There is a general sense today that the strengthening digital surveillance and algorithmic powers of corporations and governments does not bode well for most people. Using terms like techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, techno-modernism, and platform capitalism, scholars increasingly identify the digital and technical at the center of the powers of domination that allow the rich to grow ever richer and more powerful while destroying the Earth. CEO’s pass in and out of the White House’s hallways and meeting rooms to sell the government integrated databases used to sort populations as “citizens” or “domestic terrorists” and weapons targeting systems used to determine who is a “civilian” or “combatant.”
These machines of surveillance, classification, and war are among the primary technologies of contemporary state-corporate control, understood as powers that create obedience and repress and kill those the state deems a threat to established orders.1 In the USA, Nikhil Pal Singh describes a new “homeland empire” where the Trump administration is working to create a “borderless American power” that collapses the domination of people across the world “into a single domain of state impunity.”2 It follows, then, that breaking and evading its technologies is one of the primary ways, if not a precondition, for refusing this empire.
Now more than ever, as authoritarianism and ecological crises threaten to engulf the planet, a luddite revival must be considered: a going dark in manifold ways and meanings. Such a clandestine refusal entails avoiding, diluting, and falsifying biometrics and online data scraping; becoming opaque to satellites and flock cameras; and scaling-down electronic signals and energy signatures. Rebellion does not require rejecting all technology and virtual connection, but striving for formulations of strategic darkness. Deep resistance becomes dark degrowth when movements not only refuse legibility but also regenerate the capacity to live with analog and organic technologies, organizations, and ecologies—what some engineers and planners of alternative economies call liberation technologies.3 Such forms of insurgency can amass the power required to create openings for resurgent lifeways that center collective economies of craft and artisanal labor in convivial, low-energy lifeworlds to sustain and repair the ecological basis of life.
Dark degrowth exists as a kernel of counterpower. It’s real in ongoing protest movements against rising authoritarian corporate-state forces such as the Black Power New Afrikan movements in the USA and the Dark Movement (Gerakan Gelap) across the Indonesian archipelago. These are movements taking form underground and are hard to account for through electronic means. They are unseeable, or at least not nearly as perceptible as the average fully-identifiable consumer capitalist patsy, openly-online and plugged-in. Both movements emerged from years-long, lifelong even, still-ongoing riotous coordinated uprisings: nocturnal street protests, guerrilla property destruction, and digital subterfuge. They operate both online and off, both exposed to and beneath algorithmic detection. United by their respective government leaders’ affections for strongman tactics, poorly conceived luxury real estate deals, and full-throated endorsement of capitalist exploitation and consumption, the New Afrikan and Dark Movement resistances, difficult to see as they are, are the opaque thread of survival among ongoing ecological collapse.
This ongoing collapse is not darkness but white-hot. Luminous sparks and flows of accelerating extraction and the exploitation of planetary resources and life have triggered cascading metabolic crises: climate breakdown, toxicity, livelihood loss, social atomization. Crisis creates discontent without predetermined political valence. MAGA exemplifies the easy reactionary expressions of this animus: a drill-baby-drill and bomb-baby-bomb petro-nationalist uprising channeling the rage of generations taken for a ride by the capitalist classes. Yet in white Right politics there is no stopping this ride, only a doubling back toward capitalist-led warfare, authoritarianism, and exploitation. Part backlash to the demands of the dispossessed for a better world, part symptom of the impossibility of sustaining capitalist profits and economic growth ad nauseam on a finite planet, MAGA takes the inequality, excess, and waste of imperial consumption as a perverse goal of white privilege. All while the accelerationists in their basements, dungeons, and Department of War offices rub their hands with glee. War, more war, fire storms, floods, and famines all come ever quicker now, threatening to become a blur of accelerating savagery. Dark degrowth rejects the accelerationists’ fetishization of bringing collapse closer faster by recognizing that political movements must build everything needed for a pleasurable life from where we lay, sit, and labor, now. There is no collapse needed to begin. Alternatives wait for those who know how to move from white and transparent to dark and opaque.
Insurgence and resurgence require darker, cooler, and less energetic and materially demanding political economic forms. Autonomous lifeways dark to techno-capitalists are not only clandestine refusals of digital capture and control, they are also slower home and community cottage industries and economies not exposed to digital techno-infrastructures of domination. Cultivating artichokes on the dry-cropped hillsides of Los Angeles and building electric motorbikes from scavenged parts in Sumatra are acts of sustenance existing outside of online corporate data-scraping platforms, state surveillance, and consumption cycles. Such resistance is affirmative life-making because techno-capitalist state control and management of people as “populations” makes people live and die along an algorithmic calculus of sustained economic growth no matter the cost to the living, what Achille Mbembe has called necropolitics.4 Smartphones, passports, transport tracking, biometric categorization, credit scores, and social media all render legible. Going dark is to stop emitting these signals and communications and to scramble them.
Struggles can restore embodied connections to land that digital capitalism systematically severs. Resurgence, in this sense, is re-Earthing: a relearning and recreation of cultivation rhythms, watershed functions, and seasonal and temporal migrations. These are ways of building material, cultural, social, and eventually even technological autonomies buffered from Right repression, supply chain collapses, and platform blackouts or shutdowns. They take form as what Tiffany Lethabo King conceives of as Earth’s Black shoals: liminal, shifting constellations of land and water where Black, Indigenous, and other human and more-than-human-ecological life experience suffering, refusal, eros, pleasure, and care.5 Think Indonesian peasants rewilding European agribusiness monoculture plantations and deep South, deep green crews building off-grid food cultivation and sharing networks in the USA’s federal forest estates.
Dark degrowth enacts metabolic contraction as a fortification of territorial sovereignty, all within the deadly dangerous state but underneath it and just beyond its reach. Planting food in home-gardens next to where the guns are buried near tunnels that connect up on the mountain where clean water bubbles up from a spring near a cave where a fire burns as hope eternal. This Dark Mountain is both a place, I shouldn’t say where, and a Southern USA weapons manufacturer, based not too far and not too close from there. Both are committed to ending tyranny of all kinds. The company makes nearly indestructible, packable, bolt-action rifles capable of silently firing a range of ammunition calibers. It’s a gun designed to take down game and enemies, without detection and shooting whatever bullets happen to be on hand. This manufacturer rejects militarized automatic weapons, of which the American AR-15 is the most emblematic, to draw the line at crafting a single shot gun that is no technology of war but nevertheless an effort to provide a tool for a modicum of self-defense within USA gun cultures. Along with this dark art of survival come ways of communicating via scrambled Diné wind talkers’ code spoken through encrypted mesh radio networks not reliant on the internet or cell infrastructures—only friends and comrades spread across the dark caves, tunnels, and mountain ranges.
If room to maneuver and evade is to exist in multi-scalar, terraforming capacities, it will also require an unmappable metabolic “night” of scaling-down energy consumption, abandoning grid dependencies, and living outside of capitalist commodity circuits, especially digital platform economies as they exist today. All of this is not only possible, it is unfolding in places like LA’s Compton neighborhoods, where small cliques of Black Power liberationists have lived without social security numbers or state-issued IDs for four generations. Many don’t pay taxes. These lifeways are an epistemic reorientation from visibility, brightness, white, and light towards blackness and darkness. These Black Power movements draw on centuries-old subaltern maroon knowledges, those African and Indigenous enslaved peoples of the Americas who escaped and evaded colonial slavers to establish their own settlements and economies just outside of imperial control.
Across the Pacific, the Dark Movement of the Indonesian archipelago networks together different dissident formations against a joined rising military authoritarianism and capitalist exploitation of the archipelago’s peoples and ecologies. The movement operates through a loose network of groups of urban students, delivery and taxi drivers, workers in the country’s vast informal economies, and more traditional labor and peasant unions. There are no unified demands, just a black flag and dissident action, including city squats and land occupations, infrastructure sabotage, and destruction of the luxury homes of so-called public servants. The movement enacts a dark ecology of underground resistance that refuses state legibility and creates hundreds of small autonomous zones outside of state surveillance. The movement reached its latest crest in August 2025, when everyday people took over the streets, burned down congress and police buildings, and ransacked the Indonesia finance minister’s mansion during an uprising that involved tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, of demonstrators.6
Of course, clandestine actions don’t necessarily embody emancipatory potential; underground formations can traffic in criminal violence or commons regeneration. They typically do both at once, like when punk hoodlums look to make a new start at the peasant farm commune, with some transforming into helpful comrades and others falling back into their thuggish ways. Within these dark zones of society and the economy, many people strive for analog, acoustic, and organic practices and technologies that can’t be reduced to data, commodities, or algorithmic/AI logics. They do things like seed saving, play board games, embrace dumb phones, learn to 3D print medical devices as well as weapons, navigate by the stars, and practice midwifery, so at least women can choose to give birth at home, with all the comfort, joy, care, and the choice about whether or not to enroll their children in state databases that doing so can provide. These are all vital dark arts and knowledge, technologies of care, creativity, and self-defense needed to sustain insurgent and resurgent movements.
If war societies now yearn for total biopolitical tracking and control (think both MAGA’s pugnacious violence against Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and Palestine, as well as the violence inflicted against its own populace, or Indonesia’s plantation and mining violence), the reproduction of capitalist states seems to portend at least a few barbaric continuations still-ahead. Such violence, like antagonistic strikes against oppositional foreign governments and the paranoid repression of supposed internal threats from leftist antifa and the non-white “other,” continues to generate uprisings, which are compounded by planetary ecocides and climate chaos. Within these upheavals, if not overtly but somatically, rebellion is nearly universal. It’s a time for going dark, embracing the resurgent powers of the underground: secret organizing, non-electronic signatures, gold dust as currency, economies of care, kindness, and compassion without any single determining military or monetary authority. As resurgent movements work to reconnect peoples to the land and their rights to dwell, eat, drink, and breathe without exposure to poisons—or to live without fear of needing to run for their lives from federal forces’ flashing white border patrol lights—but instead, as Cooperation Jackson says, work towards “building and fighting,” they must also work to become unknowable.7 As Indigenous anarchist Klee Benally thought of living a life of decolonial refusal and rebellion, this is a struggle of unmapping colonial geographies and becoming incomprehensible to the settler-state.8
As resurgent movements go about re-Earthing in ways that offer viable postcapitalist planetary ecologies, going dark requires a turning away from the zealotry of technological solutionism, even from its leftist expression known as eco-modernism.9 Humans have never invented our way out of ecological problems; even vaccines, while vital for multispecies health, have not ended the poxes. Innovation matters, yet far too many innovations are contributing to the sixth extinction event. Cryptocurrency is becoming both liberationists’ and mafiosos’ dream technology, as is AI for authoritarians and anti-humanists. Both technologies bring serious threat to the planet’s atmosphere and waterways, using as much electricity and water as entire nations, accelerating ecological breakdown. The Matrix’s dystopian vision of humans enslaved into the role of biological batteries might seem far away but also relatable, given the energy demands of Claude, whose agentic “hands” increasingly control the levers of the digital infrastructures that underpin most life today.10
Against a non-living world of an uncountable number of electronic signals, planetary limits demand degrowth. Not a movement back to the primordial caves, but to new, more comfortable but still-opaque caves where emancipatory learning happens, where resistance survives, where a pluriverse of lifeways is realized. Degrowth offers a different kind of freedom than capitalist freedom: less stuff, more insurgent opacity to undermine the empire's panopticon. War society—both MAGA and other authoritarian formations—is capitalist reality. Resurgence promises the supersession of these formations by insurgent ecologies and their restoration of human survival within Earth's regenerative capacities. Dark degrowth is defined by counter-arts of strategic invisibility and opacity: crews that can't be turned into data, territories that can't be mapped, food practices that don't require the empire's infrastructures, or at least not many of them. Insurgent survival is darkness, not as despair or depression but as the absorption of spectral energies for building worlds outside of capitalist technologies’ totalizing reaches.
See, for example, Sophia Goodfriend, “Algorithmic State Violence: Automated Surveillance and Palestinian Dispossession in Hebron's Old City,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 55, no. 3 (2023): 461–78.
Nikhil Pal Singh, “Homeland Empire,” Equator, January 14, 2026, ➝.
Angela Luzia Miranda and Lucas Barbosa da Paz, “Tecnologia y liberación: una lectura desde el pensamiento de Dussel,” Problemata - Revista Internacional de Filosofia 10, no. 1 (2019): 234–55.
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
Kathleen Magramo, “Indonesia’s Fury and Deep Resentment Rages on Despite Crackdown,” CNN World, September 3, 2025, ➝.
Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya, Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi (Daraja Press, 2017).
Klee Benally, No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred (Detritus Books, 2023).
John Asafu-Adjaye et al., An Ecomodernist Manifesto (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015), ➝.
“Scaling Managed Agents: Decoupling the Brain From the Hands,” Anthropic, April 08, 2026, ➝.