John Zerzan is an anarchist philosopher, and is broadly associated with the philosophies of anarcho-primitivism, green anarchism, anti-civilisation, post-left anarchy, neo-luddism, and in particular the critique of technology. 'It is at least conceivable that the breakdown of civilization will overcome the gloom of inertia and programming. And one could, abstractly, imagine possibilities. There are 16 billion arable acres of Earth (half the land surface is mountains and desert), and 8 billion of us. What if humans took up half and left the remaining half to other species?... Schemas or reforms tend to ignore domestication, the origin and driving force of (lethal) civilization. Its inner logic is control, ever widening and deepening levels of domination over all life. Civilization s substance is technology, which clearly threatens to overcome everything. To 'unlearn domestication' is a necessary luddite process. The Web, the Net of technology, is the constitutive, determining framework of terminal civilization. Only by its removal will we be able to grasp liberatory possibilities, outside of industrial-digital cyberia. If agriculture was the original sin of History, the Fall was our descent into Symbolic forms which created a psychological removal best expressed by the use of artillery. With the epoch of History proper, beginning with the Neolithic, internal abstractions are projected outwards onto a terra nullius, a void now dedicated to the manufacture of first commodities, the domestication of animals and conflict management, in terror of the silences of a world made ancient by representation and signs.'
