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The Unprogram
Goals and Principles of Freedom Club

UNCFC
17 November 2014

UNCFC
The Unprogram
Goals and Principles of Freedom Club
17 November 2014
Retrieved on 17 November 2014 from
http://uncfc.org/unprogram/

Published by UNCFC, an anti-industrial and ecological

student group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
theanarchistlibrary.org

Contents
Prelude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Aside: From the Journal of Richard Hamming .
Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Aside: Technology is a system. . . . . . . . . .
Mythology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Aside: An Urban Wildness? . . . . . . . . . . .
A Signpost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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trial factory with the same wild impulse as the caveman who
painted on stone walls. Unmaintained sidewalks being torn
apart by tree roots are indicative of the same wild spirit that
floods the Nile. One of the things that has yet to be investigated
by those with anti-technological views is the possibility of an
urban wildness. This is one of the questions Freedom Club is
excited to explore.

A Signpost
This is a signpost for all who have stopped believing in this
civilizations myths. It is the beginning of a heartfelt and honest conversation about where we are and where we can go from
here.
The heart of this project, Freedom Club, will be the FC Journal, a publication that will be issued twice a year and will accept submissions from anyone who wants to engage in uncivilized myth-making, to write essays about modernity and the
actions some are taking against it, and to share stories about
communities who are figuring out new ways to relate to themselves and the earth. The FC Journal is intended to be a printed
dialogue, a journey through the decline of industrial civilization and away from it.
Joining Freedom Club is a possibility for anyone who wants
to edit the journal or start a new project, but just as important are the people who contribute to the discussion informally.
This might be through words, such as submitting an essay to
the journal, or it might be through actions, such as putting on
an anti-technology puppet show. The important part is that we
who feel the wounds of industry connect with each other.
The path to take from there is unknown, but it will no doubt
be an adventure.

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They all say

Im a child of few words
This I dont deny
But actually
Whether I speak or not
With this society Ill still
Conflict
Xu Lizhi

Prelude
In the beginning humans lived as members of small communities that fought, played, and made love together. It wasnt
all comfortable, but it was fulfilling, and it was free. Then a
new method of controlling the earth was discovered, and some
humans formed a mythology that, like a disease, began eating
away at all the beauty and freedom in the world.
The humans began to think that somehow, with enough technology, they could escape the inescapable elements of human
existence, the fundamental aspects of a human life. And yet,
even now, on the bleeding edge of progress, fulfillment can
still be found where it always was: in the laughter around a
campfire, in a hard days work, or in the drawings of a child.
And progresswell, that has brought us the atomic bomb.
Nowadays, most people can sense that the old myths no
longer hold their power. Modern life is characterized by a quiet
uneasiness, a pervasive tip-of-the-tongue feeling, and right as
we have found a way to articulate it, we are interrupted by an
ad or a notification.
And left without space to tell new stories, we can do nothing
but surround the old ones in quotation marksan age of irony.
Its time to let go of all that.
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Hidden by our current irony is a deep, soul-wrenching despair. We have lost so much already. Undeniably, civilization
has left some scars that will never heal.
But with that despair we can still find hope. There are new
stories yet. A new life is pulsing underneath the slabs of city
concrete, and it is waiting to be freed by a poet with a pickaxe.

Aside: From the Journal of Richard Hamming

Richard Hamming was one of the many scientists who worked
on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. In his 1998
essay Mathematics on a Distant Planet, he describes an experience there indicative of the way scientists irresponsibly put the
entire complex biosphere on the lineand do it casually:
Shortly before the first field test (you realize that
no small scale experiment can be doneeither you
have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked
me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I
agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate.
When I asked what it was, he said, It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere. I decided I would check it myself! The
next day when he came for the answers I remarked
to him, The arithmetic was apparently correct but
I do not know about the formulas for the capture
cross sections for oxygen and nitrogenafter all,
there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels. He replied, like a physicist talking to
a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the
arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the
Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part? I was pacing up and down the corridor
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But humans cannot live stable lives within quotation marks.

The unfulfilling aspects of the city will kill a person without
any myths to sustain themand if sociological research is anything to go by, this is precisely what is happening. Outside of
the cynical cities there is a worldwide rise in fanaticism, fundamentalism, and fascism, movements consisting of people who,
despite progress, still have irrational needs that technological
environments simply do not satisfy, and that fundamentalism
does.
But there has to be a better answer to these questions.

Aside: An Urban Wildness?

Liking nature means nothing by itself. In fact, some people
try to replace every instance of God with nature, every instance of illegal with unnatural, inevitably ending up some
place that is downright repulsive. We must remember that the
Nazis professed to love nature, too.
The real key to moving forward with an anti-technological
critique is focusing not on nature, but on wildness. Wild environments are intrinsically different from technological environments, operating according to the interests of their constituent parts rather than despite them. Wildness inspires
mythologies based on relatedness, while technological environments reduce all things to cogs in a machine or nodes in a network.
The word nature alone often reinforces the idea that nature
is somehow separate from humans, a myth that belongs only
to civilization. But it is wild nature that is important. In wild
nature we can see most clearly how free life can be and how
free it once was. This is why traditionally anti-technological
stances have accompanied a rootedness in wilderness living.
But wildness can exist in more than just a forest. Those who
dare to explore the secret corners of the city have already experienced this. The graffiti artist decorates an abandoned indus11

to use nature as a resource. Animals, who to primitive people

spoke languages, are silent in the modern world.
Other myths have driven civilization forward as well. The
myth of whiteness and the construction of races was a huge
step forward in justifying slavery and colonialism, both of
which pushed technological efficiency to its historical limits. Later, capitalism and its evaluation of profit and utility
as supreme values catalyzed technological growth like nothing before it. All along the way, specific social divisions were
deemed necessary for the efficiency of the technological system, and new values and stories developed as justifications for
these divisions.

when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I

told him. His reply was, Never mind, Hamming,
no one will ever blame you.

Technology

But at least since the first nuclear bomb and certainly since
the Cold War, uneasiness with modern life has spread from
small groups to most of society. Generations who experienced
rapid technological change began to realize that the same
things were bringing them fulfillment, purpose, and adventure,
but the ways to kill and maim and destroy were rapidly growing in number. The revelation of the Doomsday Clock marked a
major shift in consciousness as people realized that all complex
life on Earth could easily be eradicated by the wrong move of
a stranger. And in contemporary times, climate change and extreme natural disasters have snapped people back into a reality
where nature matters and is to be respected.
The old myths, lacking their former power, left whole generations with deep, existential questions. Artistic, philosophical, literary, and religious movements sprung up all around the
world to cope with these new questions, but most of them, like
existentialism and absurdism, ended their investigation with
the question, calling it unanswerable, or simply answering the
question with despair. In response to this and to the wars that
tore the world apart in later years, writers like Kurt Vonnegut
and Thomas Pynchon revealed the macabre aspects of modernity with irony and cynicism.
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The center of modern life is technology, an all-consuming

system that organizes our social relationships, controls our
economy, and determines our mythologies. To some extent,
technology can be said to simply be material infrastructure
or products: power-lines, phones, plumbing. But that would
be like saying capitalism is only products on a shelf. Technology, like capitalism, has a very obvious hand in organizing the
world, and it is similarly allowed to exist only because people
buy into specific stories it tells. A computer is inseparable from
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the myth of human separateness from nature. Plumbing infrastructure is inseparable from the division of labor that enables
it or the technologies of management and law and order that
protect it.
This way of life subjects all things to indignities and gives
them no way out. There is no opt-out button: global warming
affects everyone, as does mass surveillance, automation, and
GMOs. And avoiding technological progress is always eventually impossible. A person could refuse to have a phone for a
while, but because phones made the technological system more
efficient, phone technologies spread throughout the globe and
even our social relationships became dependent on them.
These developments cannot be resisted because technology
demands that it is preserved for its own sake. Unlike primitive
techniques, modern technology assumes the position of mediator of reality. Instead of going to the forest for food and engaging in a tangible process of gathering it, modern humans
engage only in abstract processes: they go to work where they
have little choice in what they do, they go to stores to pick up
pre-made dinners, and they sit on the couch to stare at some
sort of screen that tells them what they should buy with their
extra moneyif they have any.

Aside: Technology is a system.

Because there are quite a few misunderstandings about technology, it helps to consistently remember that technology is a system:
it consists not only of the material, but of the social and ideological as well. When first learning about these ideas, that can be
hard to remember, especially when the word technology is used
in many different, sometimes contradictory ways. But a good way
to evaluate statements about technology and their absurdity or
helpfulness is to replace technology with capitalism.
Technology is a tool; it can be used for good or for ill.
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Technology has produced good things, so the problem

isnt capitalism itself, but certain kinds of capitalism.
Technology could have been different, so critiquing capitalism is too broad.
versus
Capitalism is a tool; it can be used for good or for ill.
Capitalism has produced good things, so the problem
isnt capitalism itself, but certain kinds of capitalism.
Capitalism could have been different, so critiquing capitalism is too broad.

Mythology
Obviously, there are plenty of reasons to reject the technological world. But one might wonder whyif technological society
has shown itself to humiliate and dominate living creatures
why have humans not decided to turn away from it already?
The answer lies in the myths that sustain technology.
Progress is an almost religious concept that drives all technological growth. This myth is intertwined with many others,
and it goes something like this: Once upon a time humans were
all brutes, living in poverty, violently attacking each other to
solve their differences, and constantly hungering for food. One
day, agricultural technology appeared and fixed all that, and
since then technology has become more and more advanced,
allowing humans to have more leisure time, longer lives, and
healthier lives.
Intrinsic to the idea of progress is the idea of human separateness from nature. In this myth, humans are above nature
because of superior intelligence, and they are therefore entitled
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