This reminds me of another manifesto arguing to expand our ideas of what's possible, 'The Hedonistic Imperative', that takes a mostly pharmacological approach:
All such romantic manifestos are interesting in how they make you think, but the devil is in the details. Humans compete for power, for status, for reproduction; if you somehow remove economic competition you might get something worse, corrupt and oppressive and murderous in another direction.
And the hunter-gatherer past was a bit nastier than this piece lets on. Some alternate views:
Pinker summarizes the knowledge of prehistoric combat death rates: "If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million."
There is a long-standing anarchist critique of industrial society, and both the Unabomber and Bob Black are part of that tradition. The Unabomber just never got the memo that "we tried bombing our way into anarchy back in the nineteenth century and it didn't work out so well".
http://www.hedweb.com/
For that matter, this piece has strong similarities to the Unabomber manifesto, aka "Industrial Society and its Future".
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Industrial_Society_and_Its_Fut...
All such romantic manifestos are interesting in how they make you think, but the devil is in the details. Humans compete for power, for status, for reproduction; if you somehow remove economic competition you might get something worse, corrupt and oppressive and murderous in another direction.
And the hunter-gatherer past was a bit nastier than this piece lets on. Some alternate views:
http://www.troynovant.com/Franson/Keeley/War-Before-Civiliza...
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
Pinker summarizes the knowledge of prehistoric combat death rates: "If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million."