Pioneers, Prophets, and Patriots
An unlikely coalition's quest to save America from techno-cultural doom
Last June I returned to The Wagon Box Inn, this time to attend the Doomer Optimism Campout. The event gathered an eclectic mix of farmers, writers, political activists, and everyday citizens from across the nation to "examine how the Machine shapes families, the environment, personal autonomy, and class politics while highlighting inspiring acts of creative resistance." The Machine—symbolic of the powerful, often hidden, forces directing our culture—was examined as a cause of many problems that have made it difficult for American families to lead healthy, meaningful lives today. These problems include large-scale environment degradation, the near-unsustainability of small farms in the shadow of corporate agriculture, the domination of human life by high technology, the threat of transhumanism, the control of local politics by nefarious NGOs, the ideological corruption of childhood and higher education, and the alienation of modern man from his community, nature, and God.
The event exemplified a new vision of what a political conference in America could be, according to Paul McNeil, owner of the Wagon Box. Instead of sitting in a stodgy Washington DC hotel ballroom all weekend, attendees had a much richer and more meaningful experience. Over three days, McNeil's rustic Wyoming inn was transformed into a small community, housing about one hundred attendees and their families in the property's tepees, glamping tents, old RVs, communal lodge, and cabins, with several even deciding to pitch their own tents. Throughout the event, high quality policy discussion mixed seamlessly with shared meals, live music, and outdoor activities on the property, including cold plunges, hikes, fishing expeditions, and firearm lessons. Attendees and speakers built deep connections and friendships and made plans to support each other's personal, political, and artistic projects.
The Campout's success reinvigorated my faith in the Wagon Box project, which I learned about on my first trip to the property last year for an event co-hosted by Paul McNeil and Justin Murphy, founder of Other Life1, an internet-based group of independent scholars and writers that I joined several years ago. Many of America's cultural problems today are neglected or suppressed in mainstream academic and political discourse. Independent scholars and grassroots activists capable of unraveling and solving them are scattered across the internet, operating as "lone wolves" or within loosely connected groups. The Wagon Box aims to gather these people, immerse them in nature (away from the digital realm), and help build strong bonds of brotherhood among them, with the hope of facilitating creative cross pollination and culturally impactful artistic and business collaborations. The Campout gathered many patriots from across the nation along with scholars from the wider Wagon Box network. In so doing, it illustrated the strength of a coalition that I have seen growing over recent years, one that I believe is primed to begin making notable cultural and political impacts in the coming years and, if properly cultivated, has the potential to play an even more decisive role in shaping the fate of our nation.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. First, I provide a comprehensive overview of the event's content, surfacing its key ideas and themes and summarizing each speech. A key goal here is to showcase the emerging Doomer Optimism universe of thought to a wider audience of citizens and thought leaders. Second, I tell my personal story and vision for American revival that led me to the event. Finally, I reflect upon the event, suggesting some directions for future thinking and discussing the larger cultural significance of the event, which, as I see it, evinces the emergence of a powerful ecosystem of independent scholars and patriotic grassroots activists. I suggest some ways to cultivate this ecosystem, most prominently through establishing more dedicated physical meeting grounds like the Wagon Box across the country, and by investigating the ecosystem more deeply, as this article attempts to do, in order to help define and orient it.
The Doomer Optimism Campout
The phrase "Doomer Optimism" was coined by Ashley Fitzgerald, who runs a podcast by that name and who organized the event at the Wagon Box along with Paul McNeil and James Pogue, a prominent political journalist. The term "doomer" typically refers to someone who is not only aware of the ills of the modern world but is also emotionally consumed and excessively pessimistic about the future. A "doomer optimist" seems to be someone who is keenly aware of today's problems yet is also soberly optimistic about the future, often proposing practical solutions and actively working to implement them. But the term also seems to be deliberately ambiguous, perhaps partly to keep an open mind about the nature of today's gravest problems and to attract a wide variety of speakers and attendees who may be able to contribute something unique to solving them.
Speakers and attendees came from a variety of political, religious, and geographic backgrounds. While many could be considered conservatives or libertarians of some kind, a number were left-leaning or political wanderers who identified as disaffected liberals or as post-partisans. Most attendees were Christians, of various mainstream denominations, though there were also a number of Mormons, Jews, atheists, and others. Geographically, attendees came from nearly every region and state in America, and from both rural areas and cities, including a large contingent from Nashville, Tennessee, of which I was a part; several even came from countries abroad, including Ireland. Despite the diverse backgrounds, there was no animosity. To the contrary, a tight community developed over those few days. Everybody genuinely liked each other and spent a lot of time together, often long into the night, talking, building friendships, and having healthy disagreements and debates. Everyone had their own projects and areas of expertise. The conversational quality was high the whole time, whether during a formal speech, over brunch, or on a hike, and there was genuinely something to learn from everyone there.
Throughout the event, many speakers and attendees articulated problems using symbolism of "the Machine." The term was used in various contexts to represent large systems of organized corporate power, the seemingly unstoppable proliferation of mechanical and digital machines throughout society, the mechanization of human life that this proliferation has caused, and the underlying spirit or mindset that animates our age—one that imposes a hyper-rational interpretation upon the world, leading humans to believe that they can play God and technologically remake nature and even humanity itself. At its core, the Machine seems to represent powerful forces fundamentally alien to and antagonistic to human life, forces that we—grassroots activists or even humanity at large—stand outside of and cannot control. But although the term is widely used, it is notoriously difficult to define or even to grasp, a task that speaker Paul Kingsnorth takes up thematically in his forthcoming book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity.
I was impressed with the breadth and quality of the event's speeches as well as with what the collection of speeches, although developed independently, revealed in their totality. While writing this article, I noticed certain themes—farming and agriculture, technology, education, coalition building and disaster preparation—emerge. Each theme not only served to group the event's speeches but also seemed to be associated with a rich but largely unarticulated set of questions that oriented its thought. Each subsection below is associated with a theme. Its introductory paragraph attempts to bring out the theme's orienting questions and each subsequent paragraph summarizes one speech. The event provided ample content, in my view, to serve as the basis for a valuable book or collection of essays showcasing the emerging Doomer Optimist universe of thought to a wider audience of citizens and thought leaders.
Farming and Agriculture
Farming and agriculture were treated as matters of primary concern due to their decisive impact on political freedom and human health: "who controls the food supply controls the people," in the famous words often attributed to Henry Kissinger. Regenerative agriculture—farming practices that help the land and ecosystem regenerate naturally—was advocated as an effective and scalable approach to combat the ecological degradation caused by corporate "conventional agriculture." Small local farms were championed as a means to produce and distribute healthy food free from centralized control. Facilitating the large-scale adoption of regenerative agriculture—which demands not that humans "leave nature alone" but that we become stewards of the earth, decisively shaping a healthy and sustainable ecosystem—as well as the economic viability of small farms across America, emerged as key goals for speakers and attendees.
The event's first speech was delivered by Peter Allen who pursued a PhD in ecology then left academia to found Mastadon Valley Farms in Wisconsin, believing that practical action rather than academic study is the key to solving today's environmental crisis. Conventional agriculture has radically transformed North America's native oak savanna habitat—an expansive grassland sparsely populated by large oak trees and grazed upon by bison and other large mammals—resulting in mineral-depleted soil and, consequently, unhealthy food and human beings. Allen practices regenerative agriculture on his farm, aiming to recreate many elements of this native habitat. His talk "Graze Against the Machine" argued a dual thesis on the relationship between ecological stewardship and political sovereignty: that mankind's facilitation of large-scale mammalian grazing is the key to producing healthy topsoil and a sustainable ecosystem in North America; and that such an ecosystem is necessary to resist Machine domination of the food supply and to secure our freedom. He argued that man must become our ecosystem's keystone species, decisively shaping the ecosystem to restore its natural savannas.
Geoffrey Long is a corporate executive who founded Long Story Farms in South Carolina and runs it on nights and weekends. Long began farming late in life, after multiple deaths and illnesses in his family which he believes our unhealthy food supply, dominated by corporate agriculture, contributed to. His goals are to provide his children with healthy food, to teach them personal autonomy, and to help build a resilient human-scale future for them. Long discussed problems that many small farms face today: their processing costs and ability to sell are disproportionately impacted by slaughter regulations and interstate commerce laws; they rely on large corporations for supplies, like steel whose price doubled in recent years; and their owners often lack critical business skills like advertising. He proposed legislative, communal, and educational solutions to increase the viability of small farms, advocating government grants for small farms (which he previously opposed but now believes is necessary given the current economic climate) and farmers' teaching the trade to others, as he does on his farm.
James Pogue and Basel Musharbash, a country lawyer who specializes in antitrust litigation, discussed the problem of monopoly power in the agricultural supply chain. A few dozen large companies control the market for critical supplies, like farm machines, fertilizer, seed, incubators, and certain farm animals, allowing them to effectively dictate who can produce food and how it is distributed. For example, Musharbash blames monopoly power over hen supply for the recent surge in egg prices, arguing that the industry's two dominant corporations artificially throttled the supply in order to prolong the crisis and achieve record profits. Pogue and Musharbash advocated using New Deal-era antitrust laws to break up these monopoly powers, arguing against the conservative-libertarian refusal to restrict big business using government power, and against proposals to merely establish oversight agencies. Pogue acknowledged that this is a bold proposal, yet also believes that we live in a historic time in which the relationship between state power and freedom is being fundamentally redefined. Trump ushered in a new era where bold, unconventional economic policies may now be politically possible.
Julius Krein is editor of American Affairs, a non-partisan public policy journal, and Chair of the Board of Directors at New American Industrial Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to "revitalizing America's techno-industrial base." Krein argued that America's agricultural problems are related to the economic strategy that it adopted in the last forty years. The US pursued an economic model in which financial value was centralized in intellectual property (IP) rather than in capital and labor—colloquially understood as a "designed in California, made in China" model. Financial performance (stock valuation) was largely decoupled from economic performance (actual profit and loss) as well as from physical reality. America's agricultural problems reflect these wider economic trends: power was centralized in IP (such as Monsanto's ownership over "Roundup-Ready" seeds); capital was tied up in stocks rather than invested in agriculture and industry; and America became a net importer of food as investment and "human capital" shifted to more profitable industries. Krein complemented his fundamental analysis with policy proposals to support regenerative agriculture, including reforming federal crop insurance programs to allow for regenerative practices, funding research to discover the best regenerative practices, and investing in innovative agricultural technologies, like weed-zapping technology which may greatly reduce the use of pesticides.
Technology
Technology is largely heralded as a savior in our age, producing unprecedented material wealth, bringing us previously unthinkable devices and services, and ushering us into "the future," a global human society that breaks sharply with humanity's ignorant and intolerant past. Yet this unbridled enthusiasm is rapidly changing. Technology is increasingly seen as the cause of many contemporary social ills like addiction, rising suicide rates, and man's alienation from his community, nature, and God. And the twin specters of apocalypse and transhumanism—the technological merging of man with machine—threaten our very existence. Where should we draw the line on technology use for ourselves, our children, and our society? Can ancient religion, mythology, and wisdom guide us in understanding and navigating these difficult times? Can some of today's emerging technologies actually be used to our advantage? Speakers and attendees discussed these and other questions.
Joe Allen is a contributor to Steve Bannon's War Room whose master's studies focused on comparative religion. He discussed how Axial Age mythology and wisdom—drawn from the ancient Greek, Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, and Hebrew traditions—can help us navigate our technological crisis today. Numerous Axial myths describe civilizational destruction, decline, or alienation from God caused by the advent of new technologies, some of which eerily resemble those emerging today, like androids and artificial wombs. The Hebrew myth of a Golem (resembling an android) created to ward off enemies that turns on its own city, and the Hindu myth of a queen's growing sons from flesh implanted in jars of butter (resembling artificial wombs) bringing forth the Kali Yuga, or Dark Age, should serve as warnings against today's techno-optimist hubris. The Daoist story of an old gardener who refused to draw well-water using a machine, fearing that its use would mechanize his heart, spoil the pure and simple, unsettle his spirit, and ultimately alienate him from the Eternal Dao, may inform our understanding of technological alienation and guide our decisions on how to use technology today. In fighting the brutality of the Machine today, Allen implores us to hold fast to our ancient spiritual roots and wisdom, proceeding with love in our hearts and love of God. His talk elaborated upon themes presented in his book Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity, of which I recently wrote a detailed review.
Paul Kingsnorth dialogued with Leighton Woodhouse, a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker. Kingsnorth warned of the dangers that modern technology, especially AI, pose to humanity. AI is "demonic": it is not a neutral technology that we can control but rather the centerpiece of Silicon Valley's techno-religious cult, the sharp tip of a technological system driving humanity towards a transhuman future. At a minimum, AI will destroy human creativity and purpose. It will destroy art and culture and it promises to abolish work and struggle, thereby threatening to suck human life into meaningless hedonism, dominated by drug use and supported by universal basic income. AI is not merely a dangerous technology. It is "apocalyptic" in the original Greek sense of the word, meaning that it removes a veil: it unveils the essence of modern technology as a whole and where it is taking us. Kingsnorth explores some of these themes in his novel Alexandria, set in a post-Singularity future in which most of humanity uploads their minds to the cloud but a small group refuses to do so. He announced the launch of his "Writers Against AI" campaign and urged audience members to ask themselves: What line am I going to draw with tech usage? And how can I use my skills to stay human?
Although Allen and Kingsnorth expressed pessimistic views of modern technology, several speakers were more optimistic. First, Woodhouse pushed back against Kingsnorth's techno-religious characterization of Silicon Valley's AI evangelists, arguing, based on his experience growing up in the Bay Area, that their claims about the revolutionary power and Utopian potential of their technology should be taken as fairly hyperbolic. Second, Jack Prophesy, an Austin-based activist, contended that Machine domination should be combated through cultivating small decentralized communities, not through the proliferation of a certain philosophy or political ideology. Software and emerging AI tools are very powerful and should be embraced to help achieve this goal; hackathons facilitating this kind of decentralized software development should be encouraged. Finally, Jon Stokes, co-founder of an AI startup for news writers, and Julie Fredrickson, head of a tech-oriented VC firm, argued against the fatalistic view of emerging AI technology, characterizing today's AI boom as "just another industrial revolution."
Stokes and Fredrickson held that LLM-based chatbots are powerful tools that must be understood and related to properly. The dangerous cultural phenomenon of viewing them as sentient beings speaking to the user will soon fade. Instead, these systems should be understood as tools that perform a complex search over word sequences, with the user acting a kind of pilot steering the system toward a desirable sequence. (Though it may be fair to claim that these systems do bear some relationship to human intelligence.) AI technologies will indeed revolutionize many industries—it's up to us to use, legislate, and respond to them responsibly: journalists can use time saved writing to produce higher quality articles or merely many low quality ones; decentralized AI development must be secured through "Right to Compute" acts and other legislation; and the epidemic of students using chatbots to write essays should spawn us to fix our broken education system—perhaps, ironically, by returning to a more classical model.
Education
Education dictates a nation's fate. Childhood education forms its cultural fabric while higher education dictates its intellectual landscape, molding its politics, economy, and law, as well as its higher artistic and philosophical pursuits. Education is confronted with an even graver task today: to mold deeply authentic human beings capable of resisting today's dehumanizing technological forces—and capable of staying human, resisting the thrust towards transhumanism. Speakers and attendees widely supported a return to rigorous classical education, with many also championing homeschooling options, as a means to combat today's educational crisis, in which both K-12 public schools and universities are plagued by a decay in academic standards and by nefarious anti-American ideological corruption. Discussion on formal education was complemented by discussion on how children should be raised more broadly, examining approaches taken by different religious subcultures. Entrepreneurial projects to counteract our ideologically corrupt higher education system were also widely discussed.
Josh Centers, a journalist for BlazeMedia, and his wife Hannah Centers, a homeschool activist and former public school teacher, discussed classical childhood education and homeschooling. A return to classical education is needed to combat our severe cultural degradation: widespread illiteracy demands the serious study of great books; rampant anti-Americanism, especially prevalent in education, demands a sober and reverent study of Western civilization; and our fracturing social cohesion, caused partly by ubiquitous hyper-individualized digital content, demands a return to shared cultural reference points provided, for example, by relatable Biblical stories. Homeschooling is needed to enact this classical return as many public schools are ideologically corrupt and nearly irreformable, due both to powerful Machine interests and to many local communities' overzealous attachment to their schools. Drawing on their personal experiences as homeschoolers, the Centers and three other parents discussed the practical aspects of homeschooling, including problems, like communal division, associated with it. Forming cohesive groups dedicated to classical education is often desirable though impractical as most homeschoolers lack peers in their local communities. The Centers, partly inspired by the needs of classical homeschoolers and a desire to grow the movement, recently founded Chapter House, a division of Passage Press that is set to publish high-quality volumes containing engaging selections from classic works, like Beowulf, accompanied by custom art.
Zach Davis, a writer and devoted Mormon, addressed the problem of how we can form our children to thrive in our difficult age. He suggested that elements of the Mormon approach to raising children can be beneficially adopted by others. He told the story of his own upbringing: he grew up in a decisively Mormon community that regularly encouraged his spiritual pursuit; since youth, he was required to give his time and money to help build the community; as a young teen, he was entrusted with performing religious rituals which motivated him to keep his soul clean during the week; as a young adult, sex, alcohol, and drugs were forbidden; by the time he was married, he had built a strong spiritual foundation that withheld his questioning of his faith. Some lessons on raising children that we might take from his story include: the importance of having a strong community and how to cultivate one; that giving children responsibilities or religious duties encourages their good behavior; that abstinence may be wise, especially in our age of excessive vice; and that we must provide spiritual guidance, not merely college education, to young adults. Although Davis did not claim that everyone must become a Mormon, he did hold that an authentic religious life is the only way to resist dehumanizing forces today.
During the event's informal discussions, many championed entrepreneurial projects to counteract our ideologically corrupt higher education system. These projects roughly intended to provide substitutes for mainstream undergraduate education, graduate education, and professorial scholarship, largely in humanities disciplines. Bringing classical undergraduate-level education to local communities across America is necessary both to widely disseminate classical wisdom and to help strengthen or renew these local communities. Nick Ellis' Christian Halls International, which has already built a fairly large network of classical learning halls across the nation, was perhaps the most inspiring such project discussed. At the graduate level, Ashley Fitzgerald proposed creating a formal master's program by gathering independent scholars from the larger Wagon Box community who are already teaching online courses at that level. A year-long remote study program with quarterly week-long intensive learning retreats at the Wagon Box was proposed as its format. Last year at the Wagon Box, Justin Murphy discussed the feasibility of high-impact independent scholarship in the context of his internet-based Other Life group whose elite members, he felt, had the potential to develop the erudition of university professors, producing insights that are valuable to high-power decision makers but also to everyday Americans. He championed developing physical meeting grounds like the Wagon Box as essential to forming this community and pushing its members to do their best work.
Coalition Building and Disaster Preparation
Most of the conference's speeches analyzed the powerful forces directing our culture (especially in agriculture, technology, and education), warned of the problems and catastrophic disasters that they can cause, and proposed solutions to these problems. But how do we actually organize to make the political and cultural changes necessary to solve these problems? And how should we respond to disaster if our organizing is unable to prevent it (or if a natural disaster should befall us)? Several speakers took up these questions thematically. While emphasizing the importance of individual strength and resilience, they discussed how to build strong local coalitions, both to influence local politics, which has a much bigger impact than most people realize, and to respond to disaster with a strong community, rather than attempting to do so alone. Coalition building is also central to the Wagon Box's mission to gather digitally scattered activists at a physical meeting ground and form them into a powerful movement. The project has yielded many important insights on how to do this, as I discuss in the final subsection of this article.
Seneca Scott, a prominent political activist who led Oakland's 2024 mayoral recall campaign, warned of the spread of dangerous progressive policies through local city councils across the nation and gave attendees practical advice on how to organize to take their cities back. Oakland was destroyed in mere years by progressive policies, such as the housing eviction moratorium and defunding the police, which led to extensive crime and homeless encampments. These policies were pushed by progressive ideologues aligned with powerful networks of NGOs operating out of the Bay Area, many of which, Scott's research showed, were under foreign financial influence and had established presences in many other American cities. But Scott is optimistic that these seemingly powerful forces can actually be easily defeated since their policies are so destructive and unpopular. Conservatives and moderates lose primarily because they don't care enough and are often unwilling to engage in "community organizing" themselves, seeing it as a leftist tactic or as something beneath them. He offered many insightful pieces of practical advice on successful community organizing and announced his desire to start teaching classes on the subject.
Chris Ellis, an Army colonel2 who recently completed a PhD specializing in disaster studies, discussed the importance of effective disaster preparedness. Disaster preparation is often looked down upon today: a "prepper" is viewed as someone who is excessively paranoid about disaster, who operates alone and obsesses about which physical supplies to stockpile. But for Ellis, deriving partly from his military experience, disaster is a very real phenomenon, though one that requires much more than individual physical preparedness. Instead, effective disaster preparation requires one to become a "resilient citizen": resilience refers to one's ability to withstand physical, social, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional adversity, while a citizen is a productive member of his community, one who recognizes that disaster survival is a communal, not individual, effort. Ellis urged us to become resilient citizens. Resilience can be built, for example, by actively seeking out adversity, as he does by fasting every Saturday until after church on Sunday, a practice that builds resilience against bodily desires and brings him closer to God. Ellis' forthcoming book Resilient Citizens: The People, Perils, and Politics of Modern Preparedness explores these and other aspects of disaster preparedness, an especially prescient topic in our post-COVID world.
My Story and Vision for American Revival
Up until now, I have described the event as objectively as possible, aiming to capture the content of its speeches and its thematically organized core principles. In this section, I will briefly tell my personal story3, particularly how my personal experiences shaped my view of America's techno-cultural crisis and my mission to help revive America, a mission that ultimately led me to the Doomer Optimism Campout and the Wagon Box community.
I began a PhD in computer science, specializing in machine learning, during the 2010's and graduated amid the social justice hysteria and violence that characterized the summer and election of 2020. I had witnessed its build-up first hand within the university and had unsuccessfully dedicated many of the most precious years of my life to stopping it. During this time, I watched the academic community work, with few exceptions, to defame, destabilize, and perhaps permanently cripple our nation, remaining hostile or indifferent even to mere attempts to speak out against it. In the end, it became clear to me that academia, as well as culturally related corporate communities like Big Tech, were deeply sick and beyond reform. I turned my back on them, began freelancing for work, and traveled across America, moving among several cities throughout the heartland, away from coastal states and "elite" institutions—now operating, fully and forever, outside of the Machine (and forever forgoing any ability to influence it from within).
My exit inaugurated a journey. I felt deep gratitude for the American people and their patriotic spirit: the people, animated by this spirit, suppressed the cultural and political madness of the elites, critically stabilizing the nation. But while this spirit gave the nation a breath of life, it failed to meaningfully revive it: it did not galvanize the people to fight back hard enough nor to establish a formidable cultural-intellectual countermovement, one perhaps rooted in the spirit and principles of 1776, to set the nation on a firm footing. 2020 radically changed the nature of our national crisis: no longer did waking people up and galvanizing them towards common-sense political reform seem viable; a much deeper effort to unravel the mystery of our nation's decline and to give it new life was now needed.
Such a task, I felt, could only be accomplished by a community that has yet to arise: one that will embody the spirit of a new American patriotism and possess the skill and will to remake the nation's cultural-intellectual landscape in the wake of progressive radicalism and institutional collapse. I set out on a quest for the spirit, knowledge, and people that would ultimately form this community. I set out to discover America by living and traveling throughout it, by attending gatherings of patriotic intellectual dissidents, and by studying and mastering the foundational texts of the Western canon.
Leaving California in 2021, I set out to see America with my own eyes, moving among several states within the heartland (Idaho, South Dakota, Louisiana, South Carolina, and now Tennessee) and driving throughout it, aiming to cover as much ground as possible. I went to see America's natural beauty and national parks, its open roads and diverse terrains (its mountains, caves, swamps, forests, lakes, and oceans), its farmlands and rural communities, its thriving and struggling cities, its hometowns and main streets, its hidden histories and unsung heroes, its statues and war memorials, its revolutionary and civil war battlefields, its people and their customs, and its citizens in their everyday lives—What is America to them? What piece of the puzzle do they hold? And how might they ultimately be formed into a coalition to help revive America? I sought also to deepen my own love for the country: to develop an affection for and attachment to the land, to truly appreciate its vastness and mystery, and to persistently remind myself of what we have and what is beginning to be lost forever—to push myself to complete my journey.
I obtained another view of America by attending events and joining online groups that articulated some aspect of its decline and possible solutions. I felt particularly inspired to write about a few of them. First, the Millerman School, an online school pioneering counter-institutional political philosophy education, which elucidated the deep philosophical roots of our civilizational crisis through a curriculum that brings together ancient Greek, religious, mystical, and anti-liberal political thought. Second, last year's Wagon Box event which aimed to reorient the nation towards "the good, the true, and the beautiful" by establishing a physical meeting ground dedicated to producing culturally impactful artistic and business collaborations. Finally, an Echelon Front event, led by retired Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, which presented a nuanced leadership framework, deeply interwoven with a patriotism rooted in reverence for military sacrifice. The framework was applicable to leading teams—a skill sorely missing in American politics and among independent scholars—and leading oneself—a kind of holistic training of man's virtues, intellect, and body—to which I saw strong resonances with ancient Greek teachings.
As I saw it—and as I believe future generations will see it clearly—academia's sin was twofold: cultivating and exporting its sickness throughout the nation, yes, but also undermining thinkers within its walls who had the skill and spirit to truly grasp our nation's crisis and help set it on the right track. It was my patriotic duty, I felt, to work towards developing myself into such a thinker. I began obsessively reading the great books of the Western canon, diligently training myself as a writer, continuously connecting with independent scholars online, many of whom were pushed out of or disillusioned by academia, attending events to meet them in person, and removing from my life all technology destructive to this mission, including the smartphone and almost all social media.4 Throughout all of this—my travels, attending dissident events, and studying the great books—I sought knowledge as much as community: for companions to go on this long journey with, a brotherhood to sharpen me, and a team whose mission I could be genuinely proud of and want to contribute to.
I attended the Doomer Optimist Campout to advance each of the four aspects of my mission. First, to see more of America, as the event would bring me to Wyoming and allow me to meet and learn from attendees who live throughout rural America. Second, to meet an eclectic mix of patriotic grassroots activists who could provide essential knowledge about our crisis, particularly regarding technological domination and transhumanism, and help me discover new projects to which my skills, technical or otherwise, could be employed to help our nation. Third, to connect with independent scholars and experienced writers who could help further my philosophical and literary studies and help train me as a writer. Finally, to help advance the Wagon Box project, which I saw as the hub of a growing community that I could be proud to be a part of and one with the potential to make a lasting positive impact on our nation.
From Doomer Optimism to American Revival
This section completes a kind of "ladder of ascent" that was implicit in the organization of this article, one that took us from the event's speeches up through my holistic vision of American revival. In the first section, individual speeches organized into thematic groups which in turn organized into a holistic view of the event's content. The first subsection here begins to move from a holistic view of the event towards a comprehensive view of the Doomer Optimism universe of thought by sketching an extrapolation of the event's key ideas and themes; the second subsection here isolates the technological problem for detailed discussion. Doomer Optimism is one among the Wagon Box's network of groups which is in turn part of a larger emerging ecosystem of independent scholars and patriotic grassroots activists. The third subsection here maps out this ecosystem, advocates it cultivation, and argues that it has the potential to develop into an important element of the community that will ultimately oversee America's revival, a community whose structure I sketched out in the previous section and will describe in more detail in a future article.
Towards a Comprehensive View of Doomer Optimism
The event presented interesting content at multiple levels of resolution: at the level of individual ideas, individual themes, and holistically. The content at each of these levels can be extended to provide a more comprehensive view of it. I believe that these views, presented in writing or another form, would help many different kinds of people better understand the problems addressed by Doomer Optimism and how they can combat them. This subsection discusses each of these points in turn.
I learned many new things at the event including: what regenerative agriculture is and that it may provide the basis for large-scale environmental restoration; the specific challenges that small farmers face; that I could become a farmer myself later in life; that NGOs are nefariously influencing local politics; what it's like to grow up in the Mormon faith; that many ancient religious myths shed light on the problems of modern technology; how deliberate changes in our economic structure contributed to the dominance of corporate agriculture; that there is a strong need for tech innovation in regenerative agriculture; that the recent rise in egg prices was due partly to corporate agriculture's throttling of hen supply; that students cheating with AI may ironically lead us back to classical education; that classical homeschooling faces significant local resistance; that effective disaster preparation is a communal not individual effort; and that grasping the essence of "the Machine" is difficult even for experienced writers.
Each of these ideas, while interesting in its own right, can be generalized to address a core problem facing us today. For example, the discussion on how Mormons raise children invites a comprehensive analysis of how various subcultures in contemporary America raise children and which of their practices, especially concerning technology usage, could be adopted by society more broadly. Reports by individual small farmers on challenges they face invite a comprehensive exposition of the problems facing small farmers in America and an exposition of proposed solutions which could guide long-term grassroots activism. The relaying of interesting ancient myths related to technology invites a comprehensive analysis of ancient wisdom and teachings concerning the threat of technology and innovation. Allusions to the "Machine" and the underlying nature of technology invite a deeper philosophical investigation into the essence of technology, to which I believe the work of Martin Heidegger, especially his essay The Question Concerning Technology, is essential.
While writing this article, I noticed that each theme seemed to be oriented by a rich but largely unarticulated set of questions, which I tried to bring out in each theme's introductory paragraph, as I said earlier. These questions included the following: What are the theme's key activism goals? From which fundamental contemporary concerns does theme take its bearing? How does it relate to and affect other themes? What permanent, trans-temporal, questions about human and political life does it point to? And what, if any, fundamentally new questions does it pose in our age? I saw this bottom-up emergence as significant, indicating that it reflected the genuine concerns of grassroots activists rather than being imposed artificially a priori. But now, after having identified these structures, the above questions can be addressed directly to enrich the theme's thought.
For example, a comprehensive view of education from the Doomer Optimism point of view might proceed as follows. Classical education and counter-institutional entrepreneurial efforts were key activism goals. How should we design a classical education curriculum in our age? Which books should we draw on for guidance? How exactly do raising children, childhood education, and higher education relate? Should activists working within each realm synergize their efforts? What fundamental contemporary concerns must education address? Ideological corruption in mainstream institutions and cultural degradation were two examples I noticed; are there others? Going further: What aspects of today's cultural degradation can and should education combat? Rampant illiteracy, anti-Americanism, and fracturing social cohesion, were examples I noticed; are there others? Does education today raise any fundamentally new problems about human and political life? I identified education as being called upon today to mold deeply authentic human beings capable of resisting transhumanism. Is this truly a problem without precedent? What ancient sources from the Biblical or Greek traditions can guide us in designing an educational program with this aim?
All of this could be assembled into a comprehensive picture of the Doomer Optimism universe of thought. As I said above, I feel that the event itself provided ample material to serve as the basis for a valuable book or collection of essays on Doomer Optimism. The following questions could perhaps be used to guide future thought. What defines the bounds of the Doomer Optimism universe of thought? What are all of its key ideas and themes? How do the themes relate to each other in a holistic picture? Does this picture point to even more fundamental questions of our age that can be raised and pursued? My interest in such a comprehensive analysis appears to be in line with a project that James Pogue, in a Doomer Optimist podcast last year, discussed and seems to be pursuing: developing a "high level" "statecraft and vision of what American policy would look like if you were trying to take into account the things that people who listen to [Doomer Optimism] care about."
The kinds of analyses suggested in this section could, I believe, help a number of allies. First, they could help everyday citizens more clearly understand the problems discussed here, how they affect their families' lives, and what they can do to fight back. For example, by helping them decide how to raise their children in the technological age based on analyses of practices across subcultures in America. Second, these analyses could help activists within the community more readily identify collaboration opportunities among themselves and clarify long-term goals to guide their activism. For example, by helping coordinate the activism efforts among homeschoolers and those working on entrepreneurial efforts for higher-education. Finally, it could guide and encourage allies outside the community to pursue aligned local and national policies, cultural activism, and entrepreneurial projects, as I discuss in the context of small farmers and tech developers in the next section.
The Technological Problem
In this section, I single out the technological problem for discussion as it was one of my main motivations for attending the event and because I think that it poses both the greatest threats and the greatest difficulties in discovering a path forward to combat them. Based in the context of this event, I discuss several aspects of the technological problem: first, how I think technology can be used to our advantage; second, the problem of resisting technological domination of our personal lives; third, how technological development seems to be ultimately taking us towards a transhuman future; and, finally, if and how we might be able to ultimately win against the forces leading this development. Speakers and attendees discussed many interesting ideas, though neither they nor I have satisfactory solutions to these problems. As technology advances rapidly, it is crucial that we continue hosting events like this and cultivating communities of independent thinkers capable of addressing these issues intelligently.
As someone trained in computer science and machine learning, I attended the event hoping to find a way to use my skills to help grassroots patriots or America at large. More broadly, I sought to help build a community of similarly skilled people dedicated to these goals. Overall, I think this is a largely untapped area: that technology can be used to our advantage in many ways but that most activists are not aware of what tech can do and, conversely, culturally aligned tech developers, while willing to help, are largely unaware of the problems facing activists and rural America. Hosting an event to bring these two groups together would facilitate the discovery of these problems; formatting the event as a hackathon, where tech teams work intensely over a few days to build prototypes, would facilitate the development of solutions. Such an event could, for example, bring together small farmers, who would discuss critical problems they face, such as difficulty advertising or selling direct to consumers, with tech developers who would form teams and compete to develop the best prototype solution over one weekend. This could spawn long-term collaborations or facilitate production grade development.
Although some technology can be used to our advantage, there is a significant distinction between technologies that we adopt as behind-the-scenes tools and those that dominate our everyday lives—the smartphone, the screen, digital music, social media—at which the contemporary protest against technology is primarily aimed. The event inclined towards a tech skepticism though not extremism: no one had fully abandoned modern technology to "rough it" in the woods but many did adopt anti-tech practices like banning smartphones for their children, taking long "screen sabbaticals" themselves, and refusing to use emerging "AI" tools. However, several people were (cautiously) optimistic about these emerging technologies and embraced their development. In my view, there is no easy answer to the question of which technologies we should adopt. It was a virtue of the event that it attracted speakers with a variety of views to facilitate deeper thinking on this question. In this spirit, I think that a structured debate or discussion to put contrasting views into dialogue would have been useful and that the Wagon Box provides perhaps the ideal venue for doing so: immersed in the natural beauty of a small rural town with minimal tech usage, it serves as a constant reminder of just what we've lost in our digital age.
Although we may each choose which technologies to adopt in our personal lives, our decisions will not likely effect large-scale technological development. So then where is technology ultimately taking us? This question confronts us most starkly today in the form of "AI" technology, particularly LLM-based chatbots and image generators. Given my background in machine learning, I was sympathetic to Stokes' technical discussion of LLMs, dissecting their inner workings at a high-level and reporting on their empirical fragility, in an attempt to demystify them for the audience and unveil them as tools not beings speaking to the user. I am also sympathetic to the idea that statistically-based technical tools, as his company seems to be developing, can aid the human writing process, especially for low-level editing tasks, like fixing grammar, sentence structure, or identifying conceptual redundancies across paragraphs. However, I am skeptical that most people will adopt these views. Instead they will eagerly defer to "AI" tools as intelligent beings, especially as more realistic voice- and video-generated avatars and humanoid robots emerge, and they will use writing tools to generate large passages of text or even "new ideas," accelerating the deterioration of critical and creative thinking in our age.
Ultimately, I do not believe that today's AI boom is "just another industrial revolution."5 Instead, that it is—or at least that many of its most powerful proponents intend it to be—the beginning of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, one in which technology is turned radically inward to modify man himself, through aggressive genetic engineering, brain chip implantations, and other body modifications, fundamentally altering humanity and ushering in a transhuman future. I believe that many of the most prominent forces driving this development do hold a kind of quasi-religious belief in this future and that their sincerity, while possible to exaggerate, should not be treated with too much skepticism as Woodhouse suggested in his dialogue with Kingsnorth. My belief in the the gravity of the transhumanist threat was greatly influenced by my recent reading of Joe Allen's Dark Aeon. My fear was intensified by Peter Allen's (no relation to Joe Allen) suggestion at the conference that environmental degradation may eventually cause our food supply to deteriorate so severely that human beings cannot survive naturally, without genetic or digital transhuman modifications. That is, that not only might "superior" man-machine hybrids outcompete us for natural resources, but that the character of these resources themselves might be fundamentally altered, rendering them nearly-inaccessible to human beings.
But if we can't use technology too greatly to our advantage and if we can't directly stop or reverse its development, how can we realistically win? While we can and should resist technological domination through practical action in the realms of politics, economics, education, and agriculture, we must ultimately take our bearing from another realm, one in which we have a decisive advantage, one that is entirely within our control (not the Machine's), and one that has the potential for significant or decisive worldly impact. What is this realm? Although a clear answer did not emerge at the event, the realm of art emerged as a candidate: beautiful, excellent, and deeply human works of art and writing have the power to win over the hearts and minds of the masses and effect radical "cultural change," presumably oriented towards a more natural human future. Dostoevsky's famous quote "beauty will save the world" seems to attest to the salvific power of art. The quote appears on some of the Wagon Box's shirts, suggesting, it seems, that the property hopes to help cultivate a community oriented towards the creation or genuine appreciation of such works.
Another great thinker, Martin Heidegger, seems to point us in a similar direction. Famously, when asked in a 1966 interview if there were any way to influence the rising web of technological domination, he replied: "Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline[.]" Heidegger is not talking about the Christian God nor does he mean that we will be "saved" by some revolution that banishes modern technological devices from society. Instead, he means that only by inaugurating a new way of thinking, of seeing and being in the world, of understanding and relating to the essence of technology, can a more free relationship of the human being to technology arise. But, while thinking and poetizing—properly understood—may ultimately give rise to this transformation, it is also not fully within human control.6
The Wagon Box Inn: Hub of an Emerging Ecosystem for American Revival
Two things have been wildly underestimated in our age. First, the value of intimate in-person intellectual gatherings contra the digital world's promise of unlimited information and instantaneous social networking. Second, the collective knowledge and power lying dormant within our nation's independent scholars and patriotic grassroots activists contra that of mainstream academic institutions and political parties. In this subsection, I discuss how to capitalize on these underestimations. First, I discuss the specific mechanisms by which dedicated physical meeting grounds like the Wagon Box serve to gather digitally scattered activists and form them into a powerful movement. Second, I discuss how a strong but atomized ecosystem of such scholars and activists has developed over recent years, which the Doomer Optimism Campout exemplified, and of which the Wagon Box is a central element. I argue that this ecosystem, if properly cultivated, has the potential to develop into a powerful community that will play an essential role in America's revival.
Physical Meeting Grounds
The event immersed me in a new world, commanding my full attention during the speeches and saturating my free time with thoughtful discussions. I took detailed notes during the event; afterwards, I studied them diligently, piecing together the speeches and embarking upon the long journey of transforming my notebook into this document. I didn't come to the event with this plan. But the first night on the porch, amid the intelligent discussions and spirited debates, convinced me that the event was going to be important. In the people it had gathered, I saw the pioneers of projects, many in their humble beginnings, that they felt really mattered and for which they were willing to fight; people who had been called to this remote Wyoming inn to deliver a message, a small, hard-won, piece of the puzzle of our collapsing America. I felt compelled to write, to contribute something to this effort: to help boost the projects of friends that I had made, people who could help save America and inspire others to follow suit, and to once again tell the world about a little inn that I knew was the beginning of something much more.
I would have felt none of this in the digital world or at a "standard" political or academic conference. No doubt, as Wagon Box owner Paul McNeil suggested, the event's serene natural setting and communal atmosphere, starkly contrasting with the standard conference's stodgy hotel ballroom and impersonal socializing, played a role in this. As did its merely physical setting, allowing me to truly meet people, to hear their personal stories, struggles, and ambitions, turning them into "real" people, not merely digital avatars but people in my tribe whose well-being and projects I begin to care about. Another distinguishing feature was the spirit and motives of the event's attendees, as grassroots activists with something serious at stake (the fate of their families and nation) rather than institutional functionaries merely advancing their careers. All of these factors coalesce at the Wagon Box's events, making it an especially important project in the digital age. McNeil's concluding speech, briefly reviewing the success of the project, highlighted the many friendships and political, artistic, and business collaborations that have been born or nurtured at the property.
But the project encompasses even stronger visions on the nature of friendship and its role in enacting large-scale cultural change. Last year at the Wagon Box, McNeil and Justin Murphy presented complementary visions. McNeil emphasized the importance of forming brotherhoods, which have been all but lost in our age. Summarizing his view last year, I wrote: "America was built by tight bands of brothers working together, many of whom undertook the project of expanding the frontier westward. This expansion exemplifies the more general principle that nation-shaping change flows only out of tight fraternal bonds." In Murphy's vision, large-scale cultural change often originates from small groups of creatives living in close physical proximity, as with the Bloomsbury Group. Such an environment operates as a "pressure" cooker, whereby the group's ideas are aggressively bounced around, refined, and ultimately "bubble over" to transform the wider society. Additionally, often times a person possesses crucially important knowledge but is unaware of it; it is only through a close friend, feeling that he possesses something special and unearthing it through extended in-person interactions, that the world ultimately comes to learn of his insights, as was the case of Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell.
This is exactly what I felt while writing this article and throughout my investigations of other events in recent years: that I see something here that others do not see, something truly special that the world needs to know about. It was only because this event was hosted in-person that I could do this: that by carefully observing the event and meticulously piecing my notes together, I could assemble its unarticulated insights, surface its overlooked ideas, and help discover where it might fit into a holistic vision of American revival. While the Wagon Box community has significant grassroots energy, the energy is not undirected. Instead, I see the community beginning to form into a movement: its core ideas and concerns are beginning to take shape, its communal bonds are strengthening as people reconnect over several years, and many projects born or nurtured at the property are now beginning to germinate. In-person events are crucial for cultivating this movement, both to help strengthen its existing bonds and to help define and orient it in the interest of helping it reach its full potential, as I have attempted to do here.
An Emerging Ecosystem
An even larger cultural movement is at foot. An entire ecosystem of independent scholars and groups is beginning to emerge, as I've seen by connecting with many of them over the past few years. Justin Murphy's Indie Scholars recently launched a program dedicated to helping its members, an eclectic mix of independent scholars and writers, "[build] serious, long-term, independent writing projects on the internet" over a year-long time horizon, leveraging "1-on-1 project supervision in the style of MA and PhD programs." A number of independent scholars have built successful online schools of political thought and philosophy, including the Millerman School and the Halkyon Academy, that educate independent thinkers and creators. In-person-native groups are beginning to pop up, such as the Meriwether Academy in Nashville which hosts weekly study groups, political philosophy symposiums, and outdoor retreats that combine great books learning with immersion in nature (similar in spirit to the Wagon Box project). Directed efforts to connect atomized groups like these have recently begun. Matthew Stanley, who I met through Murphy's group, recently launched a website to map out this emerging ecosystem and help its members better discover each other and organize events. And the Wagon Box serves as a physical meeting ground which many online groups plug into to host physical events.
What might this ecosystem look like in the next few years? Extrapolating out its development, the following picture is plausible. There will be many online groups dedicated to facilitating high-level independent scholarship over long time horizons. There will be ample specialized tutors and online schools for them to learn from. Many American cities will have strongly connected local groups, facilitating study groups and retreats, and also serving as a base which groups across the nation visit for events. Powerful software tools will be built to effectively network activists and continually grow the community, inspiring successful collaborations, facilitating impactful in-person events, and helping its members attain financial solvency. And dozens of dedicated venues like the Wagon Box will be built across the nation, regularly bringing the ecosystem's members and groups together for events, building a strong community and developing a strong vision of America's future. That is, there will be a thriving, decentralized, hybrid digital-in-person ecosystem out of which culturally impactful works could plausibly emerge.
Such a community's formation is perhaps not only plausible but likely to happen soon. Many intelligent young people of our generation were pushed out of or proactively removed themselves from academia and corporate America in the 2010's due to DEI-related persecution or hostility. They began connecting online, forming communities, and building independent projects and businesses which began stabilizing in the mid 2020's. These projects and communities seem primed to begin making notable cultural and political impacts in the 2030's as the projects grow stronger (partly as intelligent young people continue fleeing institutions) and their associated scholars mature into their most intellectually productive years.
I see another important phenomenon arising out of this milieu. A strong coalition of independent scholars, fleeing institutional hostility, and patriotic grassroots activists, diligently combating progressive radicalism and incompetent mainstream political parties, is beginning to emerge. This alliance, as I see it, will have two complementing effects. First, it will facilitate deeper thinking on problems relevant to everyday Americans and the fate of our nation: scholars, regularly interacting with activists, will gain familiarity with and motivation to work on these problems while, conversely, activists with unique insights or personal experiences relevant to these problems will transform them, by studying and working with these scholars, into impactful written works. Second, it will help form the political and cultural coalitions necessary to cultivate these ideas and guide their implementation across the nation.
The Doomer Optimist Campout illustrated this emerging coalition. The event gathered scholars from the wider Wagon Box network with patriots from across the nation, from dozens of states and many walks of life, possessing diverse skills and experiences. Many speakers embodied both roots, such as Chris Ellis whose military training and childhood experience with Mt. St. Helen's eruption in Washington state motivated his PhD work and forthcoming book on disaster preparation. The event's content was both well thought out yet strongly rooted in the concerns of everyday Americans, like obtaining healthy food, educating their children, building local communities, and resisting technological domination. The event's central theme of Machine domination encompassed concerns of scholars fleeing academic institutions and grassroots activists combating mainstream political parties. Looking forward, the event provided, as I argued above, ample content to serve as the basis of a book and for more comprehensive analyses, projects for which such a coalition is particularly well suited.
How might this coalition and ecosystem be cultivated? We should take direct actions like supporting its creators, encouraging others to join, and finding creative ways to help activists advance their projects. But we must ultimately overcome its biggest problem which is atomization, both geographical and ideological. We must host more in-person events and acquire more properties like the Wagon Box throughout the nation to bring the geographically scattered activists together and form them into a genuine community. Ideologically, although many groups have interesting ideas and insights, most have not yet assembled them into a comprehensive vision of their projects nor have they developed visions of how their projects fits into a holistic plan for American revival. This article was my preliminary attempt to develop such visions for Doomer Optimism, based on the event's rich but largely unstructured content. It is part of my larger ongoing project of writing similar detailed articles about the ecosystem's groups and events, aiming to showcase the wealth of unique and valuable skills, knowledge, people, and groups within the ecosystem. It is my hope that by doing so this project will help organize and cultivate the ecosystem, allowing it grow into a community that ultimately plays a decisive role in reviving America.
Conclusion
Overall, the Doomer Optimism Campout was an excellent event. It was great to spend a long weekend at the Wagon Box in rural Wyoming, immersed in natural beauty, with minimal tech usage, plenty of outdoor activities, delicious food and drinks, and a smart and ambitious community of people. It was inspiring to see the many important projects that people were pursuing, to connect with them, and to hopefully have the opportunity to work with them in the future. I learned a lot at the event. I was impressed with both the breadth and quality of the event's speeches. Although I didn't know much about Doomer Optimism before attending the event, I now feel that I have a deep understanding of this universe of thought and activist community, something I could have only acquired at an in-person event. I highly recommend attending this event next year or contributing as a speaker if appropriate.
While the event was worthwhile in its own right, it is also part of something much bigger. An entire decentralized ecosystem of independent scholars and patriotic grassroots activists is beginning to emerge. This ecosystem is primed to begin making notable cultural and political impacts in the coming years and has the potential, if properly cultivated, to develop into a community that shapes the fate of our nation even more decisively. We must cultivate this community by directly supporting it, hosting more events like this, establishing more physical meeting grounds like the Wagon Box, and better documenting and mapping it out, as I have attempted to do here and in my larger collection of articles, a project to which I hope to inspire others to contribute.
Murphy recently rebranded Other Life to Indie Scholars and emphasized its focus on helping members succeed with long-term writing projects, as I discuss later.
Ellis emphasized that the views expressed are his own and do not represent those of the Department of Defense or any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces.
I've told my story in more detail previously, most prominently in reference to my recognition of the gravity of the transhumanist threat.
I was also protesting these technologies for how deeply they've damaged our culture and everyday lives, and for the anti-American policies and behavior of their creators in Big Tech.
Fredrickson used this phrase to quell fears about today's AI boom but it did not appear to be a direct reference to Schwab's slogan "The Fourth Industrial Revolution."
Heidegger is actually making a complex point that I will discuss in further detail, along with the potential implications of his philosophy for thinking about technology today, in a forthcoming article.
Nick-You should definitely come to our Doomer Optimism event in Ligonier, PA, outside of Pittsburgh in early November. See here https://www.savagecollective.org/events/event-two-jc7y6
Extremely thorough rundown. Appreciate you taking the time to do so.
I wasn’t referencing WEF propaganda partially as I wasn’t aware of the term as well as being directly opposed to it.
I do believe if compute is kept open and decentralized (explicitly against the centralizing efforts of state and big corporations) by little tech we have opportunities for control at the individual level we’ve not seen since the “right to repair” movement.
Montana passed into law the right to compute (protecting 1A and 2A in the process) and it has recently been taken up by ALEC as a bipartisan model for state legislators. The opposite approach is being taken in Colorado and Europe. Those are centralized goals of The Machine.
Many of those who build tools and machines do so to free us from those shackles. Industrial revolutions change our shape as a society into ones, where if we are lucky, we grab a future with more human choices.