Anti-Tech Movement Cannot Afford White Nationalism
“It follows that any movement that seeks to limit technology must make every effort to minimize divisions or differences among races or ethnic groups. Purely as a matter of strategy, racial and cultural blending must be promoted.
[…]
The ecofascists’ fixation on race puts them in the same family with the leftists, who likewise are fixated on race. The difference between the two is only that to the ecofascists the “white” race is the hero of the story, whereas the ordinary left makes the same race into the villain. The ecofascists and the ordinary leftists are only two sides of the same (counterfeit) coin. ” - Theodore John Kaczynski, Ecofascism: An Aberrant Branch of Leftism, 2020.
Within the Anti-Tech movement, racist tendencies—particularly those driven by white nationalist currents—appear to be gaining increasing influence. Yet this development stands in fundamental contradiction to the nature and objectives of the anti-tech movement itself. Modern technological civilization is a global phenomenon that transcends the control of any single nation or cultural sphere; it is not the product of one region alone. Accordingly, resistance to technological civilization must also be international in character. The Anti-tech movement that lacks cooperation across nations, ethnicities, and cultures is destined to be doomed to severe limitations.
White Nationalism—and the racism that almost inevitably accompanies it—gravely undermines such international cooperation. It fosters unnecessary hostility and distrust among anti-tech groups across the world, fragmenting the movement and ultimately weakening it as a whole.
This writer has personally encountered a case that illustrates this problem with particular clarity. An American individual who expressed extreme hostility toward Asians—especially East Asians represented by Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese—argued to this writer that anti-tech movement in East Asia are unnecessary or even harmful, offering the following claims.
First, East Asian societies are allegedly so collectivist and conformist that the emergence of a successful anti-tech organization there is impossible.
Second, any effort to spread anti-tech ideas in East Asia is therefore a waste of time and energy.
Third, the absence of anti-tech organizations in East Asia is not a problem but rather a benefit to the anti-tech movement as a whole, a claim underpinned by the implicit or explicit assumption of East Asians’ “inherent inferiority.”
Fourth, an anti-tech revolution in the West—represented by the United States and Europe—is sufficient to collapse technological civilization in its entirety, rendering East Asian participation unnecessary.
These claims, however, are demonstrably false on both historical and systemic grounds.
First, East Asia is by no means a region incapable of revolution. Xinhai Revolution, Chinese Communist Revolution, and other historical examples clearly demonstrate that East Asian societies have carried out large-scale social upheavals that overthrew existing orders and established new systems. To portray East Asians as inherently submissive or devoid of political agency is not an empirical observation but a prejudiced fiction contradicted by history.
Second, contemporary technological civilization no longer functions as a single, centralized system. It is increasingly reorganizing into a block-structured order: American bloc, Chinese bloc, European bloc, and others, each developing relatively autonomous industrial bases and supply chains. Under these conditions, even the collapse of the American–European bloc would not necessarily entail the collapse of the Chinese bloc. As a result, a Western anti-tech revolution alone would be unlikely to bring about the end of technological civilization as such. More plausibly, it would merely produce a shift in its civilizational center—replacing Western technological dominance with non-Western technological dominance. In other words, without global participation, a Western anti-tech revolution risks yielding not the abolition of technological civilization, but its geographic and cultural reconfiguration.
At this point, an additional clarification is necessary. Individuals or groups within the Anti-Tech movement who promote white supremacist ideas or spread hostility toward non-white peoples are not necessarily themselves “white” in the idealized sense they invoke. Over the past half century, advances in global transportation and mobility have led to widespread cohabitation among people of radically different skin colors and cultural backgrounds, alongside a significant increase in mixed-race populations. Under such conditions, it is entirely possible—and in practice not uncommon—for anti-tech groups espousing anti–non-white rhetoric to include mixed-race or non-white members among their ranks.
Such groups may attempt to use the presence of non-white or mixed-race members as a shield against accusations of racism. This, however, is a deliberate evasion of the real issue. The core question is not the skin color or ancestry of individual participants, but the ideology they endorse and the language and actions through which they inject that ideology into the movement.
Regardless of the outward identity of its members, any group that imports racial hostility, ethnic hierarchy, or exclusionary narratives into the anti-tech movement is engaging in racism in substance, not merely in appearance. Racism is not a matter of who speaks, but of what is being said and what consequences it produces. Skin color cannot function as an exemption or a moral alibi.
For this reason, if the anti-tech movement genuinely seeks to challenge technological civilization itself, the exclusion of entire peoples or cultures is not only morally indefensible but also strategically and theoretically self-defeating. Racism and nationalism do not strengthen unity; they operate as toxins that sever potential lines of solidarity and entrench internal fragmentation.
Therefore, the anti-tech movement must draw a clear and uncompromising line against those who spread racial hatred or ethnic nationalism under its banner. If the movement aims at a fundamental critique and dismantling of technological civilization, racists—regardless of their own skin color—and exclusionary nationalists are not comrades. They are obstacles: forces that undermine the movement’s purpose from within and must be decisively rejected.