By Askr Svarte (Evgeny Nechkasov)
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538 pages. Now available in hardcover.
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BUY NOW
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Artificial Intelligence, cyberpunk cinema, Virtual Reality goggles, and the smartphone in your pocket are not just passing fads and mere gadgets. They are visions of a future that does not belong to us. The QR-coded Matrix of Technological Singularity and the “Great Reset” is already upon us — an imminent future in which “us” and “the world” become a problem for troubleshooting. How did we arrive at the abyss of technological dystopia? What is technology? Who are we?
Available only in private circulation until now, Askr Svarte’s Tradition and Future Shock: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours has been called “the most dangerous book in the world” because it poses these questions and exposes their nerves to the extreme at the last minute. The very idea of “progress” is shattered, the concealed nature of technology is exposed, and apocalyptic landscapes are charted through a cutting-edge hermeneutics between the ancient worlds of Myth and the Postmodern “reality” of screens and cyborgs.
Tradition and Future Shock is a finale for the last humans, an awakening right before midnight, a last sacrifice for the sake of a new beginning…
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Table of Contents
Preamble
Part I: Technology as Fate
Tekhne and Gestell
Poiesis and Mythos
The Marginality of the Enlightenment
The World as Ready-to-Hand
Tekhne and Technology
Progress from the Point of View of Tradition
Watches With and Without Chains
The Contemporal Rhizome
The Excess and Monotony of Novelty
Against Reality
Waking Up Before Midnight
Archetypal Figures
Prometheus and his Humans
Icarus
Doctor Faust
The Worker
Dizzied Achilles
Baldr Slain
Our Nature
The Man of Tradition: Maximal Humanism
Intermediate Forms
The Humanism of the Last People
Dividing the Indivisible
Biopolitics/Necropolitics
Transhumanism: Away with the Human
Feminism Against Humanity
Das Man Plugged In
Flat Ontological Landscapes
Artifacts and Primitive Peoples
Dreamscapes
The Economy is Not Fate
The Spirits and Demons of Things
The Economy of the Dead
The World as the Accursed Share
Part II: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours
Dystopia Here and Now
Hermeneutics of Cultural Prototypes
Dwelling in Virtuality
Dreaming as Identity
Simulacra Again
Surrogate Eros
The Reproductive Barrier
The Cyberpunk Hero
Cyberpunk Religions
Dan Brown’s Apocalyptic Dilogy
Several Realistic Scenarios
The Future That Isn’t Ours Is Already Here
A Closed World
Total Transparency
Augmented Reality
Novelty Instead of Event
Fast Time
The End of Nature
The Ecological Fiction
Towers, Planes, and Streetlights
Two Extremes of Techno-Paganism
The Death Agony of Music
Against Museums
Artificial Intelligence
Black Miracles
Summary
Part III: Perspectives for Resistance
Posing the Questions
Deconstructing Primitivism
The Critique of Civilization
Culture and Civilization per Spengler
Simplification: Tolstoy and Thoreau
Romantic Escapism
The Weak Argument of Luddism
Alain de Benoist’s Anti-Growth Ideology
Kaarlo Pentti Linkola’s Ecofascism
The Strategy of Theodore Kaczynski
Julius Evola’s Ride the Tiger
Ernst Jünger’s Forest Passage
John Zerzan and the Rejection of the Symbolic
Remarks on the Fields of Primitivism
Depopulation
Overpopulation: Strengthening Alienation
The Metaphysical Arguments of Anti-Natalism
Who Are All These People?
The World-Without-Us
Remarks on the Fields of Depopulation
Fear of Death and the Right to Death
The Theology of the Dead Divine
The New Catacombs
In Search of Zomia
A Word on Tribalism
The People of the Underground
Final Moods
Selected Bibliography
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Askr Svarte (Evgeny Nechkasov, b. 1991) is a Russian Traditionalist philosopher, pagan activist, and the founding head of the Svarte Aske community. Descended from Bessarabian Germans exiled to Siberia in the early 20th century, since 2009 he has been a practicing pagan in the Germanic-Scandinavian tradition and an active voice in the rebirth of paganism in Russia and Europe. Nechkasov is the founding editor of the journals Warha and Alföðr and the author of multiple books, such as Polemos: The Dawn of Pagan Traditionalism (PRAV Publishing, 2020), Polemos II: Pagan Perspectives (PRAV Publishing, 2021), and Gods in the Abyss: Essays on Heidegger, the Germanic Logos, and the Germanic Myth (Arktos, 2020). He lives in Novosibirsk, West Siberia, Russia.
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