Snapshots of Truth
John Zerzan
Truth is a banality. Everyone knows what is meant by it. Obvious and familiar. And certainly something more. “What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer” (Francis Bacon, 1625).
What makes truth true? How is truth possible––under what conditions––in an untrue life-world?
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto ponders “how our society has come to lost faith in the reality of [truth] and lose interest in the search for it” (1997). It takes a lot for the temper of the times to evolve into one of chaos, disillusionment, incoherence. This evolution has taken place as we acquire habits refined by experience, imposed by culture, and shaped by particular languages.
“The truth is out there,” proclaimed The X-Files, a popular television series of the ’90s. The truth is also within us. As Julia Kristeva put it, “Truthfulness has but one constant characteristic: it means, it has the sense of a meaning” (1969).
Truth has been expressed in various ways. For example, truth vis-à-vis language, representation. The grandfather of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), forcefully stressed the latter dimension: “True is an adjective applied solely to representations and things considered as representations” (1991). And perhaps more bluntly: “Truth is that which, claiming to be a representation, is a representation” (1991). But what if the practice of re-presenting is itself a wrong road? A very similar challenge was raised by Fernandez-Armesto (1997): “Language is a response to needs which arise from contacts with objects. But suppose it was the other way around? Suppose language precedes experience and we model the world to fit it?” Arguably, this is indeed what took place at some point. Language/re-presentation becomes dominant, shaping experience to fit it.
Truth and what it undergoes can be explored in terms of the modern technological epoch. Bruno Latour (quoted in Lemonnier, 1993) observes that “Truth, Efficiency, Profitability are the three sisters who have bewitched all those who have tried to apply ethnographic methods to modern science and technology. Paradoxically, it is Truth, in spite or because of her long philosophical past, who has been the first to go.”
Our historical existence has been obscured by the triumphant quest for technological control of nature and human life, as Martin Heidegger famously claimed. José Saramago’s 1996 novel The History of the Siege of Lisbon deserves quoting, a reminiscence: “…those most excellent and shining qualities which were so difficult to define and put into practice in times long past, when, although conscious of having invented falsehood, we still believed ourselves capable of living the truth.”
Wasteland
by John Zerzan
An obvious topic these days, eh? Wasteland is a part of nature not considered suitable for domestication. As a cultural term, it began to have traction in the West in the 17th century. A fine source regarding its evolution is Vittoria De Palma’s Wasteland: A History (2018).
A century ago, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” a modernist classic (1922), spoke to post-World War I disillusionment, spiritual barrenness, and fragmentation. The horrors of William Burrough’s Naked Lunch (1959) were a less focused American update.
Wasteland is everywhere. Federal communications official Newton Minow famously described television in 1962 as a vast cultural wasteland. In the 1980s an early role-playing videogame set in post-apocalyptic ruins bore the name Wasteland. John Matson’s “Space Age Wasteland” (2012) dealt with satellite debris. Mad Max and Philosophy: Thinking Through the Wasteland (Meyer and Koepsell, 2024) discussed the dystopian movie series of the 1980s.
The term is applied with or without discrimination or focus. But there is a corresponding reality, without a doubt. Consider Michael Holland’s introduction to Maurice Blanchot’s A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life (1943). He sums up Blanchot: “the [World War II] ruin that resulted was more than physical; it extended to the very essence of the world and the self’s relation to it.”
Alasdair MacIntyre portrayed virtue’s demise, its absence, as the price of modernity (After Virtue, 1981). What “belongs with all those who lived or will live in the depths under the wasteland and who will judge the wasteland, directly or symbolically,” wondered 19th century visionary William Blake (quoted in O’Malley, 1947). “How does everything that is to be appear so ill,” wrote Georg Trakl, an early 20th century Austrian poet drawn to the dark side. A suicide at age 27.
As the fact of overall wasteland has grown into an unmistakable reality, more voices add testimony. In the 1970s Paul Virilio describe the ebb of what could be seen as affirmative, “a world that is permeated by uncertainties and disorientation” (Halden, 2024). Ulrich Beck’s The Risk Society (1986) establishes fearful, bottom-line risk or danger as the central totality, which has demonstrably deepened over the ensuing decades. Robert Kaplan internationalizes that perspective in Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis (2025).
“The philosophical basis and practice of modern technology have nihilistic dimensions which place the future of the human race and the planet itself in jeopardy.” Gregory H. Davis wrote those lines in his 1981 book, Technology––Humanism or Nihilism. In the current AI-verse his words ring true, prescient. From a 1998 Jean Baudrillard interview: “It is no longer the human which thinks the world. Today it is the inhuman that thinks us.” Less abstractly, some thought the internet would improve society. Instead, it became society.
The techno-wasteland operates against mutual and embodies co-presence. We endure a falling away of the present from itself, “the fallen present,” as Andrew Murphie termed it.
We need to rescue critique from despair, claim fidelity to the promise of happiness preserved in tears. And I see deep-seated existence beginning to find itself and refuse the wasteland.
July 2026
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