March 19 - Knave of Wands

New ideas and adventure.

Feels like kind of a funny time to draw this one, since the more anti-civ strands of anarchism are like, eternal fixtures for online rubbernecking and bad faith dunks. They're just so naive, right?

I said before, I feel like this exercise has me ultimately feeling less anti-tech than I thought I would. I find a lot of the recent luddite-inflected rhetoric kind of underwhelming precisely because they lack the analysis that even the most outre or objectionable anti-civ positons actually have. It's just about how "the phone" or "online" feels bad, or some dull moralizing or normative argument about Art or the Dignity of Labor or whatever and then therefore it can only be bad. Which is not really convincing if there's way it feels good, right? And never mind structuring it or doing anything different with it, we just have to sit on our hands continuing to feel bad because, "it's addictive" or "I might win the precarious freelance byline lottery."

Even if they're not personally practicable or desirable, I find engaging with these positions more interesting than the people who reflexively make fun of them do-- to be presented with a thorough argument for what is not -strictly- necessary, though it may be presented as such, forces you to examine and maybe even shift your own position, move towards what you actually desire, or at least make peace with your own interests.... fun, right?