The Tyranny of Technology

The curse of modernity

James Doone delivers a fierce indictment of the algorithmic age and calls for a medieval rebirth.

Every businessman wants to make things as cheaply as possible and sell them at the highest price to maximise profits. This is the essence of entrepreneurship and capitalism: the daemonic ideology of Mammon. The impetus to write this treatise came from reading Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1975), or in the glorious Russian language: письмо советским лидерам.

Technology, it is true, has given mankind many of the wonders that we in our age possess. Faustian European man has invented nearly everything we use in the modern world: from aeroplanes, to cars, to TVs, to computers, to calculators, to radio, to cinema, etc. Modern medicine and hard sciences (physics, chemistry and biology) are the fruits of Faustian seeking, of questing into the unknown, Western man’s crusade into the Immaterium, chaining the forces of chaos, bringing order to the Imperium. Modernity has given us the combustion engine, cars to traverse nations, and planes to traverse continents. Wonders of technology have given us phone calls and photography, so many things beyond memory or knowledge, and yet, this once fantastic endeavour has now brought man to the edge of a cavern, the rim of an open pit, a brim of a chasm on which mankind stands, tipping over the point about to fall in if not falling into the blackness already. We are now slaves to the ALL-POWERFUL ALGORITHM. Humans are but TIKTOK zombies, feasting like rabid wolves on the carcass of slop.

Technology has gone too far. The early internet, when someone could send an email to someone or send a fax or ring using a telephone, allowing people living far apart to communicate, was certainly a great boon and a wonderful piece of technology that improved the human condition. The internet used to be a wild place, where people made websites and articles as numerous as the sands of the desert or smarties in a tube, whereas now the internet is a stale, corporate, barren wasteland of corporatocracy. TikTok or Snapchat has not in any shape or form improved the station of humanity; it has led to the most decadent and impious deviancy that even the Romans would consider sheer barbarism. Look at Twitter, a cesspool of screeching banshees and larping Bolsheviks and all sorts of visceral tribalism. YouTube has a good use; it allows one to watch videos on how to play cards, or how to build a house, or how to learn Greek, but YouTube Shorts, whereby someone gets conned by AI slop or rage-bait nonsense from 2016, is utter mind rot. All modern technology, apart from YouTube minus slop, should be outlawed.

Technology is leading to mass unemployment: once a farm needed many workers to swing the scythes and gather up the wheat into the barns and pickers to pluck the olives from the trees and grapes from the vines for wine, or to tend the livestock to be made eventually into broths and hearty meat dishes of Germanic Europe. Now a farm needs only one man to drive the combine-harvester, or one man to drive a tractor, so all those workers that once worked on the farm now must find new work. Once the workers laboured in the factories, such as the great car plants of Ford in Chicago or the gun factories of Krupp in Germany or the watch factories of Raketa or the plane factories of BMW in Bavaria, employing thousands of men. Now everything is done by machines or run by computers. I think it was Evolas-Sunglasses who said that ‘European economies are not built on finance, but on stone and iron’.

The state needs to de-technologize; the combine-harvesters must be turned off and the masses given spades and scythes and sent out into the fields to harvest the grains—to the collective farms, comrades! The factories must by law melt down their machines and open their gates to the hordes of workers waiting outside to assemble the cars once more, and so on and so on. All sectors and domains of work in the nations need to abandon their tech and restore the working man to his station, the smith to his anvil, the carpenter to his workbench, the artisan to his workshop etc.

Instead of diesel-guzzling ships, let the old wooden ships of the line, such as found in Nelson’s navy, be restored, and instead of a small team of men, let the ships have a large crew of sailors to man the sails and oars. Let the horses and carts bring the milk and groceries instead of cars; let the trains move people. Let localism be the natural state of man, not digital nomadism be the order of the day. Feudalism had many perks: a religious order with a natural and organic hierarchy based on patronage and mutual benefit, the knight defending the peasant and the peasant giving his tithe to the knight—all under the suzerainty of the Church. Feudalism was based. Monarchies throughout Europe should be restored. A man needs only his family, his garden, his library, his work, his friends to be satisfied. More than this is greed and gluttony. We live in an age of consumption, an age of decadence and gourmandism; let the monastic simplicity and restriction be made nationwide. Our leaders need to learn the lessons of Lycurgus of Sparta. I take great pride in being nearly illiterate in matters of technology, I still write letters with my typewriter—and I am not a boomer.

Aaron Bastani, the co-founder of Novara Media, wrote a book named Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which argues that automation, green politics and socialism can introduce a post-scarcity world; this is ridiculous. Our cosmos is finite; the minerals, the metals, the soil, everything is scarce; nothing is infinite, so any plan, idea or ideology that thinks it can end this is dreaming utopian nonsense. The socialists have a wrong anthropology; man was not made by the hand of God to lounge around the salon all day eating cakes and speaking of poetry; he was made to till and tend the garden eastward in Eden; man was made to work six days and rest on the Sabbath. Work is good for the soul of sinful man. “Idle hands do the devil’s work,” said Basil Fawlty. This is one reason why prisoners should be put to work down the mines, the other being profit and usefulness to the polis. The clock must be turned back; return to the Middle Ages we must. If mankind has all its needs met, what will it do with its time? Retirement causes people to waste away and die from the ill effects of having no purpose, no reason to get out of bed in the morning. Man was not made to wake and think, I’ve nothing to do today. Lack of work is bad for psychological health. Retirement is stagnation; men who stagnate will dissolve into the ether.

Bring back the world of stone, wood and earth, bring back the medieval world, when we were happy, and life was normal. DEUS VULT. Give us back the world of magic and of the sorcerer Merlin!