Running on Emptiness

Having read Zerzan’s other works in the past I knew largely what I was getting into going into this. Many of his essays are quite hit or miss, extreme brilliance or extremely dull.

I have a love in my heart for this classic era 1990’s form of anarcho-primitivist writing. I always come back to this kind of thing and I always find something worth admiriing, particularly how philosophically pure the stance actually ends up being for most of the authors. The post-left movement as a whole is teaming with value and worth sifting through.

Here we have some of the classic Zerzan anthropology works about the structures of civilization and how they relate to pre-historical cultures or ways of interacting within the world. Some of these are about what you would expect from reading any work by Zerzan. By this I mean that they do what he always does, take something that we generally hold as a foundational contstruct within the world, and reveal that it is simply socially/culturally constructed.

In this sense, Zerzan can be read as quite postmodern in his reading of anything/everything as socially constructed nonsense. For that reason, it is particularly funny that this text is so explicitly anti-postmodern across many of the essays. The theme of this book in particular is to address several new waves of postmodern technological philosophy as vapid trash.

One of the highlights of the book is his anti-extropian essay. This is a futurist technocapital movement of sorts that had all sorts of famous proponents in the 90’s. It is essentially techno-anarchy, and here we have Zerzan’s response to it, which is exactly what you can imagine it would be.