Key Principle
Chapter XXV converts reactionary radicalism (Chapter XXIV) from political philosophy into survival strategy. If Chapter XXIV names what to defend, Chapter XXV explains how to defend it against overwhelming power -- by becoming illegible to the Machine rather than confronting it.
James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed (2009) studies "Zomia" -- the Southeast Asian highlands where peoples escaped state power for two millennia. These cultures are not "primitive" or "left behind" but deliberate escapees: "Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities" (Chapter XXV). They built cultures with features precisely inverse to the state: rugged landscape versus flatlands, diverse shifting crops versus monoculture, mobile population versus settled, fluid social structures versus hierarchy, and the ability to fragment and scatter when pursued. Scott reverses the civilisational narrative: "barbarians" are not failed citizens but strategic refusers.
Malcolm Yapp's term "jellyfish tribes" names dispersed cultures of refusal that defend autonomy through illegibility and dispersibility: "scattering, and/or changing livelihood strategy, make the group invisible or unattractive as object of appropriation" (Chapter XXV). The Berber proverb crystallises the logic: "Divide that ye be not ruled" (Chapter XXV). Tribal groups expanded and contracted -- dividing into smaller units to evade the state, reconsolidating when the state withdrew.
The ancient Chinese state distinguished "raw" (sheng) barbarians who live entirely outside state control from "cooked" (shu) barbarians who live within it but maintain inner refusal and covert solidarity with the raw. Most modern resisters will be cooked barbarians: "in the Machine but not of it," building "cultures-within-cultures -- parallel economies and ways of living" (Chapter XXV). Shatter zones need not be geographical: "they can be within our homes and even within our hearts" (Chapter XXV) -- connecting Scott's political anthropology to the book's spiritual programme.
Why This Matters
Dispersal and illegibility matter more than direct confrontation because the Machine cannot be defeated on its own terms. Ellul's insight governs the chapter: "The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilization is to give them the slip" (Chapter XXV). The Machine self-expands structurally -- "no secret elite conspiracy is necessary...as the system expands, its expansion creates problems...which it responds to with more expansion and more control" (Chapter XXV). Every head-on political opposition generates exactly the kind of legible, organised target the Machine is built to absorb or crush. The jellyfish tribe does not fight the Machine; it becomes invisible to it.
This also explains why the emerging total system resembles Huxley's Brave New World more than Orwell's 1984. Control through pleasure, convenience, and voluntary dependency is harder to resist than control through fear -- because there is nothing obvious to resist. The jellyfish model answers this: you do not attack the pleasures, you build alternative sources of meaning so deep-rooted that the Machine's offerings lose their gravitational pull. "Like small furry mammals running unnoticed beneath the feet of tyrannosaurs, we build our own little worlds on the margins and wait for the coming of the meteor" (Chapter XXV).
Good Examples
Zomia. The highland peoples of Southeast Asia maintained statelessness for two thousand years not by accident but by design. Their entire cultural apparatus -- agricultural methods, kinship structures, even oral (rather than written) traditions -- was engineered to make state appropriation impossible. Sir Stamford Raffles, encountering free Sumatrans, complained: "until they are congregated and organised under something like authority, nothing can be done with them" (Chapter XXV). People who are free are people with whom the Machine can do nothing.
The jellyfish expansion-contraction. Yapp's tribal groups functioned like jellyfish: expanding in safe conditions, contracting and scattering when threatened. This is the opposite of fortress-building. A fortress can be besieged; a jellyfish cannot. The Berber practice of deliberate division -- "Divide that ye be not ruled" -- inverts the state's logic of consolidation.
Cooked barbarians as modern archetype. The raw-cooked distinction makes the strategy applicable now. Most people cannot exit digital civilisation entirely. But they can draw lines, build parallel economies, maintain inner refusal, and cultivate solidarity with those who live further outside. The shatter zone becomes interior -- prayer, attention, askesis as spaces the Machine cannot map or colonise.
Counterpoints
Can illegibility survive a surveillance state? Scott's Zomia peoples evaded pre-modern states. Digital surveillance, biometric tracking, and cashless economies make physical illegibility far harder. The question is whether interior shatter zones -- the spiritual and communal dimensions -- can compensate for the loss of geographical escape. Kingsnorth acknowledges but does not fully resolve this tension.
Is self-barbarisation romanticised? The "raw barbarian" life involved genuine hardship, poverty, and vulnerability. Celebrating it from within a literate, digital culture risks aestheticising deprivation. The cooked-barbarian position is more honest but also more precarious -- perpetually compromised, perpetually dependent on the system it claims to refuse.
Does dispersal sacrifice collective power? Jellyfish tribes survive by scattering, but scattering also prevents the coordinated action that could change structures. The strategy accepts permanent marginality as the price of autonomy. Whether this is wisdom or resignation depends on whether one believes the Machine can be reformed from within -- and Kingsnorth clearly believes it cannot.
Key Quotes
"Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys." (Chapter XXV, quoting Scott)
"The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilization is to give them the slip, to learn how to live on the edge of this totalitarian society, not simply rejecting it, but passing it through the sieve of God's judgment." (Chapter XXV, quoting Ellul)
"Divide that ye be not ruled." (Chapter XXV, Berber proverb)
"Like small furry mammals running unnoticed beneath the feet of tyrannosaurs, we build our own little worlds on the margins and wait for the coming of the meteor." (Chapter XXV)
Rules of Thumb
Do not attack the Machine; give it the slip. Direct confrontation creates a legible target. Withdrawal, dispersal, and illegibility are strategically superior to opposition.
Know whether you are raw or cooked. Most people are cooked barbarians -- inside the system but cultivating inner refusal. Accept this honestly rather than pretending to a purity you cannot sustain.
Build cultures-within-cultures. Parallel economies, local food networks, communal education, shared prayer -- anything that creates dependency on human bonds rather than on the Machine's infrastructure.
Shatter zones are interior as well as geographical. Prayer, attention, voluntary limits on technology -- these are spaces the Machine cannot map. Cultivate them as deliberately as the Zomia peoples cultivated their highland terrain.
If the Machine can do nothing with you, you are free. Raffles' complaint about the Sumatrans is the test: does the system need you congregated and organised? Then scatter. Does it need your data? Then withhold it. Does it need your attention? Then withdraw it.
Related References
- Reactionary Radicalism and the Moral Economy - the political stance jellyfish tribes embody
- Technological Askesis — Spiritual Discipline and Technology - the spiritual practice within the tribe
- The Raindance — Rootedness and Restoration - the culminating vision of resistance