat climate change are working from - that we can exceed targets for global warming and then turn the temperature back down by cleverly deploying the right technologies. Malm feels it isn’t going to work: “I think this is extremely implausible. But the idea is that you can exceed a temperature limit but respect it at a later point by rolling out technologies for taking it down.”

What pass themselves off as the great rational publications of record for our age throw nice, crunchy, delicious data at their readers like a street magician doing misdirection. The Economist publishes articles like Climate tech: bridging the gap between innovation and impact which really sounds like it’s going to tell us about emerging climate technologies and how they’re expected to reduce emissions or improve the situation. Reading it we are treated to graphs and figures on: Early-stage climate tech firms by type of funding; Share of funding against Greenhouse Gas emissions by energy sector; Venture Capital investment in climate tech over time; Climate tech investment per capita by European countries; number of climate tech companies in European countries; and we come out of it having learned an interesting enough little factoid - that Estonia is leading the way in the climate tech startup sector by a huge margin - and we can go tell our friends that and feel like we’ve been educated on how the situation is progressing.

This is, frankly, unhinged. Did you spot the misdirection? They’re measuring the possibility only in dollars invested, because there isn’t data to show for technologies that haven’t been invented yet and even if there were there aren’t plans to make them into meaningful infrastructure, and even if they did it would work by Malm’s Overshoot theory: as carbon indulgences. They forgive the pollution that is ongoing, because stopping the pollution would require systemic change - complete systemic overhaul, in fact.

To get deeper into this we have to start to talk about teleology.

Teleology - an understanding through ending - is usually invoked to critique a political ideology that describes history in terms favourable to the kind of politics that the person describing it prefers. The now utterly textbook-to-the-point-of-farce example is Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, where modern liberal capitalist democracy is described as the final stage of human civilisation. However, teleology broadly is about understanding phenomena by what they cause rather than what caused them to happen.

It is teleological for example to assume that anyone who leaves a restaurant without paying went in intending to dine & dash, when in reality someone may forget, be distracted, have an emergency and have to leave suddenly, not understand the way the restaurant works, or realise that they have no money after the meal is eaten and, yes, having dined, then dash.

Culture around science and technology touches both the labour and capital investments in scientific and technology research and the popular imagination of what the future will hold, but the enmeshing of these elements creates a teleological schedule for the future progress of discovery.

Let’s be as kind as possible to science fiction here - since the invention of the genre, sci fi has been the home of politically activated, often working class and labour-organised authors using the conceptual struggles of technology to explore the tensions between classes in society. A technologist who reads Do Not Invent The Torment Nexus and gets nothing from it except “wow what a neat idea” and directly proceeds to invent the torment nexus is generally one whose class interests preclude them from interpreting a science fiction story in a, for example anti-capitalist, feminist, decolonial or pro-union way.

Everyone at NASA loves Star Trek, right? Science fiction succeeded in predicting some technologies or inspiring things that captured people's imagination enough for them to strive to create them, so people started to accept that science fiction and the technologies depicted in it was a prophetic force in relation to science. We will have flying cars! No we won't. Okay but we will have self-driving cars. No, they don't quite work, and public transport is a better solution to most of the problems they seek to solve. And so on, in this disappointing merry-go-round. 

I recently saw a car ad that talked about "proactive care" - a self-driving feature where the car would react to dangerous situations autonomously. By giving up on calling it self-driving, they have surrendered territory to reality over science fiction. So too, Large Language Models are being called AI, and maybe “AI” features will filter down into technologies of all kinds but once the great horizon of really sentient AGI is ceded, they'll be called something different. The reality is that technologies have applications, affordances, costs, supply chains - they exist in the real world - so they can't march in time with a future laid out in anyone's plans, much less a fiction author's or the general popular imagination.

Doing this makes technology and teleology natural bedfellows, and sure enough political projections have for a while been cast in relation to what everyone thinks a popular new technology will be able to achieve. Once we invent this gizmo or that, this problem will be solved. An ending will appear.

And sometimes this is true - AIDS for example was a death sentence, and now it isn't. Does that mean that all of history or even the history of HIV was leading up to a point where preventative medicine was invented? No, but it is tempting to view history this way. The history didn’t stop at the point where the medicine was invented. In the US, the FDA refused to approve HIV and AIDS medicines after that invention because of the genocide-through-neglect approach of the anti-queer administrations. The US embargo on Cuba made it impossible to get preventative medicine into the country resulting in a quarantine strategy against the whole gay community. The question-and-answer story, the problem-and-solution story, is not isomorphic to reality. It makes history comforting and comfortable, but narrativisation is anathema to history, despite every way that we first learned history as children.

When someone, or many people, or a whole culture is stating a projection about the future they are necessarily stating a belief, and that belief should be assessed on its logical fortitude. Techno-optimism as a belief is an inherently teleological one, and looking at the course of history so far it does seem like "technology will improve" is a reliable bet, but this belief only seems plausible looking backwards. Alexander Fleming didn't know he was going to discover penicillin, he came back from holiday to find a mould that would change the lives of billions of people.

It's true also that science and technology can be progressed by investment, that money gets the questions answered faster a lot of the time, but the thing about questions that have not yet been answered is, well, that we don't know what the answer will be.

The assertion "Technology will improve" is also very vague. Improve how? To improve implies a direction toward something, and it seems that technology often moves towards the goals of people with power.

Since we’ve gotten this far and we’ve already defined teleology it would benefit us to stop and define technology here too, and this can help us see how this fits together. Technology isn’t just electronic or mechanical - medicine is technology - but even physical forms of technology with tangible, grabbable object manifestations is a limited scope for what we mean by the word, since there are technologies of warfare, governance, economics, community structure and many other intangible forms. Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve a goal. It’s an avenue of agency. It is in the nature of power that the parties who possess power control avenues of agency, and so this is how technology and power fit together: the conceptual knowledge being applied is dictated according to the power biases in society; the application is shaped by the resources available and who has what resources is shaped by and is a function of power; the goals being aimed at in the first place are the goals of the powerful. 

Is technology evil? Well, technology is a tool and to be morally neutral it would have to exist in a society where power is utterly neutral, a complete democracy. Technology itself is not well-poised to change who has power and will move toward the interests of the powerful. The teleological law of technology that so many science fiction authors have been trying to warn us is that it may not be evil but it sure seems to be trying.

Seeing technology as poised to ever more deeply ingrain the power of the already-powerful seems like it should lead us to a radical anti-progress anarcho-nihilist or even anarcho-primitivist stance that is deeply suspicious of technology - a sort of Hyper-Luddism. This would be drawing the wrong conclusions from the logic however - the problem of technology is of course the shape of the society within which it exists, and it is technologies of power & control that must be smashed, rather than technology. And also, sometimes, they are the same thing.

The arms factory picket, the police abolition protest and the Luddite's sledgehammer in this view are one and the same. Thesis 3 of Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean's book Abolition Revolution states: Race is at the heart of policing; without race policing can't function. Dismantling the police means dismantling race. It might seem like technology is an eternal march forward that it is never possible to turn back, and technology certainly benefits from this reputation, but popular demand for abolition tells us that an awful lot of people feel the exact opposite. There is a pull to change how we understand and engage with technology, including with the technologies of control that shape our society.

The way we currently understand technology is defined in ending: technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve a goal. Whether it’s governmental technologies applied through policy, medical technologies applied through treatment, or the more physical, more accessible examples of machines and devices and digital applications on personal computing electronics (the most readily apparent understanding of technology to most people), technology solves a problem, and therefore technology, implicitly, creates an ending.

Technology gives us an end to diseases, an end to social ills. It gives us an end to inconveniences. It gives us an end to logistical problems. Technology gives us an end to physical limitations. Technology gives us an end to failures of will. Technology gives us the end.

This has to do with how we see ourselves as humans. Homo sapiens, the knowing ape, the wise human, moves narratively through time, encountering issues and then conquering them knowing equally that the sword and the pen are subjects and servants of the mind. We encounter a problem, apply conceptual knowledge, and bingo! Problem solved. But this narrative rests heavily on who “we” are and how we relate to the active process of application.
We could say something like “COVID was a big problem and we were all stuck inside and then we invented a vaccine and now we can go outside again.” Without getting intensely morose and lost in the weeds of just how much COVID has not gone away, it matters that we recognise that the “we” who are stuck inside and the “we” who invent the vaccine and the “we” who get to go outside again are all different sets of people, just as the “we” who didn’t get to stay inside is another different set of people. And I hope it goes without saying that there was a radically different “we” who tried very hard to keep the vaccine patents in private ownership and actively fowl the development and production process for profit. In fact, this is such a different “we” that some of “us” refer to this set as “them”, but maybe that’s a story for another time.

Conceptualising technology no matter how broadly as a machine, a black box, a doohickey, allows us to dissect this “we” problem. A machine that can solve our problems is something that someone else invents. It implies that we don’t have to participate directly in the solution to our problems. The person or people who invented it get all the credit because they bear all the responsibility, and then the problem is solved in this singular beautiful moment of invention.

“We” - everyone who doesn’t invent the machine - bear no responsibility for its invention and probably very little for its use, so the only way we really have to grapple with it is on the basic level of its existing in the world, which is a model that may work for some problems and some technologies, but crashes headlong into reality when there are problems that are in some senses far away and require everyone to participate in the solution.

Part 2: So When Are You Going To Become A Vegan?

This would seem to be where everything in this discussion so far has led us: When are you going to become a vegan?

This is a flippant question - I’m not doing it, you can pry my chocolate milk and and my poached eggs and salmon out of my cold dead fingies - but I think that I am in the same position as a lot of others when I say that I recognise, have recognised many different ways, have recognised for a long time, that veganism is a morally sound position. In fact, it’s hard to say there’s much of a sound moral argument against veganism. The meat and animal products industry is a morally bankrupt enterprise, and only not thinking too hard about how animals are treated by it keeps most people from stating that outright. The desire to still have access to our little treats drives the impulse to avoid thinking too hard about how animals are treated, of course. It is a place where lots of people experience an ethical failure - they can see that a thing is true, but acting like it is would be emotionally inconvenient.

Veganism is primarily a form of boycott against livestock farming, and the best arguments against it that I’ve seen are cultural and class based. The cultural argument is that some cultures consider the practices of hunting or slaughter and preparation of meat to be sacred or part of a long tradition and abstaining from animal products would incur a cultural loss. The class argument is that vegan alternative foods are often expensive, which I have to acknowledge as obviously true. The per litre price of oat milk in the UK is over 4 times the dairy alternative.

The cultural argument is often met with a fairly abstract idea to do with communities keeping their own livestock, thereby remaining separate from the industry but preserving traditions and culture, and the class argument is usually met by, of all fucking things, an argument towards free market economics: if enough of us keep buying vegan alternatives they’ll get cheaper. Christ on a cracker.

So here’s where I’d like to stage an intervention in how we’re examining responsibilities for the solutions to big problems, problems that involve lots of people. By letting the solutions to these problems blend into people’s lifestyles, we give way to the individualised logic of personal responsibility. People’s individual responsibilities certainly exist as an independent concept in the moral universe, but personal responsibility is deployed by neoliberal policy makers as a technology of governance - the slashing of state funding has for decades been papered over by rhetorical tricks that claim that citizens and communities are being “empowered” by being left to their own devices with no resources or guidance and no actual delegated power from the state for anything materially meaningful. And at least when it comes to climate change, personal responsibility is nakedly just a tool of capitalist diversion - the concept of the individual carbon footprint was invented by the fossil fuel industry to shift blame onto the lifestyles of individuals instead of systems. 

I’d like for us to reframe our understanding of responsibility into one where we ask what structures we can build together to solve problems, and how we can make them with the intention of changing them if our needs change. In doing this, we begin to ask what it means to understand technology without teleology.

For example, yes we could imagine abstractly that communities could keep their own livestock to preserve any culture around animal products that they have - and I say abstractly because we just aren’t thinking about space, logistics or cost even before any state interference - but what about the negative of this scenario? Cooking a vegan meal once a day with at least two other people replaces as many meals with vegan ones as going fully vegan yourself, reduces food waste and cost, and you get to sit down with some friends and hang out, and chat about, I dunno, like blowing up an oil pipeline or something.

I don’t have to talk totally abstractly though. In Half-Earth Socialism by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettesse, the authors discuss all sorts of ways that non-teleogical technologies - governmental; organisational; social; digital and mechanical - can be used and must be used together to find solutions that will produce an ecosocialism that keeps the planet from climate collapse. When the authors discuss veganism or partial veganism fitting in amongst other decarbonising technologies, they talk about Cuba:

“An economic system resembling Half-Earth Socialism can actually be found in recent history: Cuba’s Período Especial. In 1990 the Soviet Union stopped subsiding petroleum exports to its socialist allies, and with little hard currency to buy it on the world market, Cuba had to decarbonise almost overnight. At the time, Cuba’s model of industrial cash-crop production left it more reliant on fossil fuel inputs that US agriculture. Getting by without petroleum or petroleum-based products [...] forced the largest and most compressed experiment in organic and urban gardening in history. Soon there were 26,000 urban gardens in Havana alone, allowing the city to satisfy its own requirements for fresh vegetables. The government bought more than a million bicycles from China to replace the idling buses and cars. Eating less meat and more vegetables, combined with pedalling or walking to work, led to improved health in the general population. Despite an economic contraction and the tightening of the US embargo, universal healthcare and education were maintained and many indices even improved. Cubans cultivated less land more intensively, returning about a third of farmland to wilderness. This has helped Cuba maintain its incredible biodiversity [...] and led the World Wild Fund for Nature to recognise it as the world’s only ‘sustainable’ country. Cuba suffers less from common environmental problems such as invasive species, ‘colony collapse disorder’, and plastic pollution. Cuba’s transition to an ecological society has been difficult, to say the least, but if this poor, isolated island could refashion itself during a severe economic crisis into a novel form of ecosocialism, then no rich country has an excuse for inaction.”

I think that not enough leftists in the imperial core realise that cooking a meal for a few friends can genuinely be revolutionary, because not enough of us realise just how insidiously and how effectively atomisation and individualism as technologies of neoliberalism have been weaponised against us.

Let’s return to abolitionism and talk about how we positively envision abolitionist futures instead of just saying we want to remove a technology. We are still trying to use technologies here, and let’s acknowledge that. Technologies don’t really go away because they’re fought back against, they go away because they’re superseded, because they’re replaced. 

McBean and Day’s book Abolition Revolution charts a course meticulously and step-by-step from the realisation that police and prisons have to go to a total revolution - by Graeber’s standard, a change in the fundamental social relations. The final two theses of the book are “Crime is a social construct, but harm is real. Revolution is an essential ingredient to building transformative approaches to harm from the community level up” and “Revolution needs you…” and in these last chapters Day & McBean talk about how the real process of abolition happens not in the getting rid of police but in the replacement of reliance on the criminal justice system with robust community alternatives, or rather they are one and the same thing. Police appear as nothing but an outside force and threat to communities that have their own answers for how to respond to harm. 

This too is taking on a structural responsibility, building structures together to answer questions that we can’t solve on our own, we can’t expect others to solve for us, and we can’t solve by doing ourselves individually and hoping that everyone else joins in.

Another place we can apply this thinking is a structural responsibility to combat the horrors of technology itself. The supply chain that gives us the batteries for consumer electronics runs from mines extracting minerals like cobalt in the Congo or Lithium from Australia, Chile or China, to factories in South Korea, China and Japan. The mines extracting these minerals are ecologically devastating and the factories are notoriously awful places to work and low wages abound at every stage. To the people beyond the horizons of our world, survival depends on the destruction of the system within which you live and from which you gain only meagre benefits. Those meagre benefits are your hush money - that is the dividend you are paid to turn away from human misery, suffering, and death.

Lots of people talk about the tactic of boycotting new electronics to protest the Congolese genocide, and boycotts are an effective tool, but there’s a bit more to them in their original history. The name Boycott comes from a specific man, Charles Boycott, who was the land agent of a landlord in Ireland in 1880, who tried to evict a bunch of impoverished tenants who were protesting for a 25% rent reduction and was socially ostracised by the community as an escalation of the organised protest. His workers went on strike, tradesmen wouldn’t trade with him, his postman even stopped delivering the post. I love the story of Charles Boycott, it’s like finding out there was a guy called Michael Hatemail.

In this sense, the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement against Israeli genocide is a lot closer to the original boycott and lots of modern boycotts only perform one facet. This kind of totalising economic and social pressure is a lot more effective than just altering our consumption habits, but it requires organisation and community. The very fact of how small and marginalised the left has become in imperialist nations today is exactly why sabotage and disruption have become such favoured protest tactics - because so-called ordinary people have to be politicised, and if they can’t be then only direct action is going to make a difference. However David Graeber said that “direct action means living like you’re already free” and I think we need to interrogate our understanding of freedom to understand what we want from technology, technologies of community, and technologies of protest too.

I’ve had this 8GB micro SD card for a while and I keep failing to get rid of it even though it’s been defunct for at least a year now. I can’t get any data off it, I can’t put any data on it, and I keep wanting to find out that I’m just putting it onto the wrong device - that I actually can use it and it isn’t just functionally garbage. Why is this?
I guess there’s a sort of romantic air of mystery to this tiny object that might be able to store what is by the standards of 50 years ago an absolutely incredible amount of information, or might already be storing information, but that information is irretrievably lost. A quarter square-inch epistemic lacuna. A burning Alexandria in your pocket. The little machine that couldn’t.

My memory card was made in Taiwan. It travelled a very long way to be no use to me, and a lot of people living less free lives than they could be contributed to getting it to me.

This is in one way a bad example - this little chip can’t be fixed, but if it can’t be fixed then why was it made like this? Do we see the implicit teleology of disposable tech? It starts in the earth, it moves through the machinations of labour, imperialism, global trade, it winds up here, it doesn’t work, it goes in the bin. There are other examples though where learning a little technical knowledge could provide a huge service to yourself and the people around you in fighting back this teleology by making it so that the devices and machines - the object technology - in your lives is a little less endings-y. If you like, maybe your friends will let you cook the group vegan meal a bit less often if that’s not something you enjoy.

So if direct action means living like you’re already free, I think learning how to repair consumer electronics, or even how to modify and upgrade and exchange electronics in community with others seems like a pretty free way to live. That might sound quite abstract but even as relatively low-tech a change as switching systems to Linux gets any user out of the perpetual system-breaking update, planned obsolescence, straitjacketed firmware hellscape of Windows and MacOS and into a world of software developed by people who are only trying to make their software better for the people who use it. There’s a lot more that more technically up-to-date people than me can and have and should write about.

The insidious lie of individualist freedom that is given to us from birth in liberal capitalist society is that there is always this trade-off between interacting with others and our freedom, that total freedom is only possible in total escape from society altogether, or else in gaining total power so that others can’t dictate anything to you. There is a little truth to the idea that if you and your friend are going to go to the movies together and you want to see Dune part 2 and she is fatally allergic to Byronic protagonist white saviour stories and long shots of large things moving slowly, then perhaps your freedom to watch Big Worm Film has been impacted, but were you going to go to the cinema alone? I’ve gone to the movies on my own sometimes and had a nice time but cinema-going just like a lot of things is something that I feel a lot more facilitated to do if there are other people who want to do it with me. 

There are lots of things that are literally impossible or very difficult or at least less fun alone, like debating the finer points of a subject, arm wrestling or opening an ancient puzzle door in a forbidden temple.

The kinds of freedom that would really benefit us are not about being dependent on, or involved with, fewer people. In fact when I was on the ZAD, an autonomous zone of intentional living comprising many communes in France, last year the zadistes told me “loneliness is the capitalist disease” - they said “it might sound absurd to say but nobody here is ever really lonely”. It was something I could really feel when I was there and I could feel a lot more strongly when I came back. If our idea of freedom involves fewer people, our idea of freedom is backwards. The kinds of freedom we need most come from working together and sharing ownership and responsibility of the structures in our lives.

One thing I saw on the ZAD that subverted my ideas about technology was a deliberate multiplicity in the design of things, a conscious effort to make things serve multiple purposes, like a visitor’s centre that is also a organisational hub, like the floorboards in the visitors centre that is also an organisational hub that are also hidden compartments and also riot shields.

I think this has a lot to do with why in the age of Web 2 veering towards some kind of big dead mall internet of one shape or another we’ll call Web 3 and social media platforms becoming more and more flagrantly unhinged, fascistic, conspiracy riddled and generally unpleasant, so many people are talking about the idea of parallel internet infrastructure. There are lots of reasons an anarchist revolutionist will tell you that a parallel infrastructure of data and information enables the people to resist and challenge the power of the state, and they’re right about those things, but the general draw to most people isn’t in using the internet to overthrow the government (I recognise that I am unusual, please clap, my therapist is very proud), for most people the internet is fundamentally about talking to other people, and the ways that we get to talk to other people are becoming more and more nakedly constrained by profit. Now is the moment when alternative, decentralised solutions to informational infrastructure could pop the fuck off if they were made easy and accessible. 

I feel like alternative internet infrastructure is in one way an digital analog to permaculture, another technology against teleology that is becoming more popular in leftist discourses. 

This is about rethinking what technology means to us, and permaculture discussions - I’m saying it like that because it’s a very broad field with an enormous amount of thought and diversity - treat the land and the forms of non-human life on it as something we can benefit from, yes, but not a means to our ends. A lot of the things we think of as the special treats of the global capitalist system are things we could get for ourselves with some working together and honestly not that much imagination. It wasn’t capitalism that invented the internet, or foods you eat or technology that you benefit from, it was people, and people could produce all those things under a framework that doesn’t point us in a direction and insist we go there beyond feasibility, safety or concern for the future.

I’m playing in a somewhat abstract space here, but I’ve gotten here so quickly because it is that feasible if we engage in this kind of liberatory structure building to get to places that feel unimaginable when you’re completely alone. Because the degree to which the current society has us alienated and siloed is absolutely absurd, the things that they have us doing without thinking about the wider consequences on the world can only be achieved by making us this isolated and dissociated from the rest of the planet.

I mean, the motherfuckers have us SMOKING BATTERIES. Friends shouldn’t let friends buy disposable vapes

I am not telling anyone off for enjoying delicious, delicious nicotine, but refillable vape rigs can cost the same as like, 5 disposable vapes, and don’t have you just constantly buying and then throwing away batteries. Of course that’s a decision you could make on your own, and maybe it feels like a trivial thing compared to the scale of the broader problem here but the people around you encouraging you to get a refillable rig or even buying one for you as a present could get you to just outright stop smoking motherfucking batteries like a dystopian cyber addict character that George Lucas thought was a bit much.

Better than that, quitting anything addictive is hard and it’s a lot lot lot easier when people help you. In fact, it’s one of the things that people have come together to form structures to facilitate the world over, because of how hard it is for anyone to change deep-rooted behaviours without the support of others. This isn’t a dissection of the 12 step program though, I don’t have time to start YouTube beef with my higher power today.

Moreover, addiction is a great place to talk about how arranging ourselves in sustainable and changeable ways doesn’t just mean one possible structure, but lots of different non-teleological technologies. In the pamphlet The Revolution Will Not Be Sober, Zoe Dodd & Alexander McClelland encourage the reader to imagine a politics around drug use that doesn’t focus on sobriety as an end point. They highlight “radical sobriety” groups as an alternative to the 12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, but argue their case against the claiming of “sober addict” as a political identity as opposed to those still using drugs. They say: “so-called radicals in the “radical sobriety” movement could be unwittingly promoting the aims of the ongoing colonial project and furthering a pathologising logic which results in criminalising people who use drugs and denying them agency over their lives. These are major concerns for those working in activist communities, especially for those who are working to address issues of damaging laws, prisons, mass incarceration, criminalisation, health-care access, and forms of social marginalisation that are driven by pathologising attitudes towards people who use drugs.”

For these authors, the way that organisers have responded to the struggles of drug users has continued a direct legacy from the moralising and stigmatising attitudes in society that lead to most of drug users’ problems in the first place. There is a structural responsibility taken and shared in recovery programs that enables sobriety, but for others the structural responsibility is to make drug users safer whether they decide to keep using drugs or not.

This idea of structural responsibility meshes well with models of a potential society like the one discussed on the Srsly Wrong podcast, “library socialism”. It’s not just called that because it’s a favourite idea of people who read a lot of books, but because the model is based on how libraries work. The hosts of Srsly Wrong have spent a long time outlining the idea of a society in which property relations are changed so that things are owned in usufruct, meaning, as it says on librarysocialism dot org: “you can use things, but you cannot deny them to others when you're not using them, and you do not have the right to destroy them to prevent others from using them. So, for example, the farmer is welcome to grow crops on a given plot of land - but if they choose not to, somebody else can use the land.”

The vision of Library Socialism comprises this change in property relations, a drive toward complementarity, and a guarantee of an irreducible minimum - like universal basic income but conveyed through access to the basic needs for a good standard of living rather than a financial sum, so actually not like universal basic income, because it would actually be socialist.

In my estimation, targeting the specific places we cede responsibility to the state, or private companies, or other authoritative bodies within capitalism and building structures to take that responsibility back is the kind of prefiguration that leads directly to what the Wrong Boys have been describing.

Of course, the first step in building these kinds of structures is a hard one to figure out, and a lot of organisers have different ideas, whether you should start by solving a problem that people are particularly pressed about right now, or working to provide something people need, or starting with your values and your aims and write a constitution. I think rather than telling you what my answer would be, which would change from case to case anyway, the most fitting idea I can propose here is that you use structure to take the responsibility away from me as the singular idea-haver into your own hands, and the best way you can do that is with a reading group.

Do a little library socialism of your own and share ideas with each other in usufruct. Engage in complementarity by discussing and improving on the ideas together. Reading groups, take collective structural responsibility away from the intellectual & the academic, and reading groups are just fun! You get together with some friends, you read some Fanon, some Deleuze, some Lenin, you encourage each other not to vape, you share a vegan meal, you talk about how to blow up a pipeline (the book, of course, it’s a reading group). It’s just a swell time for everyone involved!

The more of these practices you discover, the more you’ll find that they interleave because they’ll make you and the people around you freer in emergent ways that you don’t even see yet, that I can’t even describe yet.

Black Panther leader Fred Hampton said of the programs that his party was running “First you have free breakfasts, then you have free medical care, then you have free bus rides, and soon you have freedom!”

The tower of Babel itself wasn’t scary to God - communication, specifically to the end of cooperation, is the technology that makes us more powerful than the almighty and the human power that God fears the most.

“this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”