An Anarchist’s Guide to Erewhon
From The Transmetropolitan Review
Chapter I: Waste Lands
If the reader will excuse me, I’ll say nothing of the circumstances which led me to leave my native country; the narrative would be tedious to you and painful to myself. Needless to say, I found myself at the base of tall, foreign mountains, brown and black and gray, sparsely speckled with small plants of the darkest green. Beneath these titanic mountains ran a great causeway, a freeway, commonly known to the locals as the 210, or the Foothill Freeway.
At the terminus of this great causeway, I found myself in a city called Pasadena, although the sun was now setting, causing the mountains to darken. I parked my wagon behind a large stone building illuminated with artificial light, and from here I entered that immense cavernous structure, filled with more twists and turns than I expected.
Suddenly, I was back outside, on an entirely different thoroughfare from where I parked my wagon, and when I looked up, I beheld an awful symmetry towering above me, bearing a radiant marquee with the foreign word EREWHON emblazoned across the cold, smooth stone. Unable to help myself, I entered this strange temple called EREWHON and beheld a scene which still haunts me to this day, as I pen these words.
The light was overpowering, and when my vision returned, I witnessed the same awful symmetry, with rows of foodstuffs perfectly arranged, leaving no idle space on the walls or surfaces of this glowing tableau. I wandered for what felt like hours before I remembered the foreign currency in my pocket and noticed that the strange numbers below the foodstuffs indicated the amount of coins I needed to obtain this much needed nourishment.
Most everything was beyond my limited means to purchase, and no matter how much I added up the coins in my pocket, the amount never seemed to be enough to purchase anything substantial. Furthermore, most of the foodstuffs were cold, requiring a fire to heat up, so I soon forgot about obtaining nourishment and wandered ever further, now in search of a water-closet, suddenly feeling the call-of-nature after my long wagon journey.
I feared I would have to part with one of my few coins to obtain entry to this EREWHON water-closest, but to my surprise these facilities were available free of charge. However, when I entered the closet, I couldn’t find anything besides a wash basin and faucet. The walls were white tile aside from a single wooden wall with multiple seams in the panels. On a whim, I pushed against one of the wooden panels and found that it swung open, revealing my sought after commode.
It was while relieving myself that I once again noticed the awful symmetry of this water-closet, mirroring the symmetry of the rows of foodstuffs. This symmetry was quite maddening, but then I glimpsed a foreign color in the corner of my eye, and to my great amusement, I saw that some rebel had left one of their markings on the wooden shelf of this water-closest.
Drawn in the darkest of black inks was the letter A encircled by the letter O, a symbol of Anarchism, as I have come to learn. The ink looked strong enough to have penetrated through the thin varnish and soaked into the grain of the wood, ensuring its outline would linger beyond any buffing or sanding of the surface. I must have come to a dark place, given the rebels had left their mark here, and so, with my call-of-nature satisfied, I left EREWHON and returned to the waste lands through which my journey would continue.
Chapter II: In The Wool-Shed
As you probably noticed, I wrote that first part in the style of the 1872 science fiction novel Erewhon; or, Over the Range, written by Samuel Butler. Very few people in 2024 seem to have read Erewhon, not even the journalists paid money to write about it, but far more people have heard about EREWHON, the hip luxury grocery store that has strategically placed itself in 10 key locations across the Los Angeles basin, including the new Pasadena store described above.
As many people know but few care about, the EREWHON grocery store was named after the Erewhon novel, although most journalists struggle to find a clear connection between them. Most sources agree that the EREWHON grocery store is so LA, or very Los Angeles, meaning it is a phenomenon which could only have emerged in the Los Angeles basin, specifically west of the Los Angeles River in the area around Hollywood, center of the global culture industry.
Hollywood received a shot-in-the-arm in 2024 with the release of Dune: Part Two, a smash sci-fi blockbuster based on the legendary novel by Frank Herbert. This film, released during the Artificial Intelligence (AI) grifter gold-rush, reminded Hollywood that some bizarre tome written by a weird, bearded, flesh-and-blood human back in 1965 could have more inherent draw than any AI-written slop the tech-cretins were capable of churning out.
Both parts of Dune were a triumphant success, financially and culturally, but hidden inside the source material was a jihad against technology, a Butlerian Jihad, waged against AI ten thousand years before the plot begins. All thinking machines were destroyed and forbidden, forcing humans to learn to use their minds and bodies to their fullest potential so that machines might never rise again. In this way, Dune carries a powerful anti-AI message, and as it turns out, Frank Herbert named his Butlerian Jihad after Samuel Butler, the author of Erewhon.
Back in the old days, Erewhon was really popular. When it was published in 1872, the closest cousin it had was Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726 by Jonathan Swift, where the narrator Gulliver visits many strange lands that satirized contemporary British society. Before that there was Utopia, published by Thomas More in 1516, which described a mysterious foreign land where toilets are made of gold, private property doesn’t exist, doors don’t have locks, and yet slavery is allowed. Utopia was not only a satire of contemporary society, it was the birth of the utopian novel, a hybrid genre that was mostly satirical when Samuel Butler added his Erewhon to the cannon.
Erewhon enjoys the distinction of being the first novel to deal with the problems of AI, and I’ll get to those details later, but let it be known that the EREWHON grocery store is currently deploying workforce management (WFM) solutions powered by Legion Technologies’ AI-based WFM platform, which translates in plain speech to automating many roles of the traditional manager, such as scheduling, gauging demand, and communicating with employees (which the AI does via text-message). On top of this, EREWHON uses AI to write product descriptions for the items it carries, the prices of which are displayed in the store on small digital screens.
This all might seem banal (given the current AI grifter gold-rush) if the grocery store didn’t also carry the name EREWHON. While private property was abolished in the Utopia novel, technology itself was abolished in Erewhon, specifically because it would give rise to AI. Given that EREWHON’s current owners are a pack of neo-liberal capitalists, it’s easy to see how the contents of Erewhon mean next to nothing in their calculations. However, their ignorance does produce a strange cognitive effect in all those who ask why the store is named EREWHON. Most would assume it’s all a cynical joke, on the consumer as well as the curious, but as you’ll see, the roots of this cognitive dissonance go way back to its stinky hippie origins in the 1960s.
Chapter Three: Up The River
Before delving into the hippie world and its discontents, let’s get into Erewhon; or, Over the Range by Samuel Butler, published in 1872. The first chapter begins like many adventure novels of the time, with the narrator heading off to a distant land where he can profit off grazing sheep.
The narrator is presented as an average British colonist, making his money off wool, but soon he hears rumors of gold deep in the mountains, and by the second chapter he’s recruited a local indigenous man named Chowbuck to act as his guide. This guide tries to warn him of something, he nodded his head and gibbered, and pointed repeatedly to the mountains, but the narrator is not dissuaded, and they started on their journey not very long after the summer solstice of 1870.
This duo travel for weeks, following a river deep into the mountains, but eventually the gorge becomes dangerously steep, although not impassible. The terrain resembles the rugged mountains of New Zealand, the place where Samuel Butler lived and herded sheep in the 1860s. However, this distant land is never named in the text, and the descriptions could very easily be mistaken for the mountainous interiors of Argentina or Chile.
During this journey, the narrator refers to his pack as his swag, shedding light on the origins of the contemporary swag bag, or free promotional merchandise, a common item in Los Angeles. After explaining how he tied his own swag to his body, the narrator claims this is the easiest way of carrying a heavy swag, for one can rest one’s self by shifting the burden from one shoulder to the other. This swag ends up burdening him as he crosses the raging river, but even after being fully submerged in the rapids, he finds his belongings dry, given he tied it well.
The fourth chapter ends with the narrator warning, I can assure the reader that I had had a far worse time of it than I have told him; and I strongly recommend him to remain in Europe if he can; or, at any rate, in some country which has been explored and settled, rather than go into places where others have not been before him.
The narrator soon makes a raft and hurtles down the river with his swag, and after landing on a remote beachhead, he informs the reader that he baptized his native guide Chowbuck during the journey, only to have his convert run away because of an impenetrably stupid nature. It turns out the narrator was the grandson of an archdeacon by my mother’s side [and my] father was a clergyman of the English Church. I was therefore sufficiently qualified for the task.
By setting up the narrator as an arrogant religious colonizer, the first glimpse of satire begins to emerge, especially when he reveals that after his baptism, Chowbuck tried for the twentieth time to steal the brandy, which made me rather unhappy as to whether I could have baptized him rightly.
Chowbuck left him alone the mountains, as mentioned above, and so the narrator presses onward, observing that each moment I felt increasing upon me that dreadful doubt as to my own identity—as to the continuity of my past and present existence—which is the first sign of that distraction which comes on those who have lost themselves in the bush.
The narrator eventually succeeds in crossing over the range, explaining the novel’s subtitle, and on the other side of those mountains he finds ten terrifying statues, precisely what Chowbuck warned him of. Designed to scare off outsiders, the narrator explains that the inhuman beings into whose heart the Evil One had put it to conceive these statues, had made their heads into a sort of organ-pipe, so that their mouths should catch the wind and sound with its blowing. It was horrible. However, just paragraphs later, the narrator compares those organ-pipe notes to the prelude of composer George Frideric Handel’s Harpsichord Suite in B flat major, HWV 434, with the musical notation printed in the original text.
From here, the narrator sets off down a narrow path which followed a small watercourse, and eventually comes within sight of the plains, on which I could see many a town and city, with buildings that had lofty steeples and rounded domes. He walks until he gets tired, takes a nap, and when he wakes up he hears the sound of chattering and laughter, and there approached two lovely girls, of about seventeen and eighteen years old, dressed each in a sort of linen gaberdine, with a girdle around the waist. They saw me. I sat quite still and looked at them, dazzled with their extreme beauty. The girls eventually run off, startled by the outsider, and they return with a bunch of native men, causing the narrator to experience a brief moment of fright.
As he explained, they were all powerful men. I might have been a match for any one of them singly, for I have been told that I have more to glory in the flesh than in any other respect, being over six feet and proportionally strong; but any two could have soon mastered me, even were I not so bereft of energy by my recent adventures. My colour seemed to surprise them most, for I have light hair, blue eyes, and a fresh complexion.
These natives end up being non-hostile, and one of them pointed to the mountain, in the direction of the statues, and made a grimace in imitation of one of them. I laughed and shuddered expressively, whereon they all burst out laughing too, and chattered hard to one another. This pack of natives escort him to closest hamlet and when he arrives the narrator notes that altogether the village was exceedingly like one of those that one comes upon in descending the less known passes over the Alps on to Lombardy.
When it came to the inhabitants of this hamlet, their type was more that of the most robust Italians than any other; their manners also were eminently Italian, in their entire unconsciousness of self. Having travelled a good deal in Italy, I was struck with little gestures of the hand and shoulders which constantly reminded me of that country. For whatever reason, Samuel Butler decided to model the inhabitants of this hidden realm as Italianesque, and as his narrator remarks, I was, indeed, at once struck with the primitive character of their appliances, for they seemed to be some five or six hundred years behind Europe in their inventions, but this is the case in many Italian village.
Italians were certainly exotic to most British people of that era, just as most Britons arrived in Italy after passing over the Alps, and perhaps this was all Butler could conjure up when he imagined the inhabitants of distant Erewhon.
The narrator soon takes thing to the next level by asking, was it possible that they might be the lost ten tribes of Israel, of whom I had heard both my grandfather and my father make mention as existing in an unknown country, and awaiting a final return to Palestine? Was it possible that I might have been designed by providence as the instrument of their conversion?
The narrator continues his colonial arrogance, admitting that I had never hitherto felt drawn towards becoming a missionary myself; and indeed had always admired, and envied, and respected them, more than I had exactly liked them. If the inhabitants of this strange land were in fact the lost tribes if Israel, the narrator meant to convert them to Christianity, and in this manner the sixth chapter ends with the protagonist following the natives ever further into the land of Erewhon. However, as he walks with these Italianesque people through their foreign country, he notes that there was something about my hosts which told me that they had got me, and meant to keep me, in spite of all their goodness.
Chapter Four: The Saddle
For the record, Samuel Butler hated Christianity, being forced into it by his tyrannical Reverend father, who regularly beat him. After fully abandoning the faith, Butler went on his four year journey to New Zealand, and he earned enough money raising sheep to be independent when he returned to London in 1864. By then he’d already published his classic text Darwin Among The Machines, which predicted that in the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race to the machines.
Butler had quite an extensive correspondence with Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species he greatly admired, and he even visited Darwin at his home. According to Butler, his first visit took place a few weeks after I had published Erewhon in 1872. Mr. Darwin was exceedingly kind and I enjoyed my visit very much. I could see, however, that he did not like Erewhon, in spite of the polite things he said. Butler and Darwin also had a prolonged philosophical feud which lasted decades, better explained in other texts, but when they first met in 1872, the tragedy of the Paris Commune still hung heavy in the air, and as you’ll see, even Charles Darwin got involved.
As few people outside of France even remember, the city of Paris rose up against the fledgling Third Republic in March 1871 and proclaimed itself the Paris Commune. While many anarchists were involved, the uprising was hardly anarchist, and numerous internal blunders contributed to its downfall. At the end of May 1871, the Republic sent in its troops and proceeded to massacre over 30,000 people, forever drenching the stones of Paris with blood. This massacre is largely forgotten in favor of a more romantic image of Paris, currently embodied by the hit television show Emily in Paris.
Over a month before the massacre of the Commune, an anarchist geographer named Elisée Reclus marched off with the Commune’s soldiers on April 3 to go fight the Republican soldiers on the outskirts of Paris. Reclus’ entire unit was surrounded, his commander brutally executed, and the famed geographer was taken prisoner. He was moved from prison to prison until his trial in Versailles, and on November 15 he was sentenced to life in the New Caldedonia penal colony, just northwest of New Zealand. However, this penal sentence was immediately challenged by Reclus’ many allies, and among them was none other than Charles Darwin, author of Origin of Species.
In the December 26 issue of the Pall Mall Gazette, numerous British intellectuals signed a collective statement in support of Elisée Reclus, including Charles Darwin. Addressed to Adolph Thiers, the President of France and butcher of the Commune, the statement read in part, we dare to think that the life of a man like Monsieur Élisée Reclus—whose already widely acknowledged services to literature and science did but promise, from the ripeness of his vigorous manhood, to signal still more for the future—belongs not only to the country which has given him birth, but to the world, and that in reducing such a man to silence, or sending him a prisoner beyond the pale of civilization, France will be but crippling herself, and diminishing her influence over the world.
Thanks to this letter, and the support of French intellectuals, Elisée Reclus had his penal sentence commuted to a decade of exile on February 3, 1872. He was released into Switzerland on March 14, 1872 and spent the next years living along Lake Geneva writing his massive Universal Geography, a work greatly admired by both Charles Darwin and Samuel Butler.
During the rise and fall of the Commune, Butler finished the text of Erewhon and had just found a publisher by the time Reclus’ sentence was commuted. As mentioned above above, Butler first met with Darwin shortly after Erewhon was published, and the famed evolutionist didn’t much like it. While there’s no record, it’s likely that Butler and Darwin discussed the successful campaign to free Elisée Reclus from a penal sentence, and both of them certainly counted among this anarchist’s supporters, even if they didn’t identify as anarchists.
Butler made no mention of the Paris Commune in Erewhon, but gas-filled balloons are a subject that dominate the novel’s conclusions, and Butler makes specific reference to balloons being used in Paris during the great Siege that proceeded the Commune’s creation. Not only were balloons used to carry messages when the Prussians encircled and bombarded Paris in 1870, they were used by the Commune when it was encircled, carrying over 6 million messages.
The public was mesmerized by newspaper depictions of these air-balloons, and Butler was among them, his imagination captured by this image of the future. It was certainly dangerous to mention the Commune in anything but a negative light, and Butler only mentioned the balloons used during the Siege, although he wasn’t alone in seeing the future.
In November 1872, a French writer named Jules Verne began the serialized publication of his Around The World In Eighty Days, the story of a British adventurer who makes a bet that he can circumnavigate the world in his air-balloon within eighty days. The book would go on to become a massive hit, just like his previous works 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and From The Earth To The Moon. It was to this growing body of science-fiction, or scientific romance, that Samuel Butler contributed his Erewhon, and it was the balloons of the Paris Commune which carried it into the sky.
Chapter Five: The River And The Range
At this point I should mention that Erewhon is an anagram of the word Nowhere, meaning it’s the same word, but scrambled. Similarly, the Los Angeles region has often been described as being nowhere, or a non-place, according to many pop-philosophers. Numerous commentators have made note of the superficiality which dominates the region’s cultural mindset, but outside of these subjective human states, it’s certain that Los Angeles is not only unsustainable, it’s inherently toxic.
On a bad day, all of the emissions from factories and cars get stuck under an atmospheric layer and swirls over the Los Angeles basin, creating a dense toxic smog which gets denser the further inland one travels. Near the ocean, in ritzy places like Santa Monica or Malibu, the smog can often be forgotten, but less so in Hollywood proper, where numerous mansions enjoy a regular view of what is often a literal health hazard, with the average Air Quality Index (AQI) fixed near 60. Recently, on December 4, 2024, the AQI jumped up to an officially unhealthy 103, which it regularly does, affecting all those with sensitive health conditions.
It was during one of these smog onslaughts that I first visited the EREWHON grocery store in the Silver Lake, which resides on the east of the Los Angeles River, just like Pasadena. In every respect, the building which houses the EREWHON in Silver Lake is built with the same Five-Over-One, glass-and-concrete luxury apartment aesthetic that has been invading the Los Angeles region for over a decade.
On that smoggy day in Silver Lake, I assigned myself a mission. In the novel Erewhon, when people want to skip out on work, they don’t say they’re sick, they claim to have developed kleptomania, or the uncontrollable desire to steal. With this in mind, I decided to steal as much as I could from this EREWHON, and if I were to be caught, I’d say couldn’t help it.
Thankfully, the two Loss-Prevention Officers (LPs) were obvious, and these days a sure tell is the contents of their baskets, which they carry around in order to blend in. Given that they hold these baskets for hours, the LPs generally carry little and have their few items arranged so as to not be bouncing around, making them easy to spot. However, one must also keep a look-out for the traditional brute-force LP who walks up and down the aisles talking on their smartphone or staring at items for five minute stretches without a basket.
Another concern is the surveillance cameras, which are enhanced by visual algorithms now available to even the humblest corner store owner. This makes it vital to control and regulate one’s motions, to imagine every pose the AI might recognize as the visually distinct movements of a thief. I won’t be giving away any of my tricks, which I’ve had to adapt as technology advanced, but just like the Bene Gesserit witches of the Dune universe, not only is the AI our enemy, we must control our bodies in order to defeat it.
To my fellow thieves, know that the EREWHON in Silver Lake is pretty sketchy. While it’s possible to get a nice haul by oneself, it’s much better to go in a group, in which case potentially thousands of dollars worth of fancy swag can be obtained. In my case, I wanted to obtain several of the absurd items I’d read about on the internet, such as the infamous Sea Moss Gummies, which cost around $40 after tax. To make sure I had some protein, I nabbed a mason-jar full of candied maple pecans for about $15 after tax. This gas-station type snack would have cost me $55 if I paid for it, but I needed to push the limit.
I will say that my hustle was built on having acquired (for free) the infamous $200 tote bag emblazoned with the word EREWHON, an exclusive sign of belonging to an elite society. No one with this bag is worth looking at, apparently, and it allowed me to obtain hot food as well as the dreaded Kendall Jenner Peaches and Cream Smoothie for zero dollars and zero cents. I can’t reveal exactly how I accomplished this, but a true thief already knows how I did it, especially the anarchist ones.
Without breaking a sweat, I spent around half an hour in there, and I emerged with over $100 dollars worth of a basic lunch, although it was a bit heavy on the sugar what with the smoothie and all. It was pretty good, as was my chicken sandwich, but obviously not worth the price.
I obviously didn’t eat my lunch out on the small valley-facing terrace or at one of the shaded tables on the curb. Instead, I took my lunch up to the top of a nearby hill and was able to eat with a view of both Downtown LA and the distant mountain range, all hazed over by brown smog. Through this toxic landscape, the Los Angeles River wiggled from the mountains to the ocean, its pathway now mostly concrete.
For many decades, the Los Angeles River was an economic border, with the poor and non-white living on the eastern side, but lately money from the west has invaded the east. While the EREWHON in Pasadena is hardly a gentrifying force, it’s nevertheless east of the river, as is the Silver Lake location, the only two EREWHONs to that venture that far. Meanwhile, the gentrification of Silver Lake has been a long, extended process, and the new EREWHON is unfortunately just a further manifestation of an established reality.
Anyway, while I ate my EREWHON food, everything around me was wreathed in toxic smog, and I recalled that in Erewhon the citizen is punished for being sick and sent to prison for having a serious illness. As I stared into the smog, I realized everyone in this coastal basin was being being constantly, slowly sickened by their environment.
My lunch from EREWHON wasn’t super great for me with all the sugar, but it was seemingly made with real ingredients. However, now matter how healthy I ate, if I lived in Los Angeles it wouldn’t matter, so long as I had to breath the air. At this point, a luxury grocery store being named EREWHON seemed even more bizarre, but it only began to make sense later, when I had time to research just who named it, and when. It turns out the store was named in 1966 by promoters of the original macrobiotic diet, and they wanted their EREWHON store to embody the central pillar of life in fictional Erewhon: health is an individual’s responsibility.
Chapter Six: Into Erewhon
The first EREWHON store was opened in Boston in 1966 by Michio Kushi and his wife Aveline, early proponents of the macrobiotic diet. Back then, the post-WWII agro-industrial complex had invaded the diets of every US citizen, given that most small farms were wiped out by the Great Depression in the 1930s. By the 1960s, there was only Wonder Bread, peanut butter was fake, and nearly everything people ate was processed through a factory and acculturated with chemical additives. For these reasons, the macrobiotic diet seemed like manna from heaven in 1966.
When the Kushis opened the first EREWHON, it was extremely difficult to get bulk anything, with many grains only being sold at bird stores, but they managed to create a well-rounded bulk section out of a Boston basement, with copies of their cult-leader’s 1961 book Zen Macrobiotics for sale in the back room, at least until the Food and Drug Administration raided the store. It was illegal to sell Zen Macrobiotics alongside food, given the extreme nature of certain diet cleanses proscribed in the books, such as ten days on only brown rice and green tea.
The white hippies of the late 1960s embraced this macrobiotic cult, among many others, and soon EREWHON was out of the basement and onto the street, being the only place to purchase real food for many miles in any direction. All the while, the Kushis were promoting their macrobiotic cult, claiming it could cure cancer and other ailments. By 1969, they made enough money to open a second location across the country in Beverly Hills known as EREWHON WEST, and soon Hollywood stars could be seen browsing the aisles.
Within a decade the store was bringing in $10 million a year, but in the 1980s the Kushis went full wing-nut and claimed macrobiotics could cure AIDS, and soon they were bankrupt, given that more health-food stores now existed, notably Whole Foods with its impressive bulk section. More disturbingly, the Kushis blamed all those who suffered any illness for simply not tending to their individual health with the perfect macrobiotic diet.
When their cult leader died, Aveline Kushi believed what he’d been drinking may have been too yin. When Aveline and Michio’s daughter Lily died at 41 of cervical cancer, Michio wrote that his daughter ate a lot of salmon, and salmon is a red-meat fish and extremely yangizing. Her cancer appeared in the cervix, a very yang, constricted organ. When his wife Aveline also died of cervical cancer at 78, he wrote that she loved fried kombu, the strongest sea vegetable, and she enjoyed deep-fried sourdough bread. Baking and deep-frying are each very yang and in combination are extremely tightening. The end result over time was cervical cancer, a very yang tumor.
As other journalists have noted, the guilt and shame the Kushis placed on illness is much like the guilt and shame used by citizens of Erewhon against those who fall sick in their punitive society. In this regard, the EREWHON grocery store was named perfectly, given that those who didn’t maintain the perfect macrobiotic diet were not being responsible for their individual health, and any sickness they succumbed to was a just punishment, a failure of the individual.
Anyway, like I said, the Kushis business went bankrupt, and one of their former employees ended up owning the EREWHON WEST location in Beverly Hills, the last existing storefront of that brief macrobiotic empire. With this one store, a man named Tom DeSilva created a successful niche health food store that catered to the Hollywood elite, and he was also the person who started the current craze for EREWHON smoothies, which were served at his store’s tonic bar.
In 2011, some new owners took over the store and began squeezing more hard currency from of its Hollywood clientele, even opening an EREWHON down the street from the Kardashians in Calabasas. They made so much money that the suited ghouls in New York City swooped in during 2019, purchasing a major stake in EREWHON. After that, the company quickly bloomed to its current form, with 10 stores scattered across the Los Angeles basin. In 2023, the company sucked up over $170 million in profit, with some of that money diverted into its new AI tools, and it can be assumed that their profits for 2024 will be equally as large.
As you’ve seen, the original 1960s creators of EREWHON failed to see the satire in the Erewhon novel, where a hyper-individualized British society was critiqued through Erewhon’s punishment of its sick and ill citizens. At the EREWHON luxury grocery store, only the wealthy can afford to be responsible for their individual health, and as you’ll see, EREWHON exists in spite of Erewhon, not because of it.
Chapter Seven: First Impressions
Speaking of the novel Erewhon, it’s about time we return to Butler’s hapless narrator, who we last left under escort through the Italianesque country of Erewhon. As he tramps with his new friends down a foreign road, unable to understand their language, the narrator describes these companions as the very best-bred people that I ever fell in with. According to him, their colour was equal to that of the finest Italian paintings, being of the clearest olive, and yet ruddy with a glow of perfect health.
The narrator feels simply abashed in the presence of such a splendid type—a compound of all that is best in Egyptian, Greek and Italian. These Erewhonians seemed to take a pride in their personal appearance, and that even the poorest (and none seemed rich) were well kempt and tidy. Not just the citizens, but the countryside itself was highly cultivated, every ledge being planted with chestnuts, walnuts, and apple trees from which the apples were now gathering.
After this long walk, the narrator is brought to the apartment where he is meant to stay with two roommates, but one of them was plainly very much out of health, and coughed violently from time to time in spite of manifest efforts to suppress it. The other looked pale and ill but he was marvelously self-contained, and it was impossible to say what was the matter with him.
The narrator is soon given a medical examination, and although he can’t understand the Erewhonian language, it appears he is healthy. However, when the doctors find his pocket watch, they grow noticeably angry for the first time. This makes the narrator annoyed at a Christian theologian named William Paley, who once insisted that any savage could tell that a clock was intelligently designed, only to find that the Erewhonians regarded my watch not as having been designed, but rather as the designer of [themselves] and of the universe.
The narrator gathers that only basic technology exists in Erewhon and he willingly hands over his watch, which appeases his hosts, or captors. He’s placed back in his apartment, only to realize it’s actually a prison, but he soon becomes friends with the jailer, who teaches him to speak Erewhonian. Beyond this, the narrator grows close with Yram, the jailer’s daughter. When he happens to tell her he has a cold, she fired up in an instant, and asked me what I meant by it, and how I dared to presume to mention such a thing, especially when I considered in what place I was.
In this manner, he comes to learn that illness of any sort was considered in Erewhon to be highly criminal and immoral; and that I was liable, even for catching cold, to be had up before the magistrates and imprisoned for a considerable period. He also learned that it was a very great merit to have fare hair, this being a thing of the rarest possible occurrence, and greatly admired and envied by all these dark-haired, Italianeqsue foreigners.
A month later, it’s explained that if I had behaved well and seemed generally reasonable, and if there could be no suspicion at all about my bodily health and vigour, and if my hair was really light, and my eyes blue and complexion fresh, I was to be sent up at once to the metropolis in order that the King and Queen might see me and converse with me.
In the ninth chapter, titled To the Metropolis, the narrator is invited to stay with one of the capitol’s leading merchant, and as one person describes this illustrious host, “He is a delightful man [but] has suffered terribly from” (here there came a long word which I could not quite catch, only it was much longer than kleptomania), “and has lately recovered from embezzling a large sum of money.”
This is how the narrator learns that crime is treated like a disease in Erewhon, and just as he struggles to comprehend their society, one Erewhonian yells at him, you would consort with the basest of criminals, and yet deem simple embezzlement a bar to friendly intercourse. Despite having some reservations, the narrator kisses Yram goodbye and makes the journey to the capitol blindfolded, given he is a foreign alien, and he stops every night at public inns.
No one ever asks after his health at these inns, instead they’d make an inquiry after my temper, and when he answered honestly, it buzzed about the room that I was in ill temper; whereon people began to give me nice things to smell and to eat, which really did seem to have some temper-mending quality about them, for I soon felt pleased and was at once congratulated upon being better.
The narrator learns much at these country inns, with one Erewhonian explaining that about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned professors of hypthothetics wrote an extraordinary book [proving] that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life. For this reason, the Erewhonians destroyed all their advanced technology, reverting back to an agrarian society.
After finally arriving in the capitol metropolis, the narrator goes to stay with the merchant Senoj Nosnibor and his family, quickly forming an attachment with the younger daughter Arowhena, having already forgotten Yram. This trope of seducing native daughters was common in adventure novels of the time, and Butler was certainly playing into it.
During his stay with the Nosnibor family, the narrator observes of Erewhonians, though they conceal ill health by every cunning hypocrisy and artifice which they can devise, they are quite open about the most flagrant mental diseases, should they happen to exist, which to do the people justice is not often. He also learns that when an Erewhonian wants to get out of an obligation, they go and steal something, commonly socks, and to have the socks was a way of saying one wasn’t feeling great. These type of crimes are remedied by a straightener, who can apply corporal punishment when needed, but no crime is so great as physical illness.
As the narrator observes, if a person ruin his health by excessive indulgence at the table or by drinking, they count it to be almost a part of the mental disease which brought it about, and so it goes for little, but they have no mercy on such illnesses as fevers of catarrhs or lung diseases, which to us appear to be beyond the control of the individual.
The narrator soon visits a courthouse and attends a public trial where the judge yells at the accused, you may say that it is your misfortune to be criminal; I answer that it is your crime to be unfortunate. This is one of the clearest moments of satire, and it’s followed by the most obviously anarchist statement contained within Erewhon.
While pondering the Erewhonian legal system, the narrator riffs, property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.
Those who stood against these Erewhonian traditions were the malcontents who believed that illness is the inevitable result of certain antecedent causes, which, in the great majority of cases, were beyond the control of the individual, and that therefore a man is only guilty for being [ill] in the same way as rotten fruit is guilty for having gone rotten. On top of that, these malcontent rebels also believed that the greater part of the illness which exists in their country is brought about by the insane manner in which it is treated.
This heavy satire, in which Victorian British society is mercilessly critiqued, only emerges about halfway through the novel, and it reveals an allusion to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s anarchist maxim property is theft, although in this case changed to property is robbery. After this section, the novel changes from a straight adventure novel into a more philosophical mediation on the hypocrisies and contradictions of Erewhonian society which resonates even today in 2024.
Chapter Eight: In Prison
Charles Darwin might not have liked the novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler, but that was likely because of their decades long personal conflicts, which was mostly text-based. On the other hand, the English-reading public was quickly enraptured by Erewhon when it was published in March 1872, with the first edition selling out in three weeks and a second being released that June.
One of its first readers was a British artist, craftsman, author, and radical socialist named William Morris, who enjoyed reciting Erewhon aloud for his friends and family. In 1884, Morris broke away from the Social Democratic Federation and soon helped found the Socialist League, which would soon be riven by factional infighting. By 1887, the majority of the Socialist League were in fact anarchists, something which made Morris upset, but what made him even more upset was the 1888 publication of a utopian socialist novel titled Looking Backward, 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy.
William Morris disliked the mechanistic and state-controlled utopia depicted in this science-fiction novel, which is mostly set in the year 2000 CE. In 1889, Morris wrote a bad review of Looking Backward for the Commonweal magazine, the official organ of the now anarchist Socialist League, and in reaction to Bellamy’s machine-utopia, Morris began the serialized publication of his own utopian novel, News From Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest.
The title was a direct homage to Erewhon, an anagram for Nowhere, and in contrast to Looking Backward, there is no central authority in Morris’ utopia, just as the state doesn’t exist. However, outside of the serialized print-run of News From Nowhere, only 500 copies of the first edition were printed, given the intricate artwork Morris included with the text. For this reason, News From Nowhere didn’t achieve the immediate acclaim that Looking Backward did, nor did it quickly spawn a colonial socialist movement in North America.
Edward Bellamy was born in Massachusetts and his Looking Backward appealed to colonial Americans mostly because the order and rationalism of its socialist utopia sharply contrasted with the lawless capitalism of the United States. Many unions had grown increasingly militant throughout the 1880s, especially after the Haymarket Massacre of 1886, and by the time Looking Backward hit the shelves in 1888, the United States was starving for a solution to what was called the social question.
In 1894, the Pullman Railroad strike spread across the United States, a veritable insurrection against capitalism, but after the military murdered dozens of strikers and put down the revolt, many of the strike leaders found themselves in prison, among them a unionist named Eugene Debs. While he was locked up, Debs read Looking Backward and became enamored with the idea of creating a new society rather than try and reform the corrupt world of capitalism.
By 1897, Debs had converted to socialism and become an organizer for the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth, which planned to colonize one of the western US states and take over its government through legal socialistic methods, namely voting. In addition to electing their candidates into office, these socialists would establish colonies in remote places where capitalism could be more easily overcome and all their resources better shared.
However, Debs eventually broke away from the Brotherhood and formed a new party, the Social Democracy of America, but he eventually left this party when its members split over the questions of colonization. All those in the SDA who favored colonization selected a plot of land in western Washington State and moved there with their families, establishing what eventually became known as the Burley Colony.
It was here that a guy named Otto Herbert settled with his family in 1905, and in the 1920s his grandson Frank Herbert Jr. would often come visit with his family. The world now knows this grandson as Frank Herbert, the author of the acclaimed Dune novel, but few know he spent much of his youth in a socialist colony inspired by a science-fiction novel entitled Looking Backward.
Because of this upbringing, Herbert is part of a long tradition of utopian literature where modern life is critiqued through fantastical takes like Erewhon. Herbert was such a fan of Erewhon that he also set his Dune in a universe where autonomous-machines had been destroyed many centuries beforehand, and to acknowledge his debt to the author, the holy war waged in Dune against the AI army was called the Butlerian Jihad, as you might recall. So, with that in mind, let us return to the year 2024, when the war against the AI has just begun.
Chapter Nine: To The Metropolis
On the day I started this article, I happened to be in a suburb that lies within the vast San Gabriel Valley, one of two well known valleys which sprawl away from Los Angeles. I went to this obscure suburb’s public library, the only one in the city, but it was closed when I arrived, so I waited outside the door with a crew of what looked like regulars.
I wandered off to go use the nearby public bathrooms where several people were brushing their teeth, combing their hair, taking a shit, and basically treating this facility as their own personal bathroom, given they didn’t have one of their own. Most of these people lived in their cars, but a few lived in nearby tents, most of them within walking distance.
The library was open by the time I got back, and just as I sat down at a table to begin writing this article, a woman emerged from the library bathroom and sat a table with her friend. She began telling her friend how badly her body hurt, how she could feel herself being eaten from the inside, how her ovaries ached, how it hurt to have sex with her boyfriend. She was in her mid 50s, she spoke of having two children, but she kept repeating how she was dying, how she never had good healthcare, never had good insurance.
All the while, I was staring at a copy of Erewhon and a blank piece of paper, unable to write, think, or do anything besides listen to this horrible story. I could have put headphones in my ears and ignored all of it, like most people would have done, but instead I listened, I reflected on not only this woman’s mortality, but my own. This woman was just one of millions in the United States suffering from poverty induced illnesses and a lack of health coverage, and while her story is truly heartbreaking, her soul-crushing tale is just one drop in a sea of misery.
I was so affected by what she told her friend that I barely wrote anything, just the first paragraph of this article, which I’ve left unedited. That morning, I palpably felt how she and millions of others were punished for their illnesses by this twisted capitalist society, even though it’s this society which made those illnesses so common, so lethal. Our society is no different than the one depicted in Erewhon, where the unfortunate are made to suffer more because of their misfortune, rather than aided and healed. I was angry all day, and the EREWHON grocery store felt even more disgusting than it had before I heard that woman’s mournful story.
The very next morning, while I was asleep in Los Angeles, a man named Luigi Mangione gunned down the CEO of United Healthcare, the largest and cruelest of the health insurance companies, and he appeared to do so with a silencer, making many people believe he was a professional assassin of the type hired by nation-states, organized crime, or corporations. This belief was only bolstered when the assassin evaded police and disappeared in the middle of Manhattan, one of the most heavily policed urban environments in the world.
I had the apartment to myself when I woke up that morning, about five hours after Luigi gunned down the CEO. It was the first thing I saw when I checked my computer, and like millions of others, I was happy and excited. An undeniable parasite from a worthless industry was killed on the sidewalk outside the Hilton where his fellow exploiters were having their investors conference. This CEO and his ilk were responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths in the United States, so it was no surprise when the internet lit up with true joy that December 4, 2024.
I was all over LA and the San Gabriel Valley that day, and in multiple locations I encountered happy people who were thrilled that a CEO had been gunned down on the streets of Manhattan. It felt electric outside, and at a certain restaurant where I ended up that night, every customer was glued to the television screen, watching down images of a hooded man raising a silenced pistol at a suit-wearing CEO. Millions of people were in love with this assassin, and an entirely new era was opening all around us, and era frightfully similar to the late-Victorian class war that broke out following the publication of Erewhon, which we will now return to.
Chapter Ten: Current Opinions
As mentioned, the second half of the Erewhon novel departs from its adventure story beginnings and becomes much more philosophical, dwelling chapter by chapter on customs and habits of Erewhon. In the chapter on death, the reader learns that when someone dies in Erewhon, the friends of the family write no letters of condolence, neither do they attend the scattering, nor wear mourning, but they send little boxes filled with artificial tears. This custom originated long in the past when the Erewhonians pasted these false tears to their faces, although now they just put them in a box.
The narrator quickly grows frustrated living in this hypocritical society, and he believes that the human body was so much a creature of parentage and circumstance, that no punishment for ill-health should ever be tolerated save as a protection from contagion, and that even where punishment was inevitable it should be attended with compassion.
In the opinion of the narrator, the first step toward the cure of disease should be the announcement of the fact to a person’s near relations and friends. If any one had a headache, he ought to be permitted within reasonable limits to say so at once, and to retire to his own bedroom and take a pill, without every one’s looking grave and tears being shed and all the rest of it. However, the narrator can’t help but notice that the Erewhonians were the healthiest and most comely imaginable, owing to the severity with which ill health was treated; still, even the best were liable to be out of sorts sometimes, and there were few families that had not a medicine-chest in a cupboard somewhere.
Equally frustrating to the narrator are the Musical Banks, where one form of the Erewhonian currency is stored. This ornate currency deposited in temple-like Musical Banks is all but useless, with interest payments released every 30,000 years, and Erewhonians keep part of their money in these institutions purely as a status symbol.
As the narrator explains, the Erewhonian Musical Banks, and perhaps the religious systems of all countries are now more or less of an attempt to uphold the unfathomable and unconscious instinctive wisdom of millions of past generations, against the comparably shallow, consciously reasoning, and ephemeral conclusions drawn from that of the last thirty or forty. For this reason, the Erewhonians use a baser currency to buy what they need, and wealth is measured by how much money one has in the useless Musical Banks.
The narrator eventually meets with the King and Queen of Erewhon, but after the King asks him to name some of our most advanced machines, I did not dare tell him of our steam-engines and railroads and electric telegraphs, and was puzzling my brains to think what I could say, when, of all things in the world, balloons suggested themselves, and I gave him an account of a very remarkable ascent which was made some years ago.
Thanks to his fair hair and blue eyes, the narrator is told he might wed Arowhena, the youngest daughter of his merchant host, and the family encourages him to deposit part of his newly obtained money at the Musical Banks, so as to be respectable. At the end of the chapter entitled Arowhena, the reader abruptly learns that the narrator and Arowhena have since escaped Erewhon, and that she has allowed herself to be baptized into the English Church, so as to be respectable.
After this spoiler, the narrator continues his descriptions of Erewhonian customs, this time focusing on their religion, which revolved around a goddess named Ygdrun. No one cares a whole about Ygdrun, and the narrator claims I could never think that their professed religion was more than skin-deep, and this goddess seldom punished them; for they are brave, and Ygdrun is not.
Beyond this neglected goddess, the Erewhonians believe in reincarnation, a belief shared by the Indian subjects of the British Empire, of which the narrator (and the author) were members. In many respects, the Erewhonian conception of reincarnation is similar to many Buddhist conceptions, and as the narrator describes, they believe that it is of their own free act and deed in a previous state that they come to be born into this world at all. They hold that the unborn are perpetually plaguing and tormenting the married of both sexes, fluttering about them incessantly, and giving them no peace either of mind or body until they have consented to take them under their protection.
Not only are pregnancies shameful in Erewhon, it was the pestering of the unborn which caused them to be brought into this world, and that they would not have been here if they would have only let peaceable people alone. Because of this, all Erewhonian children have to sign a birth formulae, a legal document where they admit their guilt of intruding back into the world of the living, accept the blame for any misfortunes they may suffer, and pledge their loyalty to their parents, who graciously refrained from murdering them as infants.
According to the Erewhonians, there is a world of the unborn where all souls dwell, and before entering the world of the living, they must take a potion which will destroy their memory and sense of identity; they must go into the world helpless, and without a will of their own; they must draw lots for their dispositions before they go, and take them, such as they are, for better or worse. According to this conception of the afterlife, who [their parents] are to be, whether rich or poor, kind or unkind, healthy or diseased, there is no knowing; they have, in fact, to entrust themselves for many years to the care of those for whose good constitution and good sense they have no sort of guarantee.
In the land of Erewhon, to be born is a felony—it is a capital crime, for which sentence may be executed at any moment after the commission of the offense. According to the narrator, the relations between children and parents in that country are less happy than in Europe. It was rarely that I saw cases of real hearty and intense affection between the old people and the young ones.
This brutal culture has a sort of proverb which the narrator translates as, the great happiness of some people in a future state will consist in watching the distress of their parents on returning to eternal companionship with their grandfathers and grandmothers; whilst “compulsory affection” is the idea which lies at the root of their word for the deepest anguish.
Through all of this, Samuel Butler critiques the eternal struggle of the old and against the young, and as his narrator remarks, it astonished me to see what sacrifices the parents would make in order to render their children as nearly useless as possible. Part of this uselessness has to do with the Colleges of Unreason, and it’s through one of these colleges that the narrator first discovers the Book of the Machines and its tale of the rebellion against AI.
Chapter Eleven: Some Erewhonian Trials
Once upon a time, I worked in San Francisco, having delusions I could survive in that techno-capitalist hell-hole. As you’ve gathered, I’ve since moved to Los Angeles, a place where there are self-driving AI taxis clogging the streets just as there are in San Francisco.
Back then, working in SF, I’d often find these Waymo taxis stalled in traffic, their emergency lights flashing, and I’d usually take a picture while flipping the passenger off and laughing. If I’d been masked and not on my way to work, I would’ve tagged up the taxi’s AI motion sensors and slashed the tires to make it extra spicy. By the way, every Waymo taxi in San Francisco is a fancy Jaguar I-PACE, an all electric vehicle that costs over $100,000 with the self-driving apparatus. All that to say, fucking them up is real expensive for Waymo, which is owned by Google, who support the genocide in Palestine.
San Francisco’s rebel culture might have been severely decimated over the past 15 years, but the city has suffered too much to ever fully surrender, and to prove me correct, there’s been a steady series of attacks against Waymo’s self-driving AI taxis.
For example, in the winter of 2024, a group calling itself some anarchists claimed to have sabotaged multiple Waymo taxis. While half of their communique focused on Google’s connections to Israel, the other half was largely tactical, explaining that ambushing self-driving cars requires patience and picking a good location, but these are good skills to practice. Find a park or other spot without cameras to lie in wait for a car to pass by. Check if there are passengers in the back seat and decide ahead of time if you want to avoid these cars. If you decide to proceed anyways, act quickly. Placing a traffic cone on the hood of a self-driving car causes its hazard lights to start flashing and prevents it from moving. Windows can be smashed, tires can be slashed, and LIDAR sensors can be painted or otherwise disabled. The company monitors the status of its vehicles, so attack and get away quickly. Keep in mind that it is especially important to conceal your identity while doing this. These cars use sophisticated cameras to record their surroundings.
For whatever reason, this communique was released the day after a crowd of sports fans halted, smashed, and then torched a Waymo taxi in the middle of Chinatown, an incident which drew international headlines. The entire corrupt political establishment of San Francisco flew into a rage, with the mayor promising revenge, given that Waymo is owned by Google, and Google has purchased not only San Francisco, but the state capitol of Sacramento.
During the fall of 2024, state governor Gavin Newsom signed multiple laws favorable for the development and deployment of AI, just as he vetoed a law that would have banned autonomous trucks from driving on state highways. Gavin Newsom has been fully purchased by the tech companies, and California is the most AI-friendly state in the US, especially regarding self-driving cars. However, despite how angry SF City Hall got after the torching of the Waymo, very few seemed to care about the mayor or police chief’s threats, and further examples of Waymo vandalism went viral on social media during 2024.
On September 24, footage of people casually tagging up a Waymo in the Mission District spread across the internet, with hundreds of thousands of viewers laughing at the dog-carrying tech-hipster trapped inside. This scene was made even funnier by making What You Won’t Do For Love by Bobby Caldwell the soundtrack for the original TikTok clip. This was one of three Waymos tagged up on September 21, 2024, all in the Mission.
A week later, on October 1, a Waymo full of tourists from LA was surround by taggers and disabled, causing the passengers to freak out, given they were a group of women trapped in a car surrounded by men. This incident spread widely across the internet, as did another where a single woman trapped in a Waymo was being harassed by two men who brought the taxi to a standstill. All this suddenly made Waymo’s seem unsafe for women, which was a positive development for all those who wish to destroy the AI before it can spread any further.
At the moment, Waymo is trying to expand south to the SFO International Airport, which it is currently prohibited from doing, by law. There have been numerous accidents and traffic snarls in San Francisco thanks to Waymo, and I’ve personally seen over a dozen stalled robo-Jags filled with rich morons blocking traffic in the middle of rush-hour.
Despite all these incidents, San Francisco City Hall and the state capitol in Sacramento are so corrupt that it doesn’t matter, they’ll push Waymo through no matter the cost, and when Google says that want to go to SFO, the politicians will try and make that a reality for their clients. However, in the middle of this airport push, on December 20, a Waymo taxi drove straight into wet concrete and got stuck all on its own, without some anarchists having to help things along.
Unfortunately for me, when I moved back to Los Angeles to be closer to my family, the Waymo taxi wasn’t far behind. I thought I’d escaped those horrible, creepy robots, but I was wrong, and in November 2024 the self-driving AI robo-Jags were made available to the LA public, but only west of the river from Santa Monica to Chinatown. Technically, I’m just outside their coverage area, which is great, because I don’t have to see them, but not so in the grand sprawls between Hollywood and Westwood, where these Waymos can be seen dropping rich people off at EREWHON grocery stores.
Rich people are not only taking AI taxis to EREWHON, the company is directly encouraging this, allowing its customers a free Waymo trial. As explained at the EREWHON website, Waymo is giving Erewhon members an exclusive ticket to try our autonomous ride-hailing service for a 7-day period. However, an asterisk does inform the reader that there will be only one invite code per new customer. Limited quantities available—while supplies last.
EREWHON is an active champion of AI, not only internally, but in the outside world through its partners at Waymo. These self-driving AI taxis clearly fit with the aesthetics and clientele of the brain-dead corporate suits who run EREWHON, and while I assumed its paying customers might end up using Waymos, I never imagined there would be an official corporate partnership between Google and EREWHON. All of this gets even more insane when one thinks of the anti-AI sentiment first articulated in the novel Erewhon, which I will soon quote from extensively.
Chapter Twelve: Malcontents
As you might remember, the narrator of Erewhon forms a strong connection with Arowhena, the daughter of his host, and they eventually fall in love. They make a plan to escape Erewhon, but as the narrator explains, it was almost impossible for me to escape even alone, for the king had himself told me that I was to consider myself a prisoner on parole, and that the first sign of my endeavouring to escape would cause me to be sent to one of the hospitals for incurables.
Stuck in this brutal country, the narrator eventually learns about their Colleges of Unreason where the student are taught the discipline of Hypothetics, which consists of imagining a set of utterly strange and impossible contingencies, and require the youths to give intelligent answers to the questions that arise therefrom, [and] is reckoned the fittest conceivable way of preparing them for the actual conduct of their affairs in after life.
Other disciplines are taught, such as Inconsistency and Evasion, because the Erewhonians believe that life would be intolerable if men were to be guided in all they did by reason and reason only. Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by language—language being like the sun, which rears and then scorches. Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd; the mean is illogical, but an illogical mean is better than the sheer absurdity of an extreme. This lowest common denominator logic is very familiar to all those who see it at play in our own unreasonable, illogical society of 2024.
When the narrator goes to visit the Colleges of Unreason, he comes to learn the particulars of the revolution which had ended in the destruction of so many of the mechanical inventions which were formerly in common use. The narrator is then given a copy of The Book of the Machines, the text which triggered the revolution, and he learns that five hundred years before, a civil war raged for many years, and is said to have reduced the number of the inhabitants by one-half. The parties were styled the machinists and the anti-machinists, and in the end, as I have said already, the latter got the victory.
Inside the Book of the Machines, the narrator reads the following: assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress. The answer for the old Erewhonians was obviously yes, as it should be in our culture, but Samuel Butler wasn’t trying to make a single point with his fictitious Book of the Machines, but rather use it as a giant thought experiment.
For example, Butler rightfully predicted in the Book of the Machines that a day might come when clocks, which certainly at the present time are not diminishing in bulk, will be superseded owing to the universal use of watches, in which case they will become as extinct as the icthyosauri, while the watch, whose tendency has for some years been to decrease in size rather than the contrary, will remain the only existing type of an extinct race.
In the Book of the Machines, it is explained that as yet the machines receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses: one traveling machine calls to another in a shrill accent of alarm and the other instantly retires; but it is through the ears of the driver that the voice of the one has acted upon the other. The book anticipates a time when human ears will no longer be needed, and the hearing will be done by the delicacy of the machine’s own construction, as is currently the case in 2024 with the rise of the AI.
The Book of the Machines also warns that it will never be safe to repose much trust in the moral sense of any machine, while at the same time admitting how reliant upon machines the Erewhonians had become. As the author asks the reader, for though our rebellion against [the machine’s] infant power will cause infinite suffering, what will not things come to, if that rebellion is delayed?
The book presents a simple maxim on the art of the machines: they serve that they may rule. It also asks simple questions, such as: how many men at this hour are living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives, from the cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day? Is it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us, when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to them as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom? These questions from 1872 are distressingly relevant in 2024, when their implications are now obvious.
As a consequence of the Book of the Machines, the revolutionaries of Erewhon decided to destroy all the inventions that had been discovered for the preceding 271 years, a period which was agreed upon by all parties after several years of wrangling as to whether a certain kind of mangle which was much in use among washerwomen should be saved or no. It was at last ruled to be dangerous, and was just excluded by the limit of 271 years. Then came the reactionary civil wars which nearly ruined the country.
However, just as the Erewhonians once debated the rising sentience of machines, they also spent many years debating the sentience of animals and plants. In a passage the evokes our current reality in 2024, the narrator explains that the Erewhonians are a meek and long-suffering people, easily led by the nose, and quick to offer up common sense at the shrine of logic, when a philosopher arises among them, who carries them away through his reputation for especial learning, or by convincing them that their existing institutions are not based on the strictest principles of morality.
One of these philosophers lived in Erewhon over 2,000 years before the narrator’s arrival, and he convinced most of the population to stop eating the flesh of animals. As this prophet commanded, the only animal food that you may eat, is the flesh of any birds, beasts, or fishes that you may come upon as having died a natural death, or any that may have been born prematurely, or so deformed that it is a mercy to put them out of their pain; you may also eat all such animals as have committed suicide.
However, after the philosopher died, it was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances and it was truly astonishing how some of these unfortunate animals would scent out a butcher’s knife if there was one within a mile of them, and run right up against it if the butcher did not get it out of their way in time. This is how, over time, the laws of Erewhon were eroded, and had these vegetarian laws never been written, they also would never have been broken. Eventually, the whole of Erewhon returned to being omnivorous, given the laws only served to encourage what they prohibited.
At this point, the narrator has had enough, so he and his lover Arowhena build a hot air balloon and fly away, eventually drifting over the ocean. Luckily they’re picked up by an Italian ship, and once they’re safely on board, the captain began questioning us about the siege of Paris, from which city he had assumed that we must have come. Rather than escape the slaughter of the Paris Commune, the narrator and his lover escape the cruel, hypocritical society of Erewhon, which as you’ll remember is simply an anagram of Nowhere.
The novel ends with the narrator asking the reader to join him on another expedition to Erewhon. He claims Christian missionaries are already on their way, and in the hope of beating them, the narrator requests that the reader write at once to the Secretary of the Erewhon Evangelisation Company, Limited and become a shareholder. Despite escaping from this country, despite finding it insufferably backward, the narrator now wishes to profit off Erewhons back, and with this last jab at British colonialism, Samuel Butler concluded his novel Erewhon. He could’ve never imagined the EREWHON grocery store, not in his wildest dreams.
Chapter Thirteen: The Views of the Erewhonians Concerning Death
Stealing from an EREWHON might be relatively easy for thieves like us, but in 2023 a video went viral on the internet after the Beverly Hills police arrested a guy for stealing from the nearby EREWHON. When a passerby started filming and offered to pay for the food, tens of thousands of people were seemingly shocked that the cops still arrested the shoplifter, just as they appeared to be quite angry about the basic laws of capitalism, especially when EREWHON pressed charges.
That unfortunate shoplifter happened to be a black person, but in the spring of 2024, two white shoplifters walked into the EREWHON in Calabasas, filled their tote bags with $1,500 worth of free stuff, and then walked out. This caused such an outrage to the EREWHONIANS that the LA County Sheriffs put out a wanted poster for the Grand Theft suspects. Not only did the thieves dress in sandals as part of their scamouflage, they did so just down the hill from the Kardashians.
It took me a while to steal from an EREWHON, a right of passage here in LA, but that’s only because I was living in the Bay Area when the store got popular. The first time I saw an EREWHON was back in 2020, when I happened to be visiting with a car. On my way back up north, I decided to take Sunset Boulevard from downtown all the way to the ocean, which I’d never done, and few do.
Not many people realize that after heading southwest for miles, Sunset veers northwest, away from the ocean. When I learned this, I was certainly confused, wondering if the legends of Sunset going to the Pacific were all a lie. Within this bewilderment, I came to a stoplight in front of a row of glowing white buildings, and one of them had a name that caught my eye.
Rather than keep going, I pulled over in front of a luxury grocery store called EREWHON, which I knew to be the title of a utopian science-fiction novel from the Victorian age. However, I knew nothing about this grocery store at the time, nor did I have any idea that this location in the Pacific Palisades just opened in the summer of 2019, rivaling Calabasas with its ultra-rich customers.
Back then, I thought it was odd that someone would name a luxury store after a generally subversive work of fiction, but it made about as much sense as anything else in LA, so I didn’t even bother getting out of the car, I just gawked at the rich people for another minute and then continued northwest on Sunset, which eventually curved towards the ocean and dropped me onto the Pacific Coast Highway, known as the PCH to locals.
As I mentioned, I was in LA when Luigi Mangione shot the CEO of United Healthcare, and since then most people have continued to support this assassin, unafraid of a government which they vastly outnumber. There is no precedent for this in the US, and it would be as if the anarchist Alexander Berkman, rather than being demonized for attempting to assassinate the steel baron Henry Clay Frick in 1892, was instead lionized and embraced by over half the country.
Graffiti in support of Luigi Mangione has popped up everywhere across LA, with much of it being spread across the internet. Anarchists jumped to the front, as usual, and have been successfully utilizing this moment to champion direct action and discredit both Democrat and Republican parties, who both look like a pack of greedy scumbags, at least to most people. To make this matter clear, the top post on Reddit right now is from San Francisco, depicting a DIY poster slipped into a glowing bus-stop display case which reads: SOME PEOPLE LIKE CEOS—EVERYONE ELSE LIKES LUIGI. This slogan perfectly captures the atmosphere of the US at the time of this writing.
While the US continues its spectacular unraveling, across the Atlantic in Germany, an army of anarchist ghosts has been destroying tens of millions of euros worth of machines, almost $40 million at the time of this writing. From 2019 to 2024, there have been over thirty attacks near Munich alone, while a recent arson attack on a Tesla factory near Berlin made international headlines, and there are currently dozens of people living in tree-houses near this factory, hoping to block the expansion of CEO Elon Musk’s empire.
Because of this, the German state took the unprecedented step of instituting a hard border checkpoint at all of its land crossings, something its never done since joining the EU. They claim these measures are to stop Islamic terrorists, as usual, but at the same time they issued a warning that Russian agents would try and attack Rheinmetall, the German arms manufacturer that made weapons for the Kaiser, the Nazis, and now the Ukrainians. In short, the German border is now essentially closed because they think these anti-technology anarchists might be Russian agents, and as we all know, only foreign spies would want to destroy arms factories, naturally.
These are the wild times were live in this December 2024, and so I’ll finish this article up with a quote by Marie Louise Berneri, the famed Italian anarchist agitator. In regards to the novel Erewhon, she wrote, I would have liked to liked to include in this section extracts from Butler’s Erewhon, for it satirizes many ideas frequently expressed in the utopias of the nineteenth century, and in particular the belief that the extensive use of machinery will automatically bring happiness to mankind, but Erewhon cannot properly be considered a utopia.
Editor’s Note: The preceding text is fiction and meant for entertainment purposes only.
