#appropriate technology

The debate over wayfinding is more scientific today, but it’s no academic argument about history. It’s a real-time struggle-to-the-death between native and Western ideas about human intelligence, the place and purpose of people in the universe, and the nature of reality. But in all of the debate, one crucial element has yet to be considered: the bedrock of Western thinking is being shattered by chaos theory.

Until chaos theory, we had no way to examine turbulent systems like oceans. Science just assumed sea waves are random in shape and in distribution, and that any wave’s appearance must be a matter of chance. Blind to any order in our oceans, we figured that navigators without Western technology could only blunder about. We assumed that the only way to achieve order here would be to superimpose a man-made order with a longitude-latitude grid. So we devised instruments for building the grid, installing it, and locating ourselves on it. Then our navigators journeyed greater distances with greater accuracy. But they’ve had to be constantly jockeying back and forth between the fish’s-eye view from their boats and the bird’s-eye view of their grid-maps. Over time, they’ve grown to relate more to the grid than to their environs.

The wayfinder, with no mathematical model wedged between him and his environs, concentrates 100% of his attention on his place in the sea and sky. With this one-pointedness, he processes all of his data on his course, speed, the current, etc. His point of concentration is his navel, called the piko in Hawaiian. This is considered the center of one’s body and being, so that it--not the brain--is the point from which to live. Instructions for psychologically locating one’s piko and for staying centered there have been passed down through the centuries in chants. Instructions for wayfinding explain that your piko is your canoe.

Today Western ideas about turbulent systems like oceans are being transformed by chaos theory, as it discovers order which science had always mistaken for randomness. The surface of the ocean turns out to be highly modulated, and actually contains a remembrance of all its earlier structures.

Does the wayfinder know about this order? He knows he can count on the sea and sky to tell him where distant land is. For example, a swell bending around an island casts a turbulent “shadow” downwind of the island with a pattern that reveals the island’s location. A swell reflecting off a shore gives away land’s location. Warm air rising over an island creates a high cloud pack that remains relatively stationary, while low, over-the-water clouds get pushed along by the trade winds. So the high cloud pack advertises the island before it appears on the horizon. When the sun or moon is directly above a coral atoll’s lagoon, its brightness reflects onto the undersides of nearby clouds, giving away the atoll’s location. With the sun at a certain altitude the lagoon reflects a jade-green onto the clouds. When the sun and moon can’t help, the wayfinder looks to his on-board pig, who can catch the scent of a distant atoll, its snout pointing the way. Wooded islands reflect a tell-tale dark green onto nearby cloud bottoms. Drifting debris whispers of turf windward. Floating seaweed gives away up-current land. Birds, too, offer guidance because even sea birds need nests on land for their young. Spotting birds at day’s end, the wayfinder knows they’re heading toward land. Spotting them in the morning he knows they’re leaving land to go fishing. He knows the flight range of each species of bird where he’s navigating and knows which birds are migratory, so if he were a Tahitian about 2000 years ago, watching the migrating golden plovers--these are not sea birds--and wondering where they go, he might have taken a cue from them and discovered that their other home is Hawaii.

The handful of remaining wayfinders are sharing their wisdom with a handful of Westerners like David Lewis, an early-retired physician and a highly experienced navigator. Lewis has recounted his experiences in The Voyaging Stars: Secrets of the Pacific Island Navigators. He tells about blind Kaho, who “bade his son Po’oi indicate where certain stars would appear and had him luff... into a breaking wave, that he might feel and taste the spray in his face. Then he dipped his arm down into the sea. ‘This is not Tongan water but Fijian,’ he announced. ‘The waves are from the Fiji Lau group near Lakemba island. Let us alter course to the westward.’ Next morning they duly sighted Lakemba...”

The technology of wayfinding is the patterns of nature, and these patterns reach to the stars. To see how stars participate, we need to remember that any star always rises in the east at the same point of north-ness or south-ness and sets in the west at the same point of north-ness or south-ness, so long as we stay still. A star’s risings and settings, then, are east-west mirror images of each other and are often known in wayfinding as “pits” or ruas. Imprinted on the wayfinder’s memory and “mindscreen”--like cross hairs on a gunsight--are the ruas of about 150 stars. Everything he perceives, then, is in relationship to his “star compass.” Just as telephone poles and trees “move” past us when we’re driving, the stars do (very slowly) when we sail. The wayfinder knows that when ruas are moving past him it’s because he’s changing what we call latitude. Sailing north, they shift south. Sailing south, they shift north. Knowing how much travel equates with how much rua shift, he lets the movement of the ruas tell him his latitude.

Some stars are special. To see why, we need to remember that as stars rise and set, some follow northerly arcs and others southerly arcs. Only the special zenith star passes directly through the line of your erect spine. The gold-orange Arcturus does this at the latitude of Hawaii because it’s the same degree north of the equator as Hawaii is. Arcturus, called Hokulea --star of joy--in Hawaiian, points the way to Hawaii because Hawaii is the only Pacific island directly beneath it. So Hokulea is a “guiding light” for native Hawaiians, much as the Star of Bethlehem is for Christians. Other stars are guiding lights to other islands: Sirius to Tahiti and Spica to Samoa.

To see how the sun helps out we need to remember that Earth is tilted to the plane of its orbit. So, the north end of our axis points toward the sun for six months and away from it for six. In the northern hemisphere, while you’re pointed toward the sun, it rises and sets in your own hemisphere, tracing a big, high arc and taking many hours to do so: summer. While you’re pointed away from the sun, it rises and sets south of you, tracing such a low, small arc that it’s up for fewer hours: winter. In the southern hemisphere your seasons--sun arcs--are reversed. Aware of this and always aware of the date, the wayfinder lets the sun tell him his latitude when the stars aren’t out.

Dealing with what we call longitude involves other techniques. For example, if the wayfinder is traveling north toward an island he aims well east of it. When the zenith star tells him he’s at the island’s latitude, he begins “coasting” west on the easterly trade winds, keeping the zenith star overhead until he hits his target.

What does he do when it’s cloudy? As the sun or stars disappear, he translates his position into the language of wind, wave and swell angles. He notes the ratio of pitch to roll induced in his boat by the dominant swell, and keeps to his course by keeping this ratio constant. If the wind changes he notes it before it affects the waves and adjusts his mental calculations accordingly. He recognizes different winds as much by their character as by their direction. He may track the wind with a pennant attached to the mast. He may monitor wind, waves, swells and the relative angles between them by mentally timing the dippings of the tip of the sail.

To get a feeling for what the wayfinder is doing all this time with his testicles, it helps to understand ocean swells. These enormous formations are powered by distant storms and steady trade winds and shouldn’t be confused with surface waves which change direction as the local wind shifts. Swells march in consistent ranks across thousands of miles. The swell entertaining surfers in Honolulu is generated by winds south of New Zealand. If you can read the shape of a swell you can tell the direction and strength of the current beneath it, and this is critical because if you don’t know what the current is doing you can steer a perfect course and still get lost. The wayfinder reads the swell by sitting cross-legged and nearly naked on the bottom of his all-vegetable-matter canoe and feeling its in his testicles.

David Lewis tells of a wayfinder named Tevake: “He kept course by keeping a particular swell from the east-north-east dead astern, a swell that was effectively masked for me by the steep breaking waves thrown up by the squalls... It may seem incredible that a man could find his way across the open Pacific by means of a slight swell that probably had its origin thousands of miles away... He had made a perfect landfall in the half-mile gap between ...[two islands], having navigated for between 45 and 48 miles without a single glimpse of the sky. “I was no stranger to the complexities of navigation, having three times crossed the Atlantic single-handed and having been the first to skipper a catamaran around the globe--and that through the stormy Straight of Magellan. Nevertheless, Tevake’s feat was evidence of a skill far beyond my own experience.”

Ironically, Western science is playing a key role in undermining our doubts about native wayfinding. Computer simulations of nature’s processes are the midwives of chaos theory, and computer simulations of Pacific winds and currents are making it hard to write off the entire settlement of the Pacific to accidental drifters because the winds and currents make the journey from Asia toward the Americas almost entirely “uphill.” Of course, the odd party of fishermen could accidentally drift thousands of miles to a new island if it had enough drinking water on board, but Polynesian fishing canoes don’t carry women, seeds, plant slips, domestic animals, or agricultural and hunting tools for sustaining human life on previously uninhabited islands. In addition, recent archeological evidence seems to support native oral accounts of round-trip journeys across thousands of miles of open ocean, and investigations by people like Lewis are finding native methods accurate and effective. Summarizing his investigations, Lewis says: “What my friends Tevake, ...[and other wayfinders] demonstrated beyond argument was that the ancient methods of navigation were also fully adequate for deliberate two-way voyages across these enormous empty sea lanes that we know the Pacific Islanders crossed a millenium ago.” Referring to the debate over wayfinding, Lewis confesses, “There is no longer any debate in my mind.”

Unfortunately, the handful of remaining wayfinders live so far west of Hawaii that their methods aren’t exactly the same as those used in Polynesia. So nothing they do translates into proof of how Hawaii was discovered. Yet the search for Hawaii’s discoverers is what’s propelled the revival of interest in wayfinding. This interest gave birth to the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Hawaii in 1973 to build a performance-accurate replica of a traditional, double-hulled canoe. This 60-foot vessel, appropriately named Hokulea , would use only traditional, non-instrument methods to re-trace the voyages celebrated in ancient chants. Hokulea successfully sailed the 2,500 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976 as the State of Hawaii’s contribution to the U.S.A.‘s bicentennial celebration and has had many successes since, but there was a sad irony at its bicentennial journey’s core: a fully initiated navigator had to be brought in from the western Pacific to lead the effort because wayfinding had long since died out in Hawaii. This man, Mau Piailug, kept the accustomed vigil--sleeping only in catnaps--during the entire 40-day voyage without sight of land. While never napping more than half an hour at a time, his estimates of Hokulea ‘s position were never off by more than 40 miles.

For centuries almost nobody knew about people like Mau Piailug. But in 1969 a wayfinder named Hipour acted on an urge to re-navigate with indigenous methods the long path of his ancestors between the islands of Puluwat and Saipan. His success--just as the West was being startled by the technology of its own ancestors through research at places like Stonehenge--generated waves that washed up on Hawaii’s shores. The wayfinding renaissance had begun. What we’ve learned since Hipour’s catalytic voyage may never tell us how Hawaii was discovered, but it’s introduced us to a radical technology and reminded us that something radical--the word comes from the Latin radix , meaning root--shocks us out of the stupor of our cultural conditioning and jolts us back to our roots. The “electric” contact with our origins explodes in original thinking, and with this kind of thinking we evolve.

The radical technology of wayfinding shocks us with its independence of our technology. But what really threatens our view of the universe is the complex array of totally unrelated inputs--just about everything from stars to pig snorts to testicles--that the wayfinder weaves into a picture of his position. Most of these inputs are from phenomena that don’t lend themselves to precise measurement and, because they’re of different orders, don’t allow like-to-like comparison. Yet, measurement of comparable things is essential to classical science.

Fortunately, chaos theory is revealing that a lot of what we’d always seen as complex is complex only in the context of the unnatural Euclidean geometry that’s dominated Western thinking for nearly 2500 years. Many phenomena we’d always seen as unrelated are unrelated only when viewed through the classical-science filter. Without that filter we’re perceiving a unity we were blind to for centuries. For example, we’re seeing how the “fractal” pattern in the bronchial branching of our lungs is mirrored in the movements of a fast-flowing river and in the growth of certain vegetable forms. Different natural systems behave identically, but we never saw this until recently because we were focusing more on our classical-science yardsticks and categories than we were on nature.

Wayfinders are ignorant of our yardsticks and categories. They wear no Euclidean filters on their perceptions and they understand that “the sea is full of signs.” Sensitive to these signs, the Hawaiians developed 160 words for different kinds of wind and 138 words for different kinds of rain.

Unfortunately, this still doesn’t tell us how the wayfinder integrates his inputs because nobody but the wayfinder knows. However, there’s hope of our knowing if we remember that the stars are no more distant from the wayfinder than his testicles. This is because he views the heavenly bodies, not just as celestial particles, but also as “waves:” he sees the sun, moon and stars describing the cycles of his life. Not surprisingly, the Hawaiian word for sun is also the word for a day. The word for lunar month also describes what the uterus does: protect, care, nourish. Of course, the heavenly bodies describe seasonal patterns for all of us, but a people whose survival depends on gardening, fishing and navigating in harmony with these patterns is profoundly aware of them. To these people the movements of celestial bodies are a matrix of cycles linking life-on-Earth with the heavens. So the sky is the womb of our seasons and, thus, of our lives. Since this sky isn’t “up there” or “out there,” this universe isn’t the remote universe of classical science which has no place or purpose for people. Rather, it’s an alive, whole universe with no “inputs” to “integrate” because it has no separations to be joined. This may be why Mau Piailug, when asked by the National Geographic how he navigates, responded: “I just use my head.”

Missing from--and leaving a gaping hole in--this very superficial overview of Oceania’s radical technology are the are the prayers, chants, disciplines, rituals, dreams, signs and visions which are part of the technology because the wayfinder is not just a technician, but a shaman. Most Westerners ignore or dismiss the shamanic elements, so the “other side” of Oceania’s radical technology is a story that has yet to be written. The wayfinder’s voyage across the ocean is not just a quest for more coconuts, but the outer expression of an inner journey. He journeys because, like Hipour, he feels called.

If there are facets of coloniality that we need to address, they are the processes of (1) creating rigid taxonomies and categories for classifying the world⁹, and (2) creating hierarchies of power and value for the ways those things are classified. These two moves are embedded in the in-group/out-group exclusionary dynamics that coloniality needs to function, from the way that we privilege ‘humans’ over ‘non-humans’, ‘centers’ over ‘margins’, and the ‘visible’ over the ‘invisible’. This isn't just philosophical or for the sake of pontification. These presuppositions of knowledge, being, and meaning privilege Eurocentric assertions that see "other human beings’ ways of life [as] wrong and harming nature, [since] nature needs no human beings."¹⁰ If we are to move out of ecological calamity, ‘The Last Shall be First’ must be our operating system. By centering the margins (in the ontological and epistemological sense), we can actually end suffering, rather than outsourcing it. This has to take shape in such a way that engenders room for a polyculture of meaning, diametrically opposed to the hegemonic "monoculture of meaning"¹¹, beyond the ability to label any human based on what they "lack" as an "Other"¹².

This move to truly embody decoloniality has to critique modernity, capitalism, and coloniality. This is important to understand as “modernity organizes the world ontologically in terms of atomic, homogeneous, separable categories. Contemporary women of color and third-world women's critique of feminist universalism centers the claim that the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender exceeds the categories of modernity. If woman and black are terms for homogeneous, atomic, separable categories, then their intersection shows us the absence of black women rather than their presence. So, to see non-white women is to exceed "categorial" logic. [...] the modern, colonial, gender system [is] a lens through which to theorize further the oppressive logic of colonial modernity, its use of hierarchical dichotomies and categorial logic. [...] categorial, dichotomous, hierarchical logic [is] central to modern, colonial, capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality.”¹³ We see that even in ostensibly postcolonial societies, "indigenous people who had already suffered from decades of colonial conservation policies, little changed with decolonization."¹⁴ This shows the depth at which we have to go to adequately respond to the social and ecological issues that are currently coming to a head.

This commitment isn't (principally) a moral or ethical one. One of the main reasons that we have to move towards a holistic decoloniality is because of the inability of coloniality to address the issues we're facing. "Indigenous leaders say [30x30, a worldwide conservation program] ignores generations of effective indigenous land management. [...] there was limited scientific attention paid to Indigenous stewardship."¹⁵ Unless we are willing to be radical, to grasp the roots of all the oppressive structures that we're facing, we will reproduce the things we are (ostensibly) trying to abolish in our (potentially unintentional) inability to critique coloniality onto-epistemically while proposing responses rooted in other ways of being. In the effort to try and correct the excesses of Eurocentricity, we see that Eurocentric modes of being like "nation-states [...] struggling to catch up with indigenous and other non-capitalist cultures’ understanding of the interdependence of life."¹⁶ This is not to exalt Indigenous, Black and 3rd/4th world onto-epistemes, to reify them beyond critique. It is to say that the Eurocentric onto-epistemic inability to see those modes as valid dampers the emancipatory potential extant in the world preventing the ability to reach the purported values of "progress" and "development". Eurocentric ideas have to play catch-up, and by their colonial and capitalist nature are unable to.

We have to problematize, to see as an issue, many of the foundational concepts might deploy as mired in Eurocentrism and coloniality. We can do this by (1) decolonizing what it means to be human by creating the space for Black, Indigenous and 3rd/4th worlders to self-determine and (2) "[take] non-humans seriously as persons[/beings] with agency [which] allows us to de-center humans, to notice how limited our field of sight becomes when fixated by the idea of the Anthropocene. Far from remaining a matter of theoretical discussion, non-humans [... ] influenc[e] social, political and legal realities."¹⁷ We have to bridge these two worlds: acknowledging the ways that the ideas of animality were defined along the bodies of Black people, how that relates to conceptions of humanity, and the care that we should have in highlighting the agency of non-human beings (both in the actual sense, and those who get denied humanity). This has to be done on the terms of those beings, as best as we can manage. If we are able to acknowledge that there are issues in modernity with how we taxonomize humans & how that relates to non-humans, for the sake of the biosphere, and we center those marginal and invisible beings, we can get a lot done.

I really want to impress the fact that not taking the trifecta of Eurocentrism¹⁸ seriously is resigning ourselves to doom. If we continue to build the cyberpunk future that we've been worried about for decades, the future of "urban decay, corporate power and globalization. The rise of zero tolerance policing, anxieties around health care and the psychological toll of the Cold ‘Forever war’ and the possibility of nuclear annihilation,"¹⁹ we resign ourselves, even in our imaginaries, to further our immiseration. We can use the 30 x 30 framework for conservation as a great example, where 200 countries were willing to accept it²⁰. This conservation framework reinforces the dichotomy between human/non-human²¹, assuming that top-down, bureaucratic processes of "management" are the answer to the problems that those very ideas created. The ironic thing is, even though this move would be woefully inadequate in addressing the issue of biodiversity loss or climate change²², we very likely won't even get to see it achieve protection of "30% of the world's land and water by 2030."²³ There's no meaningful accountability structure within the Eurocentric hegemony to do this. There is no room for living freely and honestly under these conditions.

"To see the coloniality is to see the powerful reduction of human beings to animals, to inferiors by nature, in a [piece-meal] understanding of reality that dichotomizes the human from nature, the human from the non-human, and thus imposes an ontology and a cosmology that, in its power and constitution, disallows all humanity, all possibility of understanding, all possibility of human communication, to dehumanized beings."²⁴ This is the double-edged sword of creating hierarchies and taxonomies around valid ways of being, knowing, and meaning. By operating along these lines, we end up in a situation where there is no meaningful way for anyone to truly reach the kinds of fulfillment that modernity is supposed to provide. Now, this is not to say that I'm personally going to cry very hard about colonizers dehumanizing themselves by dehumanizing me, but I think it's worthwhile to mention; we all benefit by tearing down Eurocentrism and building a new, multifaceted perspective that allows for mutualism between different ways of thinking about the world and our relations with/in it.

By creating these rigid categories of difference, there is an assumption of innateness that tends to become a part of it. If we are looking to dismantle coloniality, we have to situate ourselves in such a way that those seemingly subtle distinctions between differences in general²⁵ and the specific conception of colonial difference become visible. This allows us to see that "the epistemological fractures between the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism is distinguished from the critique of Eurocentrism anchored in the colonial difference."²⁶ Critiques of Eurocentrism that don't apprehend the imbrication of coloniality, capital, and modernity are left unaware at the meaningful distinctions that can be made between critique left incomplete and critique that gives us a way to move forward and build new relationalities.

I want to point back towards the phrase "The Last Shall Be First", which comes from Fanon (and the Bible). I understand this as resonant with the adage of centering the marginalized. If we truly believe that harmony and unity in life are worthwhile to work towards, the practical move to make is to, in every moment, work towards empowering those removed from power. By foregrounding those most negatively impacted by Eurocentrism through an understanding of intersectionality in material and onto-epistemological senses while spotlighting the "'decolonizers of the imaginary’, [which can be understood as] future generations, past generations, non-humans, and spiritual beings and concepts"²⁷, we can point ourselves towards more egalitarian and self-determining outcomes. We can compose and integrate efforts together, where cultural workers can do solarpunk art and organizers & community/affinity groups can build solarpunk sociality and architects can do solarpunk guerrilla urbanism and more, where collaboration becomes a space that starts to break down the borders between different ways of relating to the world. By problematizing the human "we", by understanding that while, ideally, abstractly we are including everyone, in practice, there are critical things missed that lead to the issues we purportedly want to face. We have to point towards a world where many fit.

As far as my specific commitments on the matter, I'm what I call an egoist. I've appropriated this term to mean that I find myself to be important (though not supremely so), to assert my onto-epistemology as valid, even though Eurocentric society was built at my (people’s) expense²⁸. I have hope, which I understand as the grounded counterpart to "faith" or "optimism", that things can change, that even if the world has to be broken down, that it can be, and a new, decolonial one can be built. In this space, I hope that every being is acknowledged on its own terms, to have the capacity for its "ego" to be fulfilled, roughly along the lines of the golden and platinum rules, depending on what makes sense given the situation²⁹. Solarpunk is very egoistic/anarchistic in my conception. Through horizontal power structures, we can minimize immiseration and foreground approaches to life that move our social activity towards the biosphere.

We can start working towards this, right now. Like, on some "you can go do the work after this" kind of thing. While we don't necessarily have a linear path forward, we can listen to ourselves and our desires, and experiment with doing things to fulfill them in the present, seeing them as springboards for further movement into the kind of spaces that we want to go. On a basic level, we can think about the ways that we are restricted by our needs due to alienation from self-determination, and devise plans to get those things, from food autonomy, to housing security, to social and cultural spaces. With this, I want us to be rooted in place--no White Flight ass culty commune shit. Our work should ground in locality and communality. If every being deserves the kind of world that solarpunk futures suggest, it makes no sense to leave if we have capacity³⁰ to stay. In a more egoist turn, I think places where we can practice what James Scott calls anarchist calisthenics³¹ are worthwhile endeavors; authority, as in authoritarian rule, is never legitimate. Whenever we can and have the desire to, we should rage against it. Hosting do it yourself (DIY) events are a good example of this. DIY events are usually music shows, but they can be parties or anything else, where you do it without "permission" from the state or authorities. They can happen "in a park, on a beach, deep in the forest, in a barn, under a bridge, in a parking lot, next to a pool, or at the top of a mountain. The event could be on wheels: in an RV, on the back of a truck, in a van. You could build a secret tree house. You could borrow a boat. You could find an abandoned or empty building and re-purpose it. If there’s no electricity and you need it for a PA, find a generator. If you don’t need electricity, use candles for lighting. If you would like to lessen the chance of police interference, acquire several buildings and move people from building to building during breaks. You could even take over a street."³²

If we're willing to commandeer space, the elusive element in much theorizing on change³³, we can start changing the paradigms. Rather than "fall[ing] back on [...] creat[ing] protected areas"³⁴ for the sake of reaching "biodiversity goals" and "ecological harmony", we can focus on land back, we can pull from knowledges in appropriate technology, traditional ecological knowledge, and the best that western science has to offer for being good partners with other beings in our communities. To horizontalize relationships between humans, breaking down barriers of political and socioeconomic varieties, we can put the last first and act as accomplices, supporting their needs and fighting alongside them. Any critiques that we have of the system should, within our capacities, be externalized, the (dialectical and logical³⁵) contradictions laid bare in the material world. If there is a public building that isn't being used for the public, we can commandeer it and turn it into a commons³⁶. Around these moves we can build or tie in networks of support and take seriously the militancy, strategy, and tactics required to defend that space. Or, we can be more fluid, moving from place to place, an occupation traveling band that swarms spaces, creates more solarpunk and communistic relations within, shares those tools and collaborates with folks more rooted in that space, and floats out as to remain flexible. Or, a ton of other possibilities, a ton of other ways to engage space. There are many ways to do it.

This is meant to be a conversation starter. I have a lot of love for solarpunk--you can see that from my writings. It is a really useful meta-frame for the narrative component of systems change. I also acknowledge the susceptibility that it has towards eco-modernism, crypto-scheming, and reactionary yearning to return to the "good old days", whether it's a time "before agriculture" or a time before industrialization". I hope that, through the works of 3rd and 4th worlders, and more material ties to prefigurative and insurgent practices vis a vis systems change, solarpunk can shake off the chains of Eurocentrism, towards a pluralistic decoloniality and anti/non-capitalism.

Notes

Eurocentricity/Eurocentrism is the cultural and philosophical constellation of worldviews that sees the ideas birthed from Europe and wedded to capitalism and coloniality as the only valid, worthwhile, and legible modes of knowledge, being/existence (especially as it relates to “humanity”/humanism), and meaning. Things like linear progressions of time, a fetish for scientific thought, and atomistic conceptions of the individual permeate Eurocentric thought.

XXIIVV — permacomputing

Beyond Extinction. Transition to post-capitalism is inevitable | by Nafeez Ahmed

Anthem of the Sun — Real Life

Appropriate technology is essentially what it sounds like; it looks at what technology would be appropriate, meaning that it would minimize ecological harm, to achieve specific needs/goals.

The advent of nation-statism, colonial empires, and industrial capital make up modernity. It is the “never-ending” historical period in which we find ourselves.

Capitalism is distinct, in all of its configurations, for the fact that it combines: (1)private, dictatorial authority over property, most notably of the means of production, (2) wage labor relations where those who don’t have productive private property need to work using someone else’s to survive, and (3) a focus on continual growth, which is seen as an unquestionable good.

Coloniality is the power structural relationships and ways in which society was chopped up and categorized, that, while originating during the eras of European Colonialism, still persist to this day.

Toward a Decolonial Feminism - Maria Lugones

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

Decolonizers of the imaginary

Wynter Sylvia 1492 A New World View

Toward a Decolonial Feminism

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

Decolonizers of the imaginary

Decolonizers of the imaginary

Capitalism, coloniality, modernity

SOLARPUNK: Life in the future - Beyond the rusted chrome

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

This is meant in an expansive sense, where colonized subjects and what is commonly referred to as nature is included

Eurocentric assumptions on what it means to "conserve" certain lands go against the very things that are done to preserve biodiversity. There is not a mechanism by which we can meaningfully protect lands from "on high", away from an intimate understanding rooted in place.

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

Toward a Decolonial Feminism

I don't find issue with the concept of "difference". I am not my phone, or my mom, or my favorite animal. At the same time, we have to be able to separate the idea of difference from the idea of colonial difference, and understand the ways that material and social processes shape the ways that difference in general is constructed. Ossified understandings of difference, like "I am a man and men do X" are antithetical to liberatory change.

Toward a Decolonial Feminism

Decolonizers of the imaginary. Not that there's overlap here between acknowledging 3rd & 4th world folks ways of being and knowing and a flattening of the "nature-culture" dichotomy that is generally espoused in 'colonized imaginaries'

This system tells me to assimilate or to stop existing. I choose neither, and go towards full spectrum resistance and abolition.

The golden rule is treat people how you want to be treated. The platinum rule is treat people how they want to be treated. I think there's an innumerable number of options in this range, depending on how well we can understand what other beings need. By not pedestalizing any one being over the other while understanding the deep history and present, we can move towards that. I want to make it abundantly clear that we cannot just "jump" towards that moment, as things like reparations and land back need to happen. It's a yes and situation. We should understand that every being deserves what it wants as long as it doesn't systematically/power structurally prevent someone from doing the same. And to this end, there are certain, non-privileged/marginalized/invisibled beings that will have needs that reflect a different reality visavis self-determination.

I am not saying to stay in dangerous, toxic, harmful situations. I'm saying that changing the places you're already in has more radical potential, if you're specifically looking for that, than getting a commune established out of arms reach from society.

Anarchist Calisthenics, by James C. Scott

A DIY Guide to Creating Spaces

Anecdotally, it seems easier to imagine vastly different economic, political, and social systems, but it is harder to imagine different technologies, and even harder to imagine different ways of interacting with spatial-temporal dynamics. Much of politics is actually about space and how it is occupied, and we should lean into anarchic, decolonial takes on "geography", "urban planning", and "architecture" among other fields so we can really take seriously how we are addressing all the things we need to.

How the world’s favorite conservation model was built on colonial violence

Contradiction (logical): when a subject, object, or phenomena is said to have features or properties that can’t exist at the same time and be factual. For example, All apples are fruits. If someone were to say that some apples are not fruits, that is a logical contradiction, because there is no way to substantiate that claim through information, reasoning, or data. Logic is all about “internal” consistency, where the “internal” refers to the relation between the claims being made and the things being compared. Within the system of interest, in this case the “system” of fruit classifications, of which an apple is an element, the claims and conclusions should be supported by the characteristics of that system. Contradiction (dialectical): In dialectics (or a dialectical process), contradictions can take the shape of logical contradictions, (All X are Y → Some X are not Y | No X is Y → Some X are Y) but they only need to take the shape of tensions between elements in a system more broadly. It’s all about the relationship between elements.