why
Revolution ceases to be the moment it calls for self-sacrifice.

In a discussion on the Infoshop.org News threads recently I was reminded of an experiment an Indian physicist did. What he did was put a PC in a wall in the slums of New Delhi, and watched what happened. What happened, perhaps unintuitively, was one of the most remarkable insights into the human psyche. As the experiment played out the physicist noticed who made the most use out of the computer, and then noted the behavior of the people who used it.

The results, were amazing. Ghetto children, aged 6-12, would make most use of the PC, to the point of being able to browse the internet, download music, draw, and teach themselves English. No outside assistance. No outside guidance. They just did it.

Human beings are curious creatures. There are few things one could say are "natural" tendencies. After all, our societies have existed in a similar state for as long as historical record goes back, and we can see that while many of them are similar, there's nothing innate to all human societies as a whole. You look at the feral children which we have discovered, and it becomes obvious that the "natural" tendencies of the human are quite small. But I posit that curiosity is one of them.

There are certain ideologies within the movement which are anti-curiosity. They beg to create a form of mysticism to declare away the universe and how it operates, in order to "fullfill" that innate desire to understand how things work. The Church kept people from reading for hundreds of years, if not thousands (too lazy to check). And rightly so, as we have seen that with the dessimination of knowledge the power of the Church has become increasingly weak. If you read the link I provided, we can see children walking up to this completely foreign object, moving a mouse around, and determining how things "work" within the confines of that system. There needn't be someone there telling them to click this or that, or to open this or that or how to do this or that. They simply *learn*. The human mind is inherently a pattern recognition engine, this is pretty much the consensus within neural research. It soaks them up, patterns, that is. So once you understand this, it isn't so remarkable that some street children in New Delhi could walk up to a computer and figure out how it works.

But I believe the state wants to suppress our curiosity, and indeed, our expression of that curiosity. It wants to keep us simplistic beings incapable of understanding anything more than being drones doing whatever specialized job it has shoved down our throats. Not in any sort of nefarious, covert, evil way, just part of a self-perpetuating system of, well, irrationality. It feeds us irrational religion, irrational mysticism, irrational consumerism, to the point that we are incapable of actually understanding our world, and indeed, not desiring to understand our world because that innate curiosity is fullfilled. I've made mention before, of the whole "restless legs syndrom" pill that they have out now. It came to my attention because I actually do get fidgety at night and kick my legs around a bit, but it subsides after awhile and I have control over it. I don't really need a fucking pill. But the commercials that one who is afflicted by this habitual practice are happy to explain that they affect the motorcortex neurons so that you can sleep at night. But that's utter fucking gobbledy gook. It makes no sense. I no more understand what those commercials are talking about than I understand how rockets work. Actually, I know more about rockets than the crap such commercials attempt to explain away in the 30 second spot it has to do so. What we're faced with in everyday life is the suppression, and indeed, theft of our curiosity. A world inundated with work, with hierarchical structures, and property make this the case. Though I'm struggling here to explain exactly why this is the case.

One example might be the TV. A TV costs a bit of money and taking one apart and trying to figure out how it works is a task in futility, you'd lose yourself in the jumble of specialized technologies that exist within one. The cost of entry dissuades you from actually taking one apart, and once you do so the complexity related to the technology is essentially beyond you, with the information related to that technology bound up in patents, and electronics documentation that only higher education could give you, which is in itself a costly process. It's not like some evil thing, it's just how things are. Capitalism perpetuates these systems, to its own benefit. This is why I envision a world where you could tear apart a TV, without worrying about the entry fee, and having access to the design documents that make up the whole of that TV. I was a kid and I took apart several TVs. Naturally I never figured out how they worked, though I understood the basic watered down principles that are explained to you to suppress your desire to actually, truly, understand. I remember getting cut very badly on one tube I'd taken apart, and freaking out because I thought that it had "radioactive particles" inside. The bits in the tube are poisionous, but I don't think they're radioactive (actually I'm pretty sure they're not to any significantly measurable extent). I just gleaned that from the typical "warning! X-ray radiation risk" sticker that is pasted to every CRT tube that's out there.

If it is hard for me to figure something out, then I probably won't even attempt to try. I think this goes for many people. If I'm disuaded from understanding how one simple thing works, if not by the complicated specialized technologies in it, but by the lack of information related to it, it becomes a task in futility. Why waste my time learning something that capitalism has locked up in boxes, keeping me from ever understanding it? And I'm not talking about acedemic manuals that "show you" in highly convoluted language requiring years of education to understand, I'm talking about those kids in New Delhi. They learned how to operate a computer because computer GUI systems are learnable through observation, trial and error, curiosity. Thus I would want my documentation to make that TV in such a simple to understand form that all technology related to TVs could be self-described and understood. I don't need to know how that IC component works to understand that it goes in a certain place, but I'd want the ability to see how that IC works in any case. Capitalism, capitalist science, and capitalist technology is rooted on this higher educational learning system, which is why the entry requirements are so impossibly high for most people. It isn't that technology cannot be simplifed and understood by anyone, it's that capitalists have insured that those who use technology cannot understand it without it being difficult to understand. It is the status quo, inherently. Acedemic language, proprietary information. If information were free there would be no way to profit from it.

I envision a world where ALLogy (and information in general) is freely accessable in this way. No barriers to understanding, you could sit down, and even if it took you a few days, you could go over the design documents of a given technology and learn how it worked to the very minute details of electronic circuitry. Self-describing technologies, that require little more than a simple manual that can be played with, just like those children in New Delhi played with their GUI system, to the point of teaching themselves a foreign language. Instead of an LCD being described as lots of chemical reactions and lots of convoluted mathematical constructs to get there using arbitrary element tables, it could be described in concise glyphs for each level you operate. The first glyph being representative of "LCD." Click on this, and then expand, and then you get the constituant parts of that LCD. Each part being composed of even still a more simple component. If you want to make an LCD, you just go to some place where they are made, and press a few buttons, and volia, you have one. If you want to understand how that LCD operates, you play with that simple GUI until you have determined how it works and how it is manufactured. Then you can go to that place where LCDs are made and have a bit of common understanding with those there who have simplified the manufacturing process to the point of pressing that button.

People act as if technology is beyond the grasp of a given human being, that without this large swarm of specialized individuals working together for a common goal, it couldn't exist. I don't believe that this is the case, at least, with regards to the "working together" part. Of course I must admit that specialization is necessary for a given bit of information to come into existance, but I believe that this can be a gradual process, and as long as the information of others is contained, then it lives on in other individuals. I call this passive specialization, that is, it doesn't exist at any one point in time, nor does it have any capacity for coercion or manipulation. If someone writes about some observation or something that they've made, and you read about it months later and make it, there's no issue. However, if someone is making something, and they require you to contribute back, then you're stuck on a factory line somewhere. The technology I am discussing here does not require anyone on any part of the chain of production.

I had a thought experiment on the Infoshop.org forums before I stopped posting there again. Basically, I believed I could make a steam engine simply by being dropped in the middle of a forest somewhere. And I still believe that to this day. I have made a Gingergy Machine (which I should note is the prime example of passive specialization; someone wrote a book designing how to make steam engines and other machines, and, well, I made it 20-30 years later). It's a simple smelting process, and a smelt can be made of rudimentary materials. Quite literally the difference between industrial age, and primitivism is several thousand years of knowledge, nothing more. You could put me in the middle of a forest by a river, and I could come out of that forest with a steam powered boat in a few years at most. This idea of the self-contained technology, the self-describing, self-iterating technology is far better than that of the technologies which capitalists own and produce. Their technologies are based on the impossible levels of acedemia required to understand it, and they make no efforts to make that technology known to anyone, because it would be disasterous to their profitability. If anyone could make anything, then, well, there'd be no need for insane production lines where people slave away making worthless bits of plastic.

Proprietarianism is the bane to curiosity.

I refuse to be part of the system that tells me to behave a certain way. I refuse to advocate the tyrrany of ineffectiveness. I refuse to be caught up in systematic worthlessness. When you tell me to spray paint a building, I will instead help an old lady cross the street, because then at least I could argue something useful was achieved. When you tell me to torch an SUV I will give food to an impoverished person and laugh at your utter inepitude. When I'm told in this most self-righteous tone that I am "part of the problem" and "not the solution" while I'm taking 100 miles off of your journey without being antagonistic to your convoluted views, I won't let that dissuade me from giving the next person that ride. I refuse to let you bring me down. When you tell me I should buy your books, I will steal them. When you reiterate that I should buy your books because it is wrong to steal from "our kind" I will fucking scan them in and put them online. Especially when you make the ridiculously bold and ignorant claim that this will never happen. Yes, I'm talking to you. When you tell me to advocate worthless street "insurgency" I will be planting a fucking garden, because at least then I might actually fucking eat and learn a thing or two about cultivation. You want me to cultivate emptiness. I want to cultivate ideas.

I am not "your" solution. I am my own solution. I believe in the virtues of the concepts which we all seemingly uphold, but I believe that you're going about it the wrong way. I will not tell you how to be, but I will refuse to be how you want to be. I refuse to let your bullshit get to me. Your system is not for me. Your system is broken, faulty, ineffective. I believe in a world where vast forests do not simply disappear in an instant in geologic time. I refuse to believe that tying myself to a fucking tree is going to do one fucking thing about it. I believe in a world without poverty. I believe in a world without property or monetary systems. And I refuse to be a part of your monetary systems. Which is why I won't buy your fucking piece of shit zines reiterating the same shit over and over again until my goddamn head explodes. I refuse to even live near any city that purports to be a haven of anarchist solidarity while at the same time having some of the highest costs of living in the country. I am an individual. I refuse to be called a "purist" because I am an individual. I am not like you. I will not be like you. I have my own ideas, and you cannot infiltrate them with your petty name calling and bullshit. I believe that you are weak. I see it every time your ideas are being questioned outside of the boxes that you have let others build for yourself. I believe if you cannot articulate your beliefs in writing or other form of expression, then you have none.

I uphold rationality above mysticism. I believe the universe can be explained. Mostly. I refuse to let your psychobabble create this rhetorical wall which I can never breach. I break down and destroy walls, I don't let them keep me in unless the physical nature of reality is what the walls are fucking composed off. You want me to "see things" your way. You think I am a "lost cause" if I don't see them your way. But surprise, if I let people tell me "their way" and take it at face value, then I would not be who I am. I would be a drone sitting around a committe somewhere, listening to people babble on about utter irrelevancies. I sound like a nillist, but I'm actually an optimist. I sound like an egoist, but I actually hate myself. I blame you for that. I accept my complete and utter inablity to be effective. But I refuse to believe I am irrevocibly ineffective. I believe effectiveness can be understood, evaluated, and then acted upon. I act upon it. I refuse to listen to the same speil by you and your ilk time and time again. Once is enough! I desire new ideas, new perspectives, a fresh outlook. I am curious. I want to explore my world, but you offer nothing. You waste my time with banalities. You argue without substance. You are nothing. I refuse to listen to intellectual droning. If my eyes shut for more than half a minute it is likely you have nothing to offer. Life is fun. You are not.

I believe the state should be destroyed. I believe it should come crashing down harder than any other social or technological order that preceeded it. I believe in disorganization. I want a button I can press that breaks the global stock markets. I am building such a button in my spare time. I think it will work. When you tell me I'm borderline, I'll agree with you, because if it's something you think is bad, then it must be good. When you tell me I'm a troll, I won't outright deny it, though secretly I will because unlike you I actually have strongly held beliefs that aren't easily suceptable to change. I know who I am. I refuse to "live by the moment" and "consume daily news" as if it has any overall impact on things. I look at the bigger picture. I believe mass media, media in general, is a farce. I believe that it itemizes our reality to the point of tomorrow being doomsday, until the new jobs report comes in and everything is fucking fine. You can report on how the world is supposedly going to shit, I'll be out there doing something about it being in the shitter already.

I believe the tides are turning. And I don't think many of you will be there to rise up against the state when the time comes. I believe you are caught up in the systems you have allowed to be built around you. I think you lack introspection. My tactics have changed, they've always been changing, but now I've accepted that I'm not the problem. You are. You want me to be a certain way, you want me to live up to your "religious ideal." "Sit, be a good boy, agree!" I disagree. I will not be part of your sycophanatical circle jerk. I'm done playing nice. I'm done shutting up and being a good boy and not expressing my views. I'm done letting my goddamn comments get deleted just because you're too caught up in a system of centralized power and control.

I believe the state will fall if there exist nothing there to support it. I believe we can build up new structures around which will pull the supports out from underneath. I do not believe anything you offer has very much to add to this approach. After all, I believe you are ineffective.

I believe it's time for a change of tactics. Got any books you want me to scan?

I saw a movie a few weeks back and it jolted me to the point where I must write about it so I can stop thinking about the ramifications of it all. It literally has consumed my thought process since viewing it that I can't get anything useful accomplished. But not for the reasons you might expect.

Life At The End Of Empire is another "collapsist" propaganda piece. The kind you'll read on conspiracy sites or from less than rational speakers who will go on and on about end of the world. One need only search for "prophecy" to understand just exactly how assinine this sort of prediction is. Or at least, I would hope anyone reading this wouldn't take such "predictions" too seriously, or give them a critical eye.

The movie itself starts off with this 30 minute long poetic rant about how the world is being destroyed. Now I'm not exaggerating by the time spent on this rant, as I timed it myself, and if you want to get to the meat of the movie, it can be skipped without much impact on the overall message, save the emotional effect that seeing all sorts of man-made destruction has caused in every aspect of life. And I'll grant that it was quite emotional, but necessary? I find arguments that appeal to emotion rather than reason are quite destructive. They're often subjective, but in the case of the movie itself, they are in fact outright lies.

I can't rememember the sequential order in which the movie plays out, but I can write about the basic premises it set forth. Basically it makes a primitivist argument, dismissing the value of civilization, and large human population densities due to the authoritarian aspects it claims are instrinsic to those higher level human societies. For instance, it makes the argument about agriculture. It's an old argument, but lacks any sort of insight on how societies grow. One argument is that "You don't see agriculture without a parent state." In other words, you can't find it in the historical record unless it resides along with an empire, a king, warlords, or what have you. There's always someone at the top leeching off of those at the bottom who participate in agriculture. But there's little evidence to support that agriculture is the reason for this. The Neolithic Revolution predates even the oldest writing and we have ample evidence of primitive tribes cultivating plants in a way conductive to a lifestyle which didn't compete as strongly with forest animals. And none of those societies in that time frame lent themsleves to empire or hierarchical structures. All were equals. Something else had to transpire for the hierarchical nature of most society to take place. And you have a good 5k year gap between neolithic agriculture, written language, and kings. It wasn't "just" agriculture. It was more likely the creation of property, the same sort of property that anarchists have long since decried. Agriculture helped bring the concept into existance ("I cultivate some land, it is my own"), but logically it had to have happened some point later on in a situation that allowed for it ("I can exploit those people to cultivate that land, and not have to do any cultivation myself").

The non-possessive "ownership" of a given thing, be it resources, tools, or useless trinkets, *is* the manifestation of exploitation upon people. And while it probably could not have happened on a massive scale without agriculture, agriculture is not the "reason" for it. The reason I think is actually pretty obvious. The control of information and force. Playing to the fears of the people. Would the Egyptians had actually built the Pyramids for the kings if they didn't fear them as Gods? Why is it that every actual empire in the whole of human history is backed by some large and fearful leader? Because people grew fucking food to get by easier? It's a joke. Take another example with the Americas. American Indians were agriculturalists as far back as 7k years ago, and yet there is no evidence of authoritarian hierarchical structures in the majority of those tribes! But you go south a bit to the Mayan societies and authoritarianism becomes rampant. Quite telling, really. Would it then be fair to blame equatorial weather and heat waves for authoritarianism? Hah. There is no logical connection between agriculture and authoritarianism other than that it can lead to it. Not that it does, not that it is intrinsic. Anything can lead to authoritarianism.

Now mind you, the movie itself didn't articulate its "points" very well throughout, as interviewed a dozen or so friends and colleague of the film makers, with a few interviews with "big guys" in the primitivist/anti-technologist field (such as Daniel Quinn or Derrick Jensen), with dubious credentials to begin with. There were one or two scientists who humored the film makers for whatever reason, but they fell quite short of predicting the end of human civilization (the argument that the movie tries to make throughout).

The biggest and most assinine perspective is the "Peak Oil" scenario. It resides in the bowels of internet conspiracy culture, as a sort of glue, if you will, and is impossible to ignore. The basic idea is that, at some point in the future, fossil fuels will run out. Some believe that we've hit that point already. That we're exploiting the limit of oil reserves on the planet and any day now the levels of extraction will drop. Of course, as any good documentary, it makes the argument without really "lying." For instance, it says that we've essentially mapped every possible oil reserve on the planet. That's a perfectly true statement. We do have a very good geological understanding of the planetary oil reserves. However, the statement "we can't find any more oil" does not mean that it's not there to exploit. Iraq, for instance, has reserves just sitting there which are barely even remotely tapped. Stick a valve on it, and magically world oil "supplies" jump. The argument that Peak Oil people make is flawed, illogical, and downright wrong. It's a lie. A lie based on fear, to get you to read a website, or buy a book, or even buy a movie. Whenever the "Peak Oil" scenario comes up, I laugh, though. Not because there's hundreds of years of oil left, or because they're wrong, I wish they weren't on some level. But because it's only just fucking beginning, the exploitation of the planetary resources. Just beginning. The Green River Formation in the midwest USA has more oil reserves than all other planetary oil reserves *combined*. There used to be a great inland lake there, full of nice juicy algae and other plant life, and it just so happened that it has made quite a nice oil shale deposit. One which, as I saw recently in Rifle Colorado, is only just beginning to be exploited to fuck and back. In situ production of oil shale into crude oil is proven technology, and just in the last 6 months the exploration projects went from 1 to 10. Just six months! Maybe some people have been listening to me. The argument for Peak Oil also lacks clarity due to the laws of thermodynamics and whatnot. As if "alternatives" can't be created and so on (while those who do depend on fossil fuels suffer for it). But as I showed, even if those alternatives cannot be created, and we went with current, proven technologies, then, uh, we have more than hundred years left and that's taking into account the growth of the third world. Google for the "Green River Formation Oil Shale" if you don't believe me, I'm too lazy to format this post to accept proper links.

Which leads us to the even more important issue. Climate change. The movie is fairly on target with their assessment of climate change, yet the Peak Oil argument oblivates the severity of the issue. If Peak Oil is happening right now (as the movie argues), then OK, climate change slows dramatically at whenever near term point the oil runs out, and we're OK. If Peak Oil isn't happening right now (and it isn't), then our great grandchildren will be living in sweltering deserts and most life on the planet will be supremely fucked. Which is it? My position is to take the more severe perspective. That is, to assume that climate change is happening and will continue to happen until we make a concerted effort to stop it. And I think that this is the only rational position to have given the facts. But what the movie tries to do is say, "welp, the collapse is happening very very soon so prepare yourself for it. Trying to do something about it isn't going to achieve anything. Just so you know."

In the end what would happen if oil production slowed dramatically in the next 3-5 years? Well, let's see. At first there would be attempts to get around it, to avoid the ramifications, and to create alternate technologies. Nuclear energy would probably come back in vogue (the hippies be damned; hey Lovelock seems to prefer it now, funny that), fuel cell technology would ramp up, electric vehicles and so on. But in the mean time the alternatives would not be able to maintain anyone. Fuel rationing would likely take place, government officials, agriculturalists, and so on. Global shipments of grain would cease. And a few billion people would die. Those people who can't get the food they need via agriculture would be told to hunt animals to survive, and hunting quotas would be lifted. After all, if you can't get the food you need to survive in colder climates, you're going to need to hunt to get it. During this somewhat long period of technological transferance (from fossil to fuel cell), people would resort to burning wood for heating fuel rather than kerosene. According to a show I watched before, a family of two requires half a dozen trees of logs to survive an American winter. (It was a PBS documentary on the frontieer and three families did a mock "survival" job, and were rated at the end of it. The small two family couple would've survived, maybe, but one thing that was pointed out was that his wood cutting wasn't nearly enough to keep them alive through a harsh winter and that back in the fontieer days settlers would be cutting wood all summer to make sure they had enough.) Mass migrations would occur. Genocides would occur. Borders would close up and anyone crossing would be shot.

And this all would happen without civilization collapsing. Nuclear fuel technology would take the place of fossil fuels (the only reason it didn't to begin with was that it was uneconomical compared to cheap fossil fuels). Fuel cell technology would take the place of locomative processes. The price of fuel and electricity would probably even go down. But a billion or three would be dead. The exploitation of the worlds resources would've actually gone up at that critical point though, and the world would be worse off for it.

Thankfully the laws of thermodynamics are on our side and this scenario is highly unlikely to ever happen. If oil production ceased by even half a billion barrels in one year hundreds of billions of dollars would be thrown at the problem of finding an alternative. I noted on the infoshop news feed that humans are pretty smart animals. Consider if the great midwest aqifer were to dry up by another 100 feet in a few more years. Of course, we'd be fucked, because we couldn't grow the food we need to survive, but we'd just ration it for ourselves. And the vast majority of the world who relies on the grains we ship out would be shit out of luck. Done for. Fucked. Owned. *Dead.* But we'd manage to find alternatives, for ourselves, mind you, that would make life all the more easier. For instance, the greatest contribution to the aquifer depeltion is mere evaporation. Most of the water in agriculture is lost that way. Put the plants in greenhouses (made up of biopolymers in the event we have no oil to make the plastic greenhouses). Problem solved.

So the question anyone who saw this movie should ask themselves, can it be fixed? Can it be stopped? If your conclusion is no after having read this, then I have no need to talk to you, and you just wasted your time. If your answer is yes, if you don't have an irrational fear of technology, and want to change the world, then I can only say:

Get ready.

I have some time as of late to respond to certain misconceptions that are out there within the anarchist community, and I felt it would be appropriate to respond to one of the more damaging and convoluted viewpoints that a number of anarchists share. That is, that rationality, that science and objectivity are actually harmful contrasted with religion, spirituality, and mysticism. The article I'm responding to doesn't exactly expound upon the latter paradigms, but it does apply to similar paradigms within the movment as a whole.

I article I plan to debunk now is here: http://insurgentdesire.org.uk/balanced.htm

The author begins by correlating "modern science" with "capitalism and the industrial system," which I think reflects the overall ignorance and bias of their supposedly "balanced account of the world."

The origin of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries corresponds with the origins of modern capitalism and the industrial system. From the beginning, the worldview and methods of science have fit in perfectly with the need of the capitalist social system to dominate nature and the vast majority of human beings.

Science, as an abstract concept, has nothing to do with capitalism or industrialism, merely capitalism and industrialism found that science can be a powerful tool to utilize to their own ends. This is the first mistake the author makes. That "science is capitalist," when the reality is that "capitalism uses science." A no brainer. Anyone can use science, if they know how to use it properly, to meet ends that benefit themselves and to exploit others. However, this is not an absolute end result of science, merely one path which those who chose to utilize it can take.

Francis Bacon made it clear that science was not an attempt to understand nature as it is, but to dominate it in order to twist it to the ends of humanity—in this case meaning the current rulers of the social order.

Science is most definitely a attempt to understand nature, without scientific observation you could not understand a damn thing. You'd be seeing one thing and then forming completely random conclusions each and every time. Sure you can use science to dominate nature, among many other things, but that, again, does not mean this is an intrinsic property of science.

Science is not simply a matter of observing the world, experimenting with its elements and drawing reasonable conclusions. Otherwise, we would have to recognize children, so-called primitives and a good many animals as excellent scientists.

But this is absolutely a rudimentary form of science. We wouldn't call it exact science or precise science because the results may be subjective. However, it is abundantly clear that human curiosity begets science, by the authors own implicit admission! Of course these are examples of science and the scientific method, even if rudimentary they are important aspects of being a human.

But the practical experiments carried out by all of us every day lack a few necessary factors, the first and most important of which is the concept of the universe as a single entity operating under universal, rational, knowable laws. Without this foundation, science cannot operate as such.

Yes, and primitivist science couldn't operate without rational knowable laws, like knowing which plants are poisonous or which plants are good for healing. Like knowing which rocks will chip away adequately for an arrow or which branches are best to create that arrow. The very idea that primitivist science exists without these universal laws, as they knew them, is preposterous! Science is the acquisition of knowledge through observable phenomena. Science relies heavily on knowledgeable foundations; certainly a feral child out in the wilderness is going to be unable to make a mere bow and arrow, it has no context which to derive that technology. The feral children we have discovered have had no capacity for speech, no understanding of mere tools.

Of course, the idea of universal natural laws had already come into existence in ancient Greece, arising at about the same time as written law for governing the city-states and money-based commerce. But the ancient Greek perspective differed significantly from that of modern science. The universal natural laws of Greek philosophy were fundamentally relational, parallel to the political and economic institutions of ancient Greek society. Thus this conception tended to promote moderation—Aristotle’s "golden mean"—and an avoidance of hubris, traits that very clearly do not find their equivalent in the modern scientific perspective.

First, the most glaring misconception, that ancient Greece science and understanding were "parallel" to the political and economic institutions of their society; the reality being that practitioners of science, philosophy, and the myriad other aspects of educated Greece were solely available to those with wealth and power. Aristotle himself was the son of wealthy physicians, who in turn had an education far better than the rest in his society. He wrote on many things, including the political. And ironically, his approach to science was far more inadequate than others, and in some instances lacked the method completely; he explicitly invented theories that later on were quickly disproved by the scientific method (most notably Galileo; by actually dropping two weights and timing them rather than just making baseless claims). This really was the beginning of the more modern use of so called 'science' to control populations and render them unto ones will. Engineering science was well established, but the meager pessants understood it to a great extent, they were, after all, doing all the building! So it was necessary for the philosophers of that time to invoke higher and more involved forms of 'science' and 'understanding.' And this isn't some sort of conspiracy, they merely had to make themselves seem useful to those who were feeding and clothing them, lest someone off the street take their place in the classroom! (A highly unlikely scenario though it might have been.)

The author does make the mistake of invoking Aristotle, before writing then about the Christian influence on science. Aristotle's Earth-Centric Universe became dogma that the Church spread for more than a millennia!

Between the time of the ancient Greek philosophers and the origin of modern science, two significant historical events affected the western view of the world. The first of these was the rise of the Christian religion as the central dominating factor in western thought. This worldview replaced the concept of a multiplicity of gods who were part of the world with that of a single god external to the universe who created it and controls it.

Polytheism was not removed from having a singular creator of all things, we must realize. The whole idea of 'creation' has often been from a single source, polytheism is merely the application of various phenomena and cultural traditions to more powerful mythical beings. Which of course are not exempt from the power relationships apparent in all forms of religion.

It additionally declared that the world had been created for the use of god’s favored creature, the human being, who was to subdue and rule it.

The polytheistic religions never said otherwise either. Wars were apparent throughout each religious age, indeed, the very idea that monotheism suddenly changed the paradigm of human beings ruling over nature is absurd, at best. Agriculture and civilization had long took hold before monotheism became the prevailing theme! Kings and warlords were the mechanism of society for millennia! So religion here seems to have little to do with it.

The second significant event was the invention of the first automatic machine to play a significant role in public social life: the clock. The full significance of the invention of the clock in the development of capitalism, particularly in its industrial form, is a tale in itself, but my concern here is more specific. By materializing the concept of a non-living thing that could nonetheless move on its own for the populace, the clock gave an understandable basis for a new conception of the universe. Together with the idea of a creator external to the universe, it provided the basis for perceiving the unity of the universe as a clockwork created by the great clockmaker. In other words, it was essentially mechanical.

Yet, the clock didn't exist with the advent of initial industry, and people kept time long before the mechanized clocks were around. Indeed, mechanical clocks weren't even utilized by the masses until hundreds of years later. Clocks were, somewhat similar to how Greek philosophy was, a luxury for the rich and wealthy. Not some sort of invention to make the world into this mechanized place. That was happening already. Mills, bakeries, smiths, those things existed long before even material philosophy did. The first real clocks were actually utilized on ships, because to know where you were on the planet you had to know what time it was at home, there were time keeping boys who would constantly flip an hourglass to keep track of time for very long intervals.

BTW, the art of time keeping is very very old, with agriculture there needed to be a way to understand the seasons; and time keeping was a way to do that. This was the beginning of the scientific observation of the heavens, with farmers all understanding the seasons together, as one, without anyone holding a monopoly on when the best times to plant and the best times to harvest were. Ancient people even built large stone creations that would mark, absolutely accurately, when these times came. And this required a static, unchanging understanding of the universe. A mechanized understanding? Maybe so, if you want to call it that. I personally don't consider expecting the sun to rise the same way it has since the dawn of time anything dramatic, though, but using very emotionally charged words is one tactic anti-science people tend to utilize. The religious right has done it that way for quite awhile, why not the radical left?

So religion and a technological development laid the basis for the development of a mechanistic view of the universe and with it of modern science. Recognizing the importance of religion in providing this ideological framework, it should come as no surprise that most early scientists were ecclesiastics, and that the sufferings of Galileo and Copernicus were exceptions to the rule, useful in developing the mythology of science as a force of truth fighting against the obscurantism of superstition and dogma.

They weren't scientists, they were appeasers. Much like the ancient Greek philosophers, they used their position of "education" and wealth and power to exploit the system that they were under. Galileo funded his research by making telescopes, not relying on the state because it wanted to be appeased, it did not want actual science. This is still true today, with certain so called "scientists" paid for by the oil industry, for example, writing hearsay that attempts to hysterically "rebut" solid scientific evidence. With the state suppressing scientists who hold a view contrary to their ends. Science is, underlying all things, the assumption that a given thing can be observed and that observation can be reproduced. If this is a "mechanistic view of the universe," then any human being who has existed in the last 10k years is "guilty" of that, what the author might call, 'sin.' Religion wasn't so much necessary to persuade people of the 'truth,' merely controlling their access to educational materials. The masses were generally uneducated fools in those times, too. Our Galileo was also a son of a wealthy figure, which is why he was able to get the resources and education he had. Galileo knew this through the writings of Copernicus, he had access to those materials. Optics were an expensive field at the time, and when he saw sight of Jupiter his observations proved Copernicus correct. That is the scientific method, and it's pretty cool.

In reality, the early scientists were generally working for one or another of the various state powers as integral parts of the power structure, following the same path as one of the best known among them, Francis Bacon, who had no problem with reporting people like Giordano Bruno, who expressed ‘heretical’ ideas, to the church authorities.

'Scientists' were doing this from the very beginning, though. Bacon wasn't a true scientist like Galileo or, for a very simple example, Eratosthenes who figured out the circumference of the planet over 2k years ago. Simple, very simple scientific procedures. Essentially two sundials placed at different locations on the globe at the same time of the day are going to cast separate shadows, using simple geometry it is trivial to calculate the circumference of the planet. Bacon wrote more on state affairs than he ever did science.

The so called 'scientists' the author is writing about were highly exploitive philosophers who coerced and manipulated their way into society, similarly to how religious people do it.

But the scandals of science, like those of the church, the state or capital, are not the substance of the problem. The substance lies in the ideological foundations of science. Basically relational views of the universe—whether the legalistic one of the ancient Greek or the more fluid views of people who lived outside civilization—imply that an understanding of the universe would come from attempting to view it as holistically as possible in order to observe the relationships between things, the connections and interactions. Such a viewpoint works well for those who have no desire to dominate the universe, but rather only want to determine how to interact with their environment in order to fulfill their desires and create their life. But the capitalist need for industrial development required a different worldview.

Here at least the author admits that interacting with ones environment resembles their definition of science. But I don't think it started with the capitalists, I think the exploitation of science for ones own benefit started tens of thousands of years ago. Starting with the Shaman and leading into the Magicians of old, we can see ample scenarios where people were exploiting others with the information that they held exclusively to themselves. This information was obtained through an observational process that would be called science to any reasonable person. What the author tries to do is tell us, essentially, that a holistic view is bad in some way, but I don't think they actually achieve that point.

If the universe is a machine and not an interrelationship between a myriad of beings, then one does not achieve an understanding of it through simple observation and direct experimentation, but through a specialized form of experimentation.

Heavy research science, the "specialized form," isn't for everyone, though. There's little difference between a gardener observing the proper amounts of water to feed their plants than a scientist in a lab trying to determine which genes best suite algae growth.

One cannot come to an understanding of how a machine works simply by observing it as it functions in its environment. One needs to break it down into its parts—the gears, the wheels, the wires, the levers, etc.—in order to figure out what each part does.

If you have the plans for the machine, you most certainly can understand how it works without actually having to directly break it down. The breaking it down part is merely the acquisition of knowledge. When a primitivist would sample various pieces of a plant for its potency, they were in effect breaking things down to their constituent parts to understand them more clearly. Children are fond of taking things apart and trying to put them back together again, trying to understand how they work. And certainly in most aspects of life it would be impossible to form certain conclusions without a larger picture, a larger more broken down picture. The author of this very essay is gathering all sorts of information from a variety of sources, breaking them down and reassembling them to form an argument! A highly flawed and corrupt one, but one nonetheless!

Thus, a foundational aspect of the method of modern science is the necessity of breaking everything down into its parts, with the aim of achieving the most basic unit. It is in this light that one can understand why scientists think that it is possible to learn more about life by cutting a frog open in a laboratory than by sitting by a pond observing frogs and fish and mosquitoes and lily pads actually living together.

I don't think that scientists are trying to "learn more about life" by practicing science. Science is merely an outlet for ones natural curiosities. It is unlikely that cutting open a frog is going to lead, say, a school child down a path of understanding their personal life. However, if they were compelled by such observational mechanisms to then go on and study the life cycle of frogs and try to understand what is killing them off enmasse, then perhaps they can find something useful in that. And that would be a fulfilling existence in my mind, even if part of that time is spent in a lab testing the pond waters of a specific species and so on.

What the author is trying to do is invoke an emotional response. They want the reader to read this and contrast a sterile lab environment with a nice pretty forest pond environment, and reject the overall feelings of those people who find both environments equally pleasing. There's nothing inherently wrong with this tactic, but if writing is composed almost entirely of it, it is hard to find actual reasoned commentary.

The knowledge science pursues is quantitative knowledge, mathematical knowledge, utilitarian knowledge—a type of knowledge that transforms the world into the machine it claims the world is. This sort of knowledge cannot be drawn from free observation in the world. It requires the sphere of the laboratory where parts can be experimented with outside of the context of the whole and within the framework of the ideological foundations of mathematics and a mechanistic worldview. Only parts that have been separated in this way can be reconstructed to meet the needs of those who rule.

Yet, we still see this sort of behavior in even the most primitive cultures. You don't shape your arrows out right where you snap off the branches, you select a few, go back to the tribal area, and then select them one at a time. Some branches which might at first sight seemed adequate then can be scrutinized and discarded if need be. The lab is merely another extension of that. It is taking information and scrutinizing it further for the sake of understanding it better. If humans did not do this no society could function. The author hasn't really succeeded in separating the "mechanistic" worldview from the rest of science, that is, the author assumes that primitive societies don't practice science or that children don't from the start, and that somehow their interactions with the environment are not relegated to this "mechanized worldview." Yet I think I've established otherwise, I simply chose to use a different word for it. Curiosity, ingenuity, wonder, I think those are much better words to describe natural human behaviors.

What the author wants the reader to do is imagine a world where there exist only, what they coin, "free observation." That is, observation that does not break down things into their constituent parts. That's cool, but I've established that's impossible. So where does the author draw the line? The author just, again, wants to invoke an emotional response. Again referring to labs as this "utilitarian" knowledge, when it can only be said to be an extension of knowledge persual.

Of course, the first parts that must be separated from this mechanistic whole are the scientists themselves. The factor that makes the experiments of animals, children, non-civilized people and untrained people within the modern world unscientific is our lack of so-called objectivity; we are too involved, still in intimate relationship with that with which we experiment.

No, what can make children, non-civilized people, and untrained people unscientific is that, in part, they are wrong. Science has reproducible results for a given observation. If your 'result' does not meet with the irrevocable, established, correct result, then you are not being scientific. Let's throw back to the primitivists. If I'm out in the woods and I snap off some branches to make arrows but they are made of cork, and I continue to do so imagining that they would make arrows, then I am clearly not using the scientific method, and am, essentially, an idiot. (And my primitive comrades would probably make fun of me.) I'm not observing what I'm doing, I'm not remembering which branches are more adequate for arrow making, I'm just a douchbag breaking branches off of trees all haphazardly.

I of course have nothing to say about other animals and their scientific processes, but certainly even they learn and understand their environment, they acquire knowledge and utilize it to their own ends. How often is there a nature show that shows a young animal unable to hunt because its parents got killed? I'll never forget this amazing show about Brown Eagles, and this youngling that was eaten by a bobcat because the parents nested twice in one year and had to reject the youngling before it'd learned (and been taught) how to protect itself.

The scientist, on the other hand, has been trained to place himself outside of that on which she experiments, to use the cold rationality of mathematics. But this objectivity is really no different from the separation of a king, an emperor or a dictator from the people they rule. The scientist cannot step out of the natural world in any literal sense which would allow him to view it from beyond its borders (for all practical intents and purposes, this universe has no borders). Rather like an emperor from the heights of his throne, from her laboratory the scientist proclaims to the universe: "You will submit to my commands." The scientific worldview can really only be understood in these terms.

The rhetoric thickens. Because someone has a more nuanced view of the world, they are "placing themselves outside of that which they experiment." It's impossible for me to see how one is trying to prove that observational refinement results in a dictator-like relationship with the world. Is a primitive who makes a shoe out of the pelt of an animal they kill telling the universe (the animal that it killed) to "submit to my commands"? It's an absurd proposition. And to "understand the scientific worldview in these terms" to me is an act of irrationality to the extreme.

It is of note that a scientist who is observing the behavior of proteins in an animal isn't necessarily concerning themselves with that animals behavior, or even that animals environment. Sure, the scientist may have removed that animal from its environment to experiment on it, but this is no different from a primitive taking an animal from its environment and doing something with it (the pelt example I'd made). What we have here is this sort of close-minded view that if someone works in a lab they are somehow disconnected from the learning process that they are very much participating in. That somehow, the learning process of someone who isn't in a lab is better. But as I've shown there's very little difference between the types of processes, other than a nuanced refinement in the lab, and that overall the author is trying to invoke an emotional, unreasoned response.

The conceptions of the nature of the universe that have been put forth by modern science have not been so much descriptive as prescriptive, edicts proclaiming what the natural world must be forced to become: mechanical parts with regular, predictable motions which can be made to function as the ruling class that funds scientific research desires.

I assume this means that the author blames science for capitalistic destruction of nature. Someone in a lab does some core sampling, discovers oil, and the capitalists go out and dominate the landscapes! Of course, this again can be said of the primitive, utilizing planetary resources would be impossible without breaking down those resources to constituent bits and then compiling them together adequately. The bow and arrow is made of at least 4 distinct parts and 3 distinct technologies, none of which could ever exist without there having been a scientific process to get it there. The bow and arrow didn't just pop into existence, its use was discovered and then later expounded upon and taught down generational lines.

It should come as no surprise then that the language of science is the same as the language of the economy and of bureaucracy, a language devoid of passion and any concrete connection to life, the language of mathematics. What better language could one find for ruling the universe—a language that is at the same time utterly arbitrary and utterly rational?

How about the language of this very essay? It uses more $5 words than I'd like, I'll tell you that much. Scientific language is merely designed to rid ones self of ambiguities. Religion and statist institutions are filled with ambiguities. Laws are written so haphazardly that they can be interpreted two different ways on two different occasions. And economy is so rife with ambiguities to the point that actually defining the capitalist process in its totality would be impossible. Look at any patent that is filed for a shining example of capitalists utilizing ambiguity to fuck everyone over.

So modern science developed with a specific purpose. That purpose was not the pursuit of truth or even knowledge except in the most utilitarian sense, but rather the atomization and rationalization of the natural world so that it could be broken down into its component parts which could then be forced into new, regularized, measured relations useful to the development of technological systems that could extract more and more components for the reproduction of these systems. After all, this was what the rulers wanted, and they were the funders (and thus financially the founders) of modern science.

Science itself as an abstract concept is merely the acquisition of knowledge. It just so happened that human beings found that if they utilize the knowledge that they obtained they would achieve better status within society. There is absolutely no doubt, because it is the only conclusion, that a primitivist at one point decided that they could exploit others within their environment by utilizing the knowledge that they obtained. And if we look at modern primitivist cultures we can see this as pretty apparent, with shaman being rather powerful and respected individuals in a given tribe.

Of course, the author is talking about "modern science," which is very little different from the original conception of science. It isn't the breaking down of things into constituent parts to understand them that is the problem, it is withholding that information, keeping it exclusive, keeping it tied up to those with power. A king is happy to have a person who can make an aqueduct. A king would not be happy if that aqueduct builder went on and built an aqueduct for a competing region. So it is a self perpetuating system, but it by no means started with the advent of industrialism, it was a paradigm that quite literally goes back to the beginning of humanity.

With the mathematization of all things, what is singular in each thing disappears, because what is singular is beyond abstraction and therefore beyond mathematics. When that which is singular in beings and things disappears, the basis for passionate relations, relations of desire, disappears as well. After all, how does one measure passion? How does one calculate desire? The domination of instrumental reason has little room for any passion other than that deformed sort of greed that seeks to accumulate more and more of the standardized, commodified items available on the market and the money that makes them all equal in the strictest mathematical sense.

This whole paragraph assumes one fatal assumption, that science itself desires to attach itself to all of humanity. While no one could exist without scientific principles, that is, reproducible observations which to live by, certainly people can and do on a vast plain exist without being part of the more research oriented scientific process. So assuming the larger assumption about passion and desire are correct, it cannot, absolutely cannot apply to the whole. There's a distinct difference between scientific research, and existing, and there aren't billions of labs in the world where people can go and do whatever banal observation the author is inventing.

But the overall argument about passion and desire is not correct. Just because one has a more nuanced and analytical view over certain aspects of reality does not automatically mean that in their personal lives they lack these things. When Archimedes finally understood the principles of buoyancy and density, he jumped out of his tub exclaiming "Eureka! I found it!" I can not even imagine his excitement and satisfaction for such a discovery. When a scientist makes a discovery they are no different from a primitive killing the hunt or a child learning to do some task for the very first time. When Eratosthenes proved not only the Earth was round but was able to calculate its circumference, the excitement and passion that ran through his blood must have been remarkable. Here we had a librarian who for all intents just walked around managing books all day, but he made one of the single most important discoveries in the history of humanity. We all know the story of Einstein and how he imagined "thinking like a boy," before he went on to discover the Theory of Relativity. These simple examples are nothing, there are many to chose from, more than I could count on my fingers, more than I could write in a month. Carl Sagan, one of my favorite scientists of all time, his Cosmos series expressed wonder that it would be hard for one to comprehend was anything less than passionate, anything less than desirable. These things didn't disappear for him, no! They were empowered by science! Enhanced! Steve Squyres is the more recent variant of Carl Sagan, a scientist with passion, with the desire to share the world with children and students alike. Both times the Mars Exploration Rovers landed, the scientists stood with baited breath watching the large screens, finally breaking out in loud claps, strong embraces, and tearful smiles when the images finally showed. And these people have no passion? Fuck that shit! What a cold and ignorant perspective to have! And lately, as the rovers are enduring a dust storm of a magnitude never before witnessed on the ground, the emotions of the team members and fans of the project are passionate. I guess they're evil cold and calculating people, all around. They have no appreciation for anything.

I do realize that I am invoking a contrarian emotional response here in my writing, but how else to I defend this perspective when it is being attacked by emotional hearsay?

One might be able to make the argument that the toil related to capitalistic science, that is, a scientist who goes in to work day in and day out and does experiments which in turn are filled with redundant work rarely resulting in success is a bad thing, but even then I would argue that the experience of success is still a wonderful thing to behold. This is illustrated by the response of Gregory Pincus when, after their success with the birth control pill and the thousands of hormone related trials that had to be conducted, his wife asked with baited breath and admiration, "Did you ever think it was possible?" and he responded "With science, dear, anything is possible!"

The various classification systems of science—which parallel systems used by state bureaucracies—certainly played a significant role in excluding the singular from the realm of science. But science uses another more insidious and irreparable method for destroying the singular. It attempts to break every thing down into its smallest possible components—first those units that are shared by every entity of a particular type, and then those that are shared by every entity that exists—because mathematics can only be applied to homogeneous units, units that can be equivalent. If early scientists had a tendency to experiment frequently with dead animals, including humans, it was because in death one dog or one monkey or one human is very much like any other. When pinned on a board in a laboratory with their bodies cut open, have not all frogs become equivalent?

I've already shown that breaking things down into bits is not some new phenomena, that essentially, it is the result of observation, and a natural occurrence. And certainly, we can see quite clearly that the classifications, in the case of "mere frogs," are not "all equivalent," that their environments are increasingly understood, and that in the end their value as creatures is quantified, each species is unique, each path of qualification is unique, and indeed, a scientist who studies frogs would understand and appreciate this more than anything! A small child who finds different species of frogs would not immediately appreciate their uniqueness, especially if they are similarly shaped and colored. A child would discard the unique characteristics that a discerning scientist would notice! Such absurdity even still as I delve deeper into the authors convoluted argument!

DNA does exhibit similarities within all life, because that is all that life is known to be composed of, and certainly scientists noticed these similarities without the knowledge of DNA (Darwin, anyone?). But that does not mean a scientist would be incapable of appreciating the uniqueness and beauty of a given product of DNA, quite the contrary! Carl Sagan was awed that a human being shares much of its DNA with a banana! The very idea to scientists is groundbreaking, earth shattering. Take a few thousand strands of DNA and you have the difference between a fruit fly and a human being! We are quantitatively 'equal' when all is said and done, and certainly scientists above all others are capable of appreciating that. The primitive that uses its tools to dominate the free range animals, the primitive that uses fire to burn down whole forests, I think felt at least superior in some effect to those creatures on the planet which it dominated. A scientists knowledge may be utilized by capitalists to dominate the environment, but their curiosity by no means indicates a desire to actually dominate it, merely understand it. Not to say that there were not scientists whose goals were dominance, though I would argue in effect that these scientists did not uphold the spirit of science by any means since that would imply a move away from the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, and toward the control of it, much like how the Church held back truly scientific views.

But this does not yet break things down adequately. Certainly such experimentation, whether with dead organisms or with non-organic matter allowed science to break the world down into components it could mold to fit into its well-measured, calculated, mechanistic perspective, a necessary step in the development of industrial technology. But mathematics and the corresponding mechanistic worldview were still quite clearly ideas that were being imposed on an unwilling and resistant world—particularly (or maybe just most noticeably) the human world, the world of the exploited who did not want their lives measured out in hours of work timed by the industrially accurate clocks of the boss, the exploited who didn’t want to spend every day in the same repetitive task that is also being carried out by hundreds—or maybe thousands—of others in the same building, or one that is identical to it in order to earn the general equivalent for buying survival.

This is a loaded argument, at best. Agriculture was an improvement to those who lived in the forests, and the scientific observation that seeds make plants, and that those plants can be nurtured into providing for the people was hardly rejected by anyone. Industrial machinery made it so that farming vast fields was no longer a toiling process requiring significant labor that resulted in far greater rewards. The rejection or the resistance of technological progress that the author here notes simply did not exist, and believing it existed is one of the failures of radical circles. Thinking that capitalism, the state, and the economic structures that imposed themselves on society utilized science toward ends which the population was against is the beginning of a spiral down a path of illogic. Tools allowed kings and conquerers to take over vast lands, resulting in the perceived benefit of those under these kings. If one society had inferior technology, then it was wiped out, those with superior technology appreciated their capacity to succeed and defeat their perceived enemies. No doubt at all that science and technology were used in this manner to cause great havoc upon society, but this is no different from the old primitive societies who have gone to war against one another for tens of thousands of years. War being an intrinsic aspect of those in power wishing their people to exhibit that power in whatever convoluted fashion. And utilizing whatever knowledge and capacities they had within them to convince their populations that these wars were needed to begin with.

Now I will agree with the author that people didn't want to actually spend their days doing repetitive tasks and the things that go along with it, I have made similar arguments before. However, I accept that those tasks were and generally are accepted as a lesser evil than the alternatives. Living in squalor, and so on. Someone who works in a sweatshop isn't prostituting themselves out (sexually), and for them it is undoubtedly a better alternative. Most people, if given the chance to better their existence, will chose to do so. This is why sweatshops and other types of shitty labor do exist. And it is likely that those who utilized science from the beginning offered the opportunity for one to better themselves, but exploited their own position of knowledge and power to their own ends. Consider the secret trade of porcelain creation, which in Europe was more valuable than gold (despite that the Chinese dynasties had perfected the art thousands of years before it came to Europe).

Physics has always been the science in the forefront of the effort to make mathematics the inherent basis of reality. If one is to believe the myth, when the apple hit Newton on the head, it supposedly led him to come up with equations to mathematically explain the attraction and repulsion of objects. For some reason, this is supposed to make us think of him as a genius rather than a petty-minded, calculating businessman/scientist. (He was a stockholder in the famous East India Company which provided the financial basis for so many of Britain’s imperialistic endeavors and head of the Bank of England for a time.) But Newton’s law of gravity, Galileo’s law of inertia, the laws of thermodynamics, etc. come across as mathematical constructs of the human mind that are imposed on the universe, just as their technological results—the industrial system of capitalism—was an imposition of this rationalized worldview into the daily lives of the exploited classes.

The authors rhetoric about "mathematical constructs imposed upon the universe" is ridiculous, at best. Firstly, it is important to note that science isn't about "imposing" constructs upon the universe. Any creation, be it the formation of weaves in a primitive, yet sturdy, basket, or an electron gun for a television set, requires constructs, or rules, for success. You can't just make a basket by throwing twigs together, you must find the best branches, and furthermore you must understand the weave and motions necessary to attain the most structurally sound result. Newton invented the calculus simultaneously with Leibniz, and Newtons equations for gravity work just as well with Leibniz's approach to calculus. Since then dozens of approaches to calculus have been invented. Had either been 'just' "constructs of the human mind" and not merely the human minds interpretation of actual, real, valid events, then both would not have been applicable to one another. Newton invented the calculus long before he discovered the laws of gravity, he actually discarded calculus as very useful until he saw how it could be applicable to the orbit of the moon.

BTW, it is still pretty obvious to note that the exploited classes had no care in the world for Newton or Galileo's discoveries; indeed, they were at the time mired in other politics that the state had conjured up. Newton's laws of motion were hardly significant to the masses, but his prosecution of counterfeiters and otherwise working for the king in those times probably did. Newton's laws of motion hardly came into effect technologically for centuries! Even the work (of Newton, Galileo, and especially Kepler) with optics did not improve the eyesight of the masses for hundreds of years (those who benefited from the optic work were the kings and wealthy). The imposition of the state on the exploited classes was there before Newton made his discoveries, and it continued on after he made his discoveries. The only truth we can surmise from this is that science doesn't, by default, emancipate anyone. But I would argue that it couldn't without someone there trying to use it to those ends! And certainly, by the use of technology by the powerful, and the exclusion of knowledge from the masses, we can easily surmise that the state and those with power didn't want to share the benefits.

The exploited classes continued on their way being ignorant of their world, obeying their statist masters. Indeed, the heliocentric model of the solar system was not allowed to be accepted for over a hundred years after Galileo proved it, and 200 years since it was proposed! Many scientists didn't even accept it due to fears of the Church, until Newton's laws of motions and Kepler's mathematical construction of planetary orbits resoundingly proved the Church wrong. Had the masses actually been educated, they could not have been so easily deceived by the Church, and they might have been able to have a nice pair of glasses before their end.

It should be clear from this that the scientific method was never the empirical method. The latter was based only on experience, observation and experiment within the world with no preconceptions, mathematical or otherwise. The scientific method, on the other hand starts from the necessity of imposing mathematical, instrumental rationality on the universe. In order to carry out this task, as I have said, it had to separate specific components from their environment, remove them to the sterility of the laboratory and there experiment with them in order to figure out how to conform them to this instrumental, mathematical logic. A far cry from the sensual exploration of the world that would constitute a truly empirical investigation.

I fondly refer back to the primitive. The empirical method doesn't require that no one have prior knowledge or understanding, that all preconceptions be ousted, for it to be empirical. If every primitive had to discover, on their own, the tools to create the things that they use, they would achieve nothing. Snares, traps, and other inventions of the primitive could not magically just be discovered, they have to be taught from one generation to the next, otherwise the capacity of the human is lacking any sort of understanding of those technologies. Knowledge has always been passed down throughout humanity, and the empirical method would be lost without it. If you were to send a primitive out to find rocks that make flint on a rainy day, and they had no prior knowledge of which rocks they were, they would have an impossible time trying to find the necessary rocks. Math is certainly a powerful tool utilized by scientists, however, it is no different than any other observational approach passed down through time. The question the author should be asking is whether or not math is reflecting an interpretation of the universe which is correct. The author would never answer that question because they know the answer already. It does.

And this is why the author goes on this emotionally charged diatribe about "sterile laboratories." Because they have no real argument against science except emotionally charged hearsay, that rejects the feelings and emotions of those people who do practice science, and who do find value in their perceptions of the world. The author would seemingly prefer a world where observational knowledge is actually kept hidden in boxes so those who have access to them can use that knowledge to exploit everyone else. But the author cannot escape the natural world of human involvement because science, the empirical method, knowledge, understanding, are all things that humanity has practiced since it first left the forest, since it first utilized tools. Sadly, many many anarchists are deluded by these incoherent fantasies that authors such as the one I am responding to espouse.

The whole essay I'm responding to is full of misinformation and rhetoric.

Continue to part 2 here.

Modern science has been able to continue developing not because it opens the way to increasing knowledge, but because it has been successful at carrying out the task for which the state and the ruling class funded it. Modern science was never intended to provide real knowledge of the world—that would have required immersion in the world, not separation from it—but rather to impose a particular perspective on the universe that would turn it in to a machine useful to the ruling class. The industrial system is proof of the success of science at carrying out this task, but not of the truth of its worldview. It is in this light that we can examine the "advances" that constitute the "new physics"—relativity physics, atomic physics and quantum physics—because it is this post-Newtonian physics that succeeds in imposing the mathematical conception onto the universe to such a degree that the two come to be seen as one. In Newtonian physics, the universe is a material reality, a machine made up of parts the interactions of which can be "explained" (though, in fact, nothing is really explained) mathematically. In the "new" physics, the universe is a mathematical construct—matter simply being part of the equation—made up of bits of information. In other words, the "new" physics has a cybernetic view of the universe.

The author of course makes another agreeable point, that science has continued due to the capitalist masters funding it, however, that does not make science intrinsically capitalist (or statist for that matter), it merely shows that science is a very powerful tool, and in the hands of those who seek power can be utilized to those ends.

Science has always been to acquire knowledge, however, the capitalists and statist used science to their own benefit, and by doing so they had to maintain a monopoly on that knowledge. It is no surprise why the Church kept the evidence of scientists from ever seeing the light of day; it went against the teachings of the Church and they couldn't have that! Similarly, again, to how the current administration in the USA is suppressing the thoughts of a scientist whom is going against the preconceptions that the current administration holds! And of course, this is just a natural phenomena, those with power, however they got it, will attempt to keep it. And this goes for anyone.

The useful aspects of science have, for the longest time, been exploited by those with power, that class of peoples who could utilize it to their own ends. But this is not because of science, as a whole, that is, the acquisition of knowledge that is apparent in every single human society on the planet. It is because those with the power to exploit the science utilized it to their own ends, and not the ends of everyone. I've argued many times before that it shocked me how industrial agriculture didn't change the landscape and remove work from our daily lives, how, essentially, our agrarian society didn't manage to just stop giving a shit about everything else and expect the machines to provide everyone with free fucking food. It didn't work out that way because the ruling class found other ways to maintain their power grip. Farmers left the fields en mass, only to take up other jobs which they were convinced, by the ruling class of course, were just as progressive and just as good. But blaming this on science is preposterous! The class system was already well in place at that point. Property relationships, again, well in place. People couldn't just suddenly say no to the new capitalist "innovations." It would've required systematic rejection by all of humanity for that to have worked, and the concept of property was enhanced by those with the power to hire police forces and so on. Humanity, as a whole, at that stage in history, lamented the wonderful machinery it had made to emancipate itself, and succumbed. The capitalists, not the scientists, or the engineers for that matter, were the ones who created this scenario, nothing more, nothing less.

In part I begin to realize that science, that is, the science as practiced by capitalists, the science in patents, in copyright, in all things control, is not true science at all. The Enlightenment period could've never occurred were it not for the free dissemination of information between scholars. Eratosthenes would've never been able to calculate the circumference of the planet without having had access to all the books he had as a librarian (he'd been reading about how during noon time in Egypt during the fall, the sun did not cast a shadow deep into the water wells). The only way to emancipate ourselves from the capitalists is not to think about warm fuzzy bunnies and delude ourselves that our mere emotional observations are true reflections of reality; the solution is to share the information we have gleaned so far about our existence far and wide, for everyone to have access to, without the restrictions that the capitalists have currently placed on ones ability to observe and appreciate their reality.

The observation of a shadow does not make the world this sterile place. But it can be used to calculate the circumference of the planet! Without math you'd have to walk the circumference of the planet with a freaking ruler.

Relativity physics mathematizes the universe on the macrocosmic level. According to its theories, the universe is a "space-time continuum". But what does this mean? The "space-time continuum" is, in fact, purely a mathematical construct, the multi-dimensional graph of a complex equation. Thus, it is completely beyond empirical observation—strangely like cyber-space. Or not so strangely, if one considers the former as a model for the latter. Once again, it matters little if this picture of the universe is true. It works on a technological and economic level, and that has always been the bottom line for science.

It is not at all beyond empirical observation. In fact it was proved by astronomers with cute little telescopes as soon as the first full solar eclipse occured after Einstein published his paper. Light rays were found to follow the gravitational force. Time dilation is an effect that occurs with increasing speed, and we can see ample evidence of its effects, most notably in the global positioning system, which would not function without Einstein's discovery. Funnily enough the GPS has within it yet another example of the power class utilizing science and technology to its own personal gains, with the inclusion of "selective availability." Basically the military introduced errors into the GPS to make it unreliable for anyone who wasn't military. Fortunately SA has been turned off since 2000, however, it could be turned back on at any time, and it can still be affected over a given locality, if the US military so chose.

I wonder why the author discards the picture of the universe that scientists have discovered as true. It matters monumentally if the observations of science are true. Relativity, being true, allows a traveler to know where they are on the planet at any given moment. You could rely on astronomical observation to get a decent idea of where you were with respect to your original location, say, 5k years ago, but that would not give you a full understanding of where you were at all. You'd be lost. To actually know your location 5k years ago would've required math that wasn't even discovered yet. You didn't even have that math 2k years ago. And it would require ample understanding of astronomy before you could even begin the latitudinal equations, and of course an understanding of time.

Why are these useless variables? If as a primitive I could utilize tools for my survival, why as a sophisticated human being does my survival become sterile and without emotion or feelings or desire or whatever other bullshit because I utilize technology which is a few orders of magnitude more complex? Complete hogwash.

Oh, and it should be noted that the author to this point has failed to make a connection between science and the capitalist industrial system that has utilized it to its ends. Einstein didn't set out to make the atomic bomb, at least not at first. He was merely daydreaming like a young boy, imagining what it would look like to travel on a photon, and his discovery left incredible repercussions for scientists forever. Of course, the author would call this a sterile existence devoid of passion or desire, but what can you do?

The "ultimate reality" that is the "space-time continuum"—this "reality" beyond our senses that the experts tell is more real than our daily experience (and who still doubts them in this alienated world?)—is constructed of bits of information called quanta. This is the microcosm of the total mathematization of the universe, the realm of quantum physics. Quantum physics is particularly interesting for the way in which it exposes the project of modern science. Quantum physics is supposed to be the science of sub-atomic particles. At first, there were just three: the proton, the electron and the neutron. These explained atomic weight, electricity, etc. and allowed for the development of nuclear technology and modern electronics. But too many mathematical discrepancies appeared. Quantum physics has dealt with these discrepancies by using the most consistent scientific method possible; it has formulated new equations in order to calculate away the discrepancies and called these mathematical constructs newly discovered sub-atomic particles. Once again, there is nothing that we can observe through our senses—even with the aid of tools such as microscopes. We are dependent on the claims of experts. But experts in what? Clearly, they are experts in constructing stopgap equations that uphold the mathematical conception of the universe until the next discrepancy arises—functioning in a way that parallels capitalism itself.

The author does seem to know how to exhibit their misunderstanding or misconceptions about science pretty well, given how I've agreed with the author very little and rarely completely. Quantum physics has not dealt with its conceptions by making shit up out of nothing; it put into place predicted variables, and through experimentation those variables were unsurprisingly discovered. Had the scientists of old lived long enough to see the launch of the first satellites they would've also been similarly content in the proof that the solar system consists of spherical bodies. In science, if a claim is made, and it is proved incorrect then it is invalid, and other claims must be made. Einstein didn't just make some voodoo up from nothing, he took with his equations the understanding of a myriad of fields, before he came to his conclusions. It would've been impossible for Relativity, for instance, to have actually been verifiable experimentally unless it was based on true constructs of the universe. The odds that Einstein just sat down and made up some equations and somehow they magically conformed to reality are so small that it is a joke.

If the author so wishes they can take a tour of any particle physics lab and see with their own two eyes the existence of quarks. Unless they're going to invoke some sort of irrational conspiracy as it relates to tens of thousands of particle physicists around the world! Which I admit would not surprise me at all. Of course, no doubt there exist, essentially, a contingent of scientists who insist that their work is needed and that they are well on their way to the next big discovery and so on, and you cannot slight them for exaggerating the importance of their field, or their use of humanities resources to make the next big discovery. But to say that quantum physics is essentially the assignation of new variables, not new discoveries, mind you, but new variables, shows to me a wholly ignorant view of particle physics. This would be true of things such as String Theory, but the author themselves seems to be a big fan of non-observational theories as opposed to empirical evidence. The author placing very little value on a nuanced or more refined observational practice. And why they? They lack understanding of simple concepts like the empirical method, making the absurd claim that only direct observation without any preconceptions whatsoever is empirical!

Relativity physics and quantum physics are often passed off as "pure science" (as if such a thing has ever existed), theoretical exploration without any instrumental considerations. Without even considering the role these branches of science have played in the development of nuclear weapons and power, cybernetics, electronics, and so on, this claim is also belied by the ideological interests of power that they serve. Together these scientific perspectives present a conception of reality that is completely outside of the sphere of empirical observation. Ultimate reality lies utterly beyond what we can sense and exists completely within the sphere of complex mathematical equations that only those with the time and education—that is the experts—are capable of learning and manipulating. Thus the "new" physics—like the old, but more emphatically—promotes the necessity of faith in the experts, of acceptance of their word over one’s own perception. Furthermore, it promotes the idea that reality consists of bits of information that are connected mathematically and can be manipulated at will by those who know the secrets, the sorcerers of our age, the scientist-technicians.

As the author delves deeper into their convoluted perception of the world, I have to admit, it gets more and more difficult to understand WTF they're trying to say. What is the point here, of this misguided paragraph? Science, any science, must have observation and reproducibility. Claims just can't be written down on paper and then magically be canonized as truth. That is for authors like this essay and the myriad other people on this planet who make shit up to exploit others. Certainly those who write senseless essays like this one are encouraging a move away from reason and understanding and toward a more convoluted existence that is prone to exploitation.

Electronics are more a result of the mechanization of mathematical constructs in the early world wars. We needed a way to decode the enemies messages, and we needed a way to calculate trajectories that would take "hand calculators" (females who did the math by hand) hours to do. The early computers were mere analog devices that turned gears and so on until a magical result had been the result. Mathematicians understood from very early on that bases could be utilized to express the same exact concepts, and quickly discovered that vacuum tubes could be utilized as capacitors. It wasn't too long after that that other scientists discovered they could make those vacuum tubes very small if we changed their chemical properties, we call them transistors. Now while no doubt these discoveries (and it's important to emphasize that these were discoveries) were pushed by capitalistic and statist influences, as discoveries, in their own right, they are benign. And the people making these discoveries were fulfilled by them. Read any interview by any old tech scientist and they will go on for hours about the discoveries they made, with a fascination that would rival the response from any other of equal curiosity.

And finally, nothing of any aspect of science is "outside the sphere of empirical observation." Just because one may not be able to directly observe a given mechanism work, does not mean that they cannot have an understanding of it (even if they don't have complete understanding). The authors concept of empiricism is completely laughable, at best. A primitive, through prior knowledge, can know that when they shape a bow it will work, it's not a kind of faith, it's knowledge of their environment. And likewise a scientist can know that their detector is giving them correct results, because they are knowledgeable about its inner mechanisms. There are websites at this very moment that explain the standard model (of particle physics) for high school students. Now while most students probably couldn't tour a particle physics lab, some most certainly can, and those that understand the instrumentation (as explained by the website no less!), would have an empirical understanding of the experiment as it was done. And the little display that says "this is a quark" would be instantly recognizable.

Would such a student, a bright young student with so much capacity for learning, and a curiosity for their environment, then be labeled as a sterile and passionless person without desires? Would they? If the author would so name such a student I would have to laugh in their face.

Relativity and quantum physics have succeeded in doing what every branch of science would like to do; they have completely separated their sphere of knowledge from the realm of the senses. If reality is only a complex mathematical equation made up of bits of information, then thought experiments are certainly at least as reliable as experiments on material objects. It should be evident by now that this has been an ideal of modern science from the beginning. The separation of the scientist from the sphere of daily life, the sterile laboratory as the realm of experimentation, the blatant scorn of the early scientists for daily experience and what is learned through the senses alone are clear indications of the attitude and direction of science. For Bacon, for Newton, for modern science as a whole, the senses—like the natural world of which they are a part—are obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of dominance over the universe. Interacting with the world on a sensual level is much too likely to evoke passion, and the reason of science is a cold, calculating reason, not the passionate reason of desire. So the world of non-material experimentation opened by the "new" physics fits in well with the trajectory of science.

To me is seems the author has some sort of grudge against advanced science, that is, science which requires a bit more technology for it to be experimented with and understood. But the author lacks the understanding that relativity has been significantly tested for almost a century, and is a given, and that any additions to quantum physics, as a theory, must be made through experimentation. Otherwise we are talking about a sphere of mathematics, and not science. Most Standard Model advocates consider String Theory and its related theories to be absolute heresy. And rightly so! It's not science if empirical data is not used!

Should I now go on to condemn the obsession with radical circles and the so called "environment" which they espouse? Those people who are so naive that they cannot see that their world is highly interconnected and dependent upon technology to a point that it is inconceivable how we can easily move beyond it? I don't think I should expound in that direction, despite the authors condemnation of scientists whom for all intents have lives just as fulfilling as those who are free from the reigns of capitalism. Scientists who experiment with probes, and who get to go out and dig up bones. I myself know a paleontologist, she absolutely loves going out in the field, and it is sad that she currently cannot get grants to do what she truly wants to do. There are so many fields in science that it is shocking that the author can only conclude that it exists for dominance, when in reality that is the fault of the class who has used science to exploit the rest for so long. There are so many unique individuals in the whole of science that it is shocking to me how the ignorant author can make comments about a lack of passion, because of its "cold, calculating, reason." Every scientist I have ever known has been a very passionate person, and they do not utilize their scientific reason except when actually, erm, doing science! The author themselves must be of the boring personalities who brings work home with them, who essentially cannot separate their different desires from one another and must cram them all down ones throat at any given moment.

The naivety of the author in neglecting the exploitive class' use of science as a tool to dominate, and instead as something intrinsic to science as a whole, is one thing terribly wrong with the anti-authoritarian movement. I've shown how, already, I've shown the rhetoric by the author, and I've done it with ease, I think. But how many are going to read this and how many are going to care? I have no idea. I would hope some do, but I don't see that happening. I think the movement is away from reason and toward a more discombobulated anti-reason, anti-technology, anti-civilization point of view. And the more that this happens the more I am inclined to agree it is a cultural thing more than a revolutionary thing, because if it was revolutionary it would at least be tenable. But it's not. In any case, I'm going off topic, I should continue.

While some have tried to portray the concepts of relativity and quantum physics as a break with the mechanistic worldview held by science up to that time, in fact, this "new" view of the world as pure mathematical construct made up of bits of information was precisely the aim of science. It developed its material manifestation in cybernetic technology. The industrial mechanistic worldview gave way to the far more totalizing cybernetic mechanistic worldview, because the latter serves the purposes of science and its masters better than the former. The development of cybernetic technology and particularly of virtual reality opened the door to the possibility of non-material experimentation for those branches of science for which this had previously been impossible, particularly the life sciences and the social sciences. This world doesn’t just provide a means of storing, organizing, categorizing and manipulating figures and information gathered during experimentation and research in the physical world; it also provides a virtual world in which one can experiment on virtual organic beings and systems, on virtual societies and cultures. And if the universe is nothing more than interchangeable bits of information in mathematical relationship to each other, then such experiments are on the same level as those carried out in the physical world. In fact, they are more reliable, since the obstacles of the senses and of the possible development of sympathetic emotion toward those upon which the scientist is experimenting do not come into play. No need to worry about the fact that anything mathematically calculable, and thus programmable, can happen in the virtual realm; this merely shows the infinite technological possibilities to be found in the manipulation of bits of information.

As is seemingly customary with anti-intellectual, anti-civilization, anti-technological articles, it is apparent that the language becomes increasingly incoherent. And that is no doubt exhibited by this incredible paragraph. What does it even mean?!?

I've already established that relativity and quantum physics are not just 'mere' mathematical constructs, but that they are based on empirically proved data. These things do exist! But the author self-admittedly doesn't care about the truth of these things, merely the convoluted and incorrect worldview that they have created to explain these things away because, I suspect, of their incapacity to actually understand them. Which is somewhat ironic given that for the longest time even Einstein himself argued that if someone could not explain their field to a child, then they did not have an adequate understanding of it (in other worlds, children ought to be able to understand these constructs). E=mc^2 is one of the most elegant equations in mathematical history, behind it exists a mired of convoluted equations, but in the end its truth exists, and is tested a thousand times a second every minute of every day. It seems to me the author themselves lack even the understanding of a child!

Non-material virtual experimentation has always been and always will be wholly inadequate to simulate anything useful in the world. Mere protein folding requires the computation power of hundreds of thousands of computers, millions of computer-year cycles, and it still isn't adequate enough to tell us what the proteins do, merely how they fold. It is up to the scientists, using empirical data, to take the rudimentary folding information and figure out what the fuck it actually does. It gives them a direction to follow, it doesn't answer the big questions. Which again illustrates the authors inadequate understanding of computerized simulations. They are intended to give us an idea, not be an absolute prediction or give us a perfect answer. When it comes to materials science, I should say; clearly they can give correct answers when it comes to math, but the material world is highly dynamic and once a simulation is set loose it quickly approaches an exponential and lacks any capacity to actually simulate reality in any significant way. We can simulate car crashes in computers, but we always rely on actual car crash tests to get our data, because while a computer could theoretically simulate every single part of a car being crushed at impact, a real world test is still far superior. As far as experimentation is concerned computers are a joke. We can absolutely utilize them to govern principles we have proved, a probe being sent into space can find its target with little to no intervention by the scientists, on principles over 500 years old! But a computer cannot, by definition, figure out the calculus, or discover relativity! If Newton or Einstein had access to a massively powerful computer and programming languages, they couldn't have utilized them to magically discover what they did, it required their own ingenuity and their own empirical observation for that!

One example the author might throw about is using computers to simulate traffic patterns, or consumer behavior, and so on. These are all things that we discovered follow general statistics. It isn't that the computers actually do any experimentation; statistics are a proved science already. The computers merely act as tools to do a job that scientists could not have done easily on paper. This is the difference between using simulations on computers that actually have experimental results, and using computers to aid in experiments in which a result could theoretically be derived without them. It would be possible, for instance, to set up a particle accelerator experiment that, when run once, would take a team of scientists a few thousand years to decipher (imagine instead of dynamic collectors that assigned bits to a computer program, a series of plates that absorbed particles which could be analyzed later). Certainly the first particle accelerators utilized bubble chambers which an photograph was taken of. And if the author doesn't believe in subatomic particles they need only view a bubble chamber in action (I have)! Talk about understanding the most convoluted aspects of science with ones senses! Would the author then agree with analyzing images from a bubble chamber and designating various particles that take frequent and reproducible paths? I would think probably not, that would make you a pathetic, boring, sterile, dispassionate, undesiring individual.

It is worth noting that the "discovery" of DNA occurred just a few years before the beginning of what some have called the "information age". Of course, cybernetic and information technologies had existed for some time already, but it was in the early 1970’s that these technologies began to penetrate into the general social sphere to a great enough extent to be able to affect how people viewed the world. Since we have already been torn from any sort of deep, direct relationship with the natural world due to the exigencies of the industrial system, most of our knowledge of the world comes to us indirectly. It is not really knowledge at all, but bits of information accepted by faith. It is, therefore, not so difficult to convince people that knowledge really is nothing more than an accumulation of these bits and that reality is simply the complex mathematical equation that encompasses them. It is a very short distance from this to the genetic perspective that life is simply the relationship between bits of coded information. DNA provides the precise interchangeable bits that are the necessary basis for this and, thus, provides the basis for the digitalization of life.

I like how the author puts "discovery" with regards to DNA in double quotes. As if it doesn't exist, or it wasn't a discovery. That it is, as the author would like to put it, a "imposition of the human mind on the universe." Which is humorous at best, really. DNA has been heavily researched, probably more than any other biomedical science at all, it has been well established as something that does exist, and we have gone so far as to utilize it to create rudimentary structures. But those people who discovered it and those people who utilized the basic information behind it to cure disease are nothing more than cold calculating people.

A "direct relationship with the natural world" is largely a figment of the authors imagination, seeing as how even the primitive was practicing science, and 'dominating' its local surroundings. Empirical data has been used by humans since the first tool was invented. Cutting ones hand on a sharp rock which was being played with, potentially one even dying from such a cut, and discovering that it could be readily useful for accurate hunting. And the removal of humanity from a more natural carefree state has been the direct result of those with power, of the masses lacking the education that the elites held in their own control. Those with power have always held information exclusively, have always kept on to whatever power that they had, so it is natural that science was utilized in a manner conductive to the status quo and not the rest of society. Rejecting science, rejecting even modern science, flies in the face of reason when they are the ones who control it. The only logical conclusion is to take it from their control, with things like open source, and free technology distribution. But I suspect to the child-like mind of the author such an approach would be horrifying at the least!

Science is different from faith in that whatever observations it makes and discusses can be reproduced with anyone with the capacity to do so. Current elitist science does keep most people from actually reproducing quite a many experiments. However, most experiments and most knowledge gleaned from science that is immediately useful to humanity is trivial and goes back 100 years or more. And those experiments are trivial to implement. If a given theory does not hold up to this scrutiny then it is quickly rejected from the scientific world. Now, there may be some individuals, people, consumers, who actually view science faithfully, who don't understand the underlying aspects of a given field, and who listen to commercials on TV and whatnot, but I would say even though I think that is a bad thing, that in the end there are still magnitudes more who simply don't understand science at all, who have absolutely no understanding of even the trivial experiments I have mentioned. Those people are in the third world, and of the people on the planet exploited the most, it is them. The uneducated, unlearned, fools. They deserve better, I would say.

As we have seen, science has never been simply an attempt to describe what exists. Rather it seeks to dominate reality and make it conform to the ends of those who hold power. Thus, the digitalization of life and of the universe has the express purpose of breaking everything down into interchangeable bits that can be manipulated and adjusted by those trained in these complex techniques in order to meet the specific needs of the ruling order. There is no place in this perspective for a conception of individuality made up of one’s body, one’s mind, one’s passions, one’s desires and one’s relations in an inimitable dance through the world. Instead, we are nothing more than a series of adjustable bio-bits. This conception is not without its social basis. Capitalist development, particularly in the last half of the 20th century, turned citizens (already part of the apparatus of the nation-state) into producer-consumers, interchangeable with all others in terms of the needs of the social machine. With the integrity of the individual already shattered, it is not such a great step to transform each living thing into a mere storage bank for useful genetic parts, a resource for the development of biotechnology.

Yet the author still hasn't established that science has never been an attempt to describe what exists. Its observations on reality are truth, irrevocable truth unless one can create and prove an alternative theory. The author has only shown the obvious, that those with power will do what they can to hold on to that power, and if that means utilizing science, they will do so. There is a contingent of people in America who utilize what they call science, called Creationism, for example, to push their ideas. And then there is a whole other contingent of those with power who reject many facts of science because it is their goal. It's clear, then, that when science is used by those with power, it is only when it is beneficial to them. It's not as if science, as a whole, is only utilizable by those with power to further its goals, because science can be used to hurt those with power, it can be used to emancipate the rest of society quite readily. Yet, somehow the author misses this! The author makes a totally unsupportable claim, by saying that science seeks to dominate. Capitalism, yes, the state, yes. But science itself is an inherently neutral thing, it can be used to dominate, and it can be used to emancipate.

I would argue again that those scientists who found joy in what they did did feel all sorts of emotions toward their goals, perhaps rivaling the emotions the author wants to invoke to grip at the readers feelings. After all, if the author can show that science is this cold and calculating entity that destroys our souls, then he's won. The reader will run away terrified at the prospect of their very existences being torn apart by a dark and evil creature that has been used for so long to exploit the world. But it's completely untrue in every aspect. Capitalism is capable of making every aspect of society a sort of producer-consumer relationship. This is abundantly clear as radical circles argue for certain market mechanisms that benefit capitalism, particularly those in the environmentalist field who think that somehow their protesting something on the other side of the planet is going to achieve anything but putting money in airplane companies, hotels, and other businesses required to get them there and fed. The new producer-consumer relationship that capitalism has an extraordinarily firm grip on is the environmental movement! Those people who spend billions consuming "environmentally friendly goods" which would have existed regardless, and which have no negative impact on the overall consumption of society. Oh the irony, indeed!

Nanotechnology applies the same digitalization to inorganic matter. Chemistry and atomic physics provided the conception of matter as constructed of molecules which are constructed of atoms which are constructed of subatomic particles. The goal of nanotechnology is the construction of microscopic machines on a molecular level that will ideally be programmed to reproduce themselves through the manipulation of molecular and atomic structures. If one accepts the impoverished conception of life promoted be genetic science and biotechnology, these machines would arguably be "alive". If one examines some of the purposes their developers hope they will serve, it seems that they could, like spliced genes, function in the environment in ways very much like viruses. On the other hand, some of the descriptions of the auto-reproductive function that is to be programmed into them give the frightening idea of air-borne active cancer cells.

Smalley already proved that self-reproducing nanotechnology outside of water-based DNA based entities is impossible, so it is amusing yet again to see another anti-science anti-technologist writing about things they know nothing about. The other amusing encounter was with Derrik Jensen who wrote about hackers and EM devices as if either bit of 'story' he was telling had any of truth to it at all. I've come to accept that pro-environmental Luddites are some of the biggest hypocritical liars in radical circles, they will say anything to get their convoluted point across. I wouldn't mind if it had no effect, but it does, more people are caught up in the religion of bunny worship while the rest of the world festers. It is of no surprise why the third world have very little environmental movements, these are people who merely want to survive in a world dominated by capitalism, and they have little science or education to begin emancipating themselves from it, so they go with the flow.

Anyway, since the nanotechnology described by the author is impossible, I consider the point here moot. The author simply doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about. The trans humanists that the author alludes to, likewise, are just as delusional as the primitivists when they write of their fantasy worlds. Worlds where tiny little machines can make anything and do anything with ease. Repeat after me, Smalley was right.

Both biotechnology and nanotechnology can evoke horrific visions: large and small scale monsters, strange diseases, totalitarian gene manipulation, microscopic air-borne spying devices, intelligent machines with no more need of their human dependents. But these potential horrors do not strike at the heart of the problem. These technologies are reflective of a view of the world drained of wonder, joy, desire, passion and individuality, a view of the world transformed into a calculating machine, the worldview of capitalism.

Non-self-reproducible nanotechnology, that is, the creation of things on a very small scale, of course will remain possible. However, invoking fear in the reader isn't necessary. Certainly Margaret Atwood's conception of the world in Oryx and Crake is not something we'd like to attain, but if anyone really wants to know, in the end Crake destroyed the world because he himself was essentially a closet Luddite. I'm tired of responding to the absurd idea that science and technology result in a world devoid of, well, human behavior. Basically that's what the author is trying to argue. That because of science we aren't human, we're these cold calculating machines. I don't see it. The author is really off the mark here. Do they not appreciate other human beings in their world? The world which, btw, is inundated by the very things the author writes about? It seems to me that many Luddites or many anti-science writers really just despise their world. How can they enjoy living in a world where everyone is just so ... cold, and calculating, lacking passion, joy, desire? It must be mind boggling to these people. To think that essentially the world is just this totally evil place. I don't think the world is evil. I don't even think capitalism is intentionally evil, it just works that way in practice for natural reasons, people want to keep their status, and that's the result. If anyone were to let loose an evil creation upon the world I would expect it to come from a Luddite, given how much they really do hate the world.

Derrik Jensen would rather see billions of people die than the salmon. And he cannot envision a world where both are able to exist. This is the end result of this convoluted and wrong line of thought.

I'm done, I'm done responding to this utter banality. The next two paragraphs merely exhibit the authors conspiracy against science, this conspiracy that is so utterly insane that it is hard to understand where the person is coming from. Considering that they are completely wrong on so many counts in this reply, I think the only conclusion is that science is a tool that capitalists use to fuck us over. But so is environmentalism. So is pacifism. So is, shockingly, violence! Shit, the whole "thug culture" is oriented around feeding goddamn idiots a violent message, and they fucking eat it up. They buy the goddamn CDs. Just like the environmentalists buy their hemp hand baskets, and the pacifists let the world walk all over them. People are just so utterly naive when it comes to capitalism. Fucking goddamn books are being sold that are inherently anti-capitalist. Does anyone reading this see the irony in that? Anyone at all?

Thus, the struggle against capitalism is the struggle against modern science, the struggle against a system that strives to know the world merely as measurable resources with a price, as interchangeable bits of economic value. For those of us who seek to know the world passionately, who want to encounter it joyfully with a sense of wonder, different ways of knowledge are essential, ways that aim not at domination, but at