In 2014, we republished the Dark Mountain Manifesto as a paperback book. This new essay was written to introduce the text, telling the story of how it came about and where it led us.
Author: Dougald Hine
Wherever you look, to the left or to the right, you will have a hard time finding a politician who doesn’t want to create more jobs. They may argue over the best means to do so, but they would hardly think of asking whether employment as we know it is a good thing.
As shadows lengthen over our whole way of living, we may once more be in need of the kind of storytelling that stalks truths so monstrous they turn our minds to stone if looked at straight on.
The radical thought of Ivan Illich speaks more clearly than ever to our times, I argue, in this review of a new selection of his essays.
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Five Years on a Mountain
Five years on from the launch of the Dark Mountain Manifesto, Paul Kingsnorth and I spoke together as part of Schumacher College’s Earth Talks series.
For the fifth Dark Mountain book, I wrote this essay looking back on what we’d learned from four years of running the Uncivilisation festival.
An essay for Aeon magazine on information, boredom and how the survivors of the sixties counterculture shaped the story of the internet.
From his rise to prominence in the late 1960s to the last conversations with David Cayley, published as The Rivers North of the Future, Ivan Illich sought to uncover the hidden assumptions on which modern industrial societies had been built.
The Tories did not simply invent a half-baked cover story, they took other people’s ideas for a joyride, then smashed them into the dead end of their own ideology. The challenge now is to salvage what is worth saving of those ideas from the wreckage.
This book is a document of the work of Robert and Geska Brečević (aka Performing Pictures), but also an enquiry into the discomfort it has caused among their art-world contemporaries.