I thought the XReadiness survival document was awful and dangerous. But the idea that this blog is “dystopic” cli-fi is worse. The attack followed a short fiction item I wrote after seeing author Manda Scott, Rupert Read and Natalie Nahai talking about, I forget what, but Scott was saying she was tangentially involved in the creation of an AI Shamanic Eldering Tool.
The “AI Shamanic Eldering Tool” prompted me to write possibly the only piece of fiction I have ever written in all seriousness, but it was the only way I could put across my worry about a spirituality which is primarily in the realm of indigenous people, which has been misappropriated, sanitised and is now sold to anyone idiotic enough to part with their money to these grifters.
The Indigenous sacred clowns or Heyoka are powerful individuals who bring balance to a community. They risk serious assault and abuse to bring balance to a community; they ridicule the conceited.
When I started writing about how the climate/environmental movement was being infiltrated and used as a grifting vehicle by various dubious self-styled neo-shamans, an old friend and filmmaker messaged me on FB saying they thought I shouldn’t be questioning other people’s activism. That was shortly followed by her deleting it, and thats when I became aware of an online attack about “Dystopian Survivalism” and the psychological projection from the Accidental Gods podcaster about ‘small groups of plucky humans roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape’, something neither I, nor this blog, nor any of my writing has ever put forward as a concept, because as a wilderness practitioner, its an impossibility during ecological collapse.
40 years ago I chose to become as expert as was possible in wilderness survival because I love being in nature. I have spent more than 1/2 my life doing this. I am a veteran of the 1990s road protests, and I was arrested several times for trying to stop roads from being built.
We didn’t stop the road, but we forced the Tories to secretly shelve the road-building program, costing over 10,000 trees cut and burned. Leaderless, non-violent direct action. I have been grabbed by a mounted policeman and thrown under his horse. I am also the archivist for some of my former comrades’ injunction photos: Newbury Bypass Archive
No one ran courses on how to “digger dive”. New-Agers and druids of dubious backgrounds periodically turned up at our bender camp. David John Townsend transformed into Kreb Dragonrider and drifted off into the deep end. We watched him stitch his Druidic gown from old bed sheets in the communal bender before he started lording it around camp, spiritually bypassing his edicts about what the Goddess wanted until someone told him to fuck off.
“Spiritual activism” just couldn’t gain traction without social media, and it didn’t exist in 1995/6. But something that is for sure is that none of the people who call themselves neoshamen (they drop the neo) spend long periods of time deep in nature the way indigenous medicine people do. Connection to nature is visualised rather than real. Podcasters like Scott, who has made Core Shamanism “safe” (it was never unsafe), will tell you that learning survival skills is pointless because “no one is going to live in a mud hut on a Welsh hillside or go back to the Stone Age”. These ideas are cliché but central to her belief that you connect with nature by sitting under a tree and asking it questions.
This puts Rupert Read’s article, The State of Cli-Fi, and Scott’s quote into perspective. Before my criticism piss-take of the AI Shamanic Eldering Tool in the style of the Heyoka (I’m not so arrogant as to think I am), it was only on the Sacred Earth Activism interview with Scott that she talked about rejecting survival skills. However, since my fiction piece, she has kinda lost the plot and not taken her own advice: “We need to stop reacting to our triggers” As a former psychiatric nurse, I know how to do that; it’s called being thick-skinned.
Every online interaction and response I have received from Scott has been loaded with the expectation that I am trying to influence or change people. In a recent conversation I had with an Aboriginal friend, we talked about blocking on social media: “On social media, fragile people, who you disagree with, or are just plain wrong, just block you or attack you or both”. He’s right. “But in the bush you can’t do that; you can’t just stop talking to someone because community survival depends on compromise and live and let live.” Besides, if things get that bad, the Elders step in. I can’t imagine an AI Shamanic Elder: an AI which seems to want to please everyone, solving disputes.
I am no influencer, thought leader or shaman. I don’t expect to convert anyone to my way of thinking or counter climate denial or soothe climate anxiety
This blog isn’t about surviving the 6th mass extinction, but if we can, it would be amazing; the people who survive will be super-skilled, and the food they eat will be very different to what we eat now. Scott “explores a way out of the current mess, a “thrutopia”, to use the term coined by Rupert Read”. I have already written: Thrutopia: The Art of Saying We Don’t Know How We Might Survive Climate-Driven Collapse, So Instead of Asking Survivalists, Let’s Ask Artists & Writers.
I maintain anonymous authorship of this blog. I am not a believer in the cult of Me, something I have also written about when discussing the toxicity of Western spirituality. Anonymity of ideas is an 18th-century Enlightenment idea: “Most eighteenth-century texts appeared without the author’s proper name on the title page. This absence could signal a writer’s modesty or scurrility, or the absence could result from various forms of suppression that modern attribution studies have done much to reverse. However, anonymity and pseudonymity were also deliberate gestures prompting readers to distance authorship from biography or to differentiate fiction as a conceptual category from truth and lies. Authors including Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, and Frances Burney purposefully omitted their names to complicate textual ownership and copyright, manipulate market conditions, or pursue ethical questions. Famous authors like Samuel Johnson and Laurence Sterne made their anonymity public, collapsing the apparent need to sign a name to make a name. When the authorial name becomes a counter rather than the simple solution to a puzzle, even signing a proper name—“onymity”—is revealed as a strategic authorial subject position.” https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/43514/chapter/364251253
Most of what I post is either my opinion or open-source FACTUAL survival information, with my own insights and experience added.
“Dystopian Survivalism” is another fiction genre. Irrelevant to what I write about. I suggest Scott spend a very long time under her tree with her hallucinated guides and ask how long she needs to be in the wilderness before she grows up enough to understand the difference between fact and fantasy.
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