Of Lightning & Serpent: An Anti-Tech Sermon – by Yours For Wild Nature

Preface

To some this will read like the ranting of a lunatic, or else, more likely, as a middling author’s attempt at the imitation of such. Nonetheless, it is sincere and it is a paper some people will have to understand.

In the writing of it, I have had to rely on memory or on old notes; there is no list of works cited, but the information is sound. I encourage curious readers to do their own research.

Introduction

1. We speak of the need for a revolutionary myth. A frame of legend and symbol, archetype and ritual to bind us to and sanctify the brutality of what must be done. And what is it that must be done? The complete and irrevocable destruction of the technological system in every part of the world. What task could be more daunting? What cause could be more lost? But the gods of the earth favor the fighters in such contests. The small and the lost and the desperate and the hopelessly outmatched. The myth was unrolled for us to inhabit. We were foretold. What must be done will be done and we will do it and though the field will be well-blooded we will win in the end.
2. Not so long ago, as time is measured on this world, our species lived and thrived as we were meant to, in conditions to which we had adapted, into which we had evolved. We went upon the earth in small, autonomous bands and the wilderness was our home and though life indeed was hard, and we survived only by the sweat of our brow, we were contented. The vast majority of human history was lived in this way. But then something happened. Slowly but inexorably our kind fell under the shadow of a cruel and blind and idiot god. The Gnostics speak of the Demiurge, called also Yaldabaoth; a wicked, deformed, sightless deity that in its perverse and unnatural hunger for power claimed dominion of the world. A god, perhaps, made manifest in wheat – that great golden slavemaster who caged us first in those agricultural prisons called farms, then in choking, diseased cities and ultimately in a world-system so vast and perfect in its utility that to dream of escape is more often to dream of suicide. A god of metallurgy, smoke and poison. Something less like a god at all and indeed sharing more in common with a virus, an airline catastrophe, a serpent. We will call this Thing the Technium. The Dark One. The Black Snake. Surely it is not a god of the earth, but a crawling thing and though its victories have been great and many and its reign has been long, like any tyrant or similar parasite it can be killed. It must be killed.

We are not the first to say this. It has been said before. It will be said again. And on the day the last ugly buzzing light goes out and the long-captive moths are free to make once more for the moon we will stand in the darkened world and we will marvel that we ever doubted our own inevitability.

Storm and Serpent

3. The great serpent Apep chases the sun across the black and brumous sky of the underworld. All black scales and hunger, a devourer of light. Is it not written? Look now upon the suffering world of the living. Across the desert and the fields and over hills and all through the jigsawed wild and under lake and sea the slithering, oozing pipelines carry black poison and venomous gas to sacrificial fire. The smoke of its burning reaches forth to choke the sun. Is this not that old serpent? In other deserts, in other fields, solar panels glisten like so many black, iridescent scales. Feeding on the sun. Leeching into the earth their venom. Lead. Cadmium. Arsenic. Sulfuric acid. Hydrochloric acid. Hexafluoroethane. Polyvinyl fluoride. Is this not that same asp? And who shall do battle with it? Who shall prevail? Are we not the sons and daughters of Horus? Are we not the beloved and guarded wards of the storm that comes to strike the snake to boiled ruin where it slithers in the mud toward our young?
4. The motif of the storm god fighting the serpent is found in many religions, in cultures separated by continents, by oceans, by time.
5. Thor of the Aesir, god of thunder, must on the appointed day contend with Jorgmundir, the world-serpent. In elder days, the great snake was cast into the sea and there it waits, circling the earth with its tail in its mouth. Thor will die in his struggle, venomed by the serpent’s fang, but he will be avenged. The snake will die. Is that day so distant? Look now. See our skies thrash and rage at their poisoning, their mutilation. See them hurl storm and flood like hammer-blows upon the palsied world as the great ships unspool their enormous, serpentious cables from their sterns to rest upon the sea floor. As of 2024, 458 such cables lay upon the benthic bed. 900,000 miles of internet cable. Enough to wrap around the planet thirty-six times.
6. Yahweh, too, that erstwhile father of Christ, began his career as one among many in the Canaanite pantheon. Alongside Dagon, El, Asherah, and others, Yahweh served as the god of weather and war. Set against him was the gargantuan serpent Leviathan, whom our young and virile supergod wrestled and threw into the deepest chasms of the sea.
7. Zeus and python. Thunderbird and Horned Snake. Lightning strikes the flood.As I write this the waters are rising and in the water, there is the serpent. We must seek higher ground from which to hurl our bolts. Head to the mountains. Some defensible place.
8. As I write this the waters are rising and in the water, there is the serpent. We must seek higher ground from which to hurl our bolts. Head to the mountains. Some defensible place.
9. Are we the ones to hurl the lightning, and not the gods we have named? Did Christ not say, “Did I not say, ‘ye are gods;?” John 10:34.
10. Therefore ready your lightning. The serpent is come.

The Machine Can Bleed

11. The world will not be saved by those who say “the world will not be saved”.
12. In the fist of every David who ever held a stone against armored Goliath, the gods of the earth lend their strength. To every Persius his polished shield. To every Fingolfin his rage. The beast at the heart of the labyrinth is ferocious and it is imbued with great power and it is rapacious and it is doomed. The Dark Lord strides forth from the walls of his iron fortress where in chthonic chambers slaves and acolytes toil and radioactive fuel rods seep death into the groundwater. To stand against him has ridden hard some hate-blind fanatic regarded perhaps by his own kind as a maniac, a heretic, a locust-eating imbecile. For who else but one such would have sold his only cloak for a rusted sword and come thus naked and alone to the gates of the tyrant? And though the king wields a hammer that strikes smoking pits into the earth, and though the champion will die, he will in that glorious moment wound the Lord of Artifice grieviously, so that evermore the tyrant shall go forth with a limp. And by the limp shall the world entire know that he is mortal. That the Machine can bleed. That it can be killed.
13. The meek shall indeed inherit the earth. But it is the vengeful who will win it for them.
14. Industrial technology has enabled the slavery, slaughter, and psychological and spiritual torment of the human race on such a scale that would confound the minds of even history’s most heinous sadists. It has made the earth an abattoir. It has placed the fate of billions in the hands of a few hedonistic madmen. It has subjected us to mass experimentation which has left us sick and blind and cancerous and sterile and docile as cattle, fattened on blinking lights and tinitic from the hiss of hydraulic pistons, the ceaseless bee-hive roar of engines.
15. Yellow-5, the dye they put into Doritos and candy corn and Mountain Dew, when injected into laboratory mice, causes their skin to turn transparent.
16. On December 23, 1921 Thomas Midgley Jr. discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline reduced engine-knocking in the new, crankless Cadillac Model 30. Leaded gasoline was patented and sold to the public. It was marketed as safe. Immediately workers in the processing plants producing leaded gasoline began to get sick with lead poisoning. Five of them died. By 1923 Midgley himself was suffering from the effects of lead and refused to go anywhere near his own product. Nonetheless, the Ethyl corporation continued to unleash it on the world. By the 1950s there was so much lead in the atmosphere that it had seeped into the bedrock, confusing initial efforts to determine the age of the planet. Lead causes hardening of the arteries, which conservative estimates say cause 256,000 deaths in the US alone. Globally, over 100 million deaths can be attributed to the advent of leaded gasoline. As of 2022, current estimates of death caused by lead exposure range from 500,000 to one million. In 2020, the UNICEF report warned that one in three children globally – over 800 million children – have dangerous levels of lead in their blood. Lead also causes learning disabilities and antisocial behavior. Data strongly suggests a direct correlation between lead exposure among children born from 1951-1980, when leaded gasoline was widely used, and the sudden surge in violent crime in the 1990s. Thomas Midgley Jr. also invented dichlorodifluoromethane, more commonly known as freon. This opened the door to the use of Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, in refrigeration and aerosols, resulting in the hole in the ozone layer, which led to an increase in skin cancer and cataracts. CFCs also contribute to global warming. Per kilogram, CFCs cause 10,000x more warming than CO₂. Historian John McNeil is quoted as saying, “Midgley has had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth’s history.” In 1941, Midgley had become so physicially deteriorated that he needed mechanical assistance for the smallest tasks. In order to get out of bed, he devised a complicated mechanism of levers, ropes and pulleys. On November 2, 1944 he became tangled in his own contraption and died of strangulation. To this day, leaded gasoline is still used in airplane engines.
17. We have reached a more dolorous age. The AI Age, which presages if not the wholesale extinction of our species then at the very least the transformation of it into something neutered, deformed, perverted into beasts of strange burden preserving only those components of our being utile to the survival and propagation of the Technium. At the same time the Transhumanist and Multiplanetary cults of the technophiles spew their lies, their blasphemies. They demand our submission, body and soul, to the Techno-Demiurge. These serpent-worshippers. These ersatz Ophites. They proclaim their millennarian prophecies of singularity and interstellar conquest, calling for us to lay ourselves and our planet and our souls and all life upon the altar to progress. What can this be but the Antichrist? The false Messiah comes to lead mankind astray? The beast whose name, like a computer, is only a string of numbers.
18. The beast, as we have said, is doomed. Like the factory. Like the computer. Like the gorgon. Like the giant and the pharaoh and the serpent. For we are foretold. We are favored by the free and wild living earth in whose name we fight. We the fighters. We who see the way of things, the truth evident in our own lives and in the archetypes that have walked the land and the dreams of those that came before us. We who have rightly identified the Great Malady, the Enemy of our kind – the Technium. We stand at the fore of a heroic and storied legion of legend and memory. It falls to us now to do the awful, sacred, wicked work that must be done so that when we die, even in their mighty company, we shall not be ashamed.
19. But we have tarried overlong. We must shed our cowardice, our trepidation, our attachment to the world as it is and we must begin the work in earnest. We could do far worse in this than to emulate the cultic origins of great faiths of the past. Let us gather and sequester ourselves – so far as is possible – from this civilization. The realm of the Technium. But do not misunderstand; This is not to be a masturbatory, indulgent exercise. We must do this not to live as we feel mankind “ought”, nor to “lead by example” on self-sustaining compounds. Like every action we take, our removal from mainstream society must be practical. Let us create such communities of radicals wherever and however possible, removed enough from the System that detection and surveillance is frustrated. Let each function in such a way that enables them to fund themselves and their ventures. These communities will need infrastructure. Internet. The ability to communicate and to travel quickly. Tools of defense. In these Farraday-caged communes let us set about the great work. Let us call it holy. Let us call it crusade. Let us call it Jihad. If we are hated and feared, so much the better. If, in our published writings (like this one), we seem deranged with quasi-religious fervor, if by our propaganda and the deeds we claim we are perceived to be some kind of extremist cult, some sect of frothing and ecstatic zealots, and if we thereby succeed in drawing to us only those who are likewise mad, likewise willing to dedicate themselves wholly to the anti-tech cause, to the war-cry of the earth, then we will not have erred.
20. In the struggle against the Technium there can be no quarter given. As a movement, anti-tech needs the kind of religious fervor that has toppled Empires and changed history. We need our myths and our legends to guide us. Our faith must be unwavering.
21. We will be free. We will find peace. We will have our revenge.

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