Harassment Architecture [Review]
A dive into one of the most relatable pieces of fiction in our time
I’ve never lashed out in anger under the influence of a book before.
Harassment Architecture is a book written by Mike Ma. It is best described not in terms of plot line, because there is no plot line, and not in terms of philosiphy, because there’s scarcely any philosiphy either. Harassment Architecture is a raw piece allowing one to enter the mind of those crushed by the hypersensitive post-industrial society of the early 21st century. It’s very difficult to convey in a coherent fashion because the thoughts of my generation are hardly coherent at the best of times.
I’ve described the book to others as “an authors psychotic break” and “the Kaczynskian reality we were warned about.” In truth it’s a relatively unbroken train of thought beholden only to the whims of the author. Mike Ma is clearly well read, and has clearly lived in the soulless hive cities of the twenty first century. What little story there is makes mention of New York.
For me, the book was more visceral than contemplative, able to elicit powerful emotions often focused around anger, aggression, and depression. Few books I’ve ever encountered had the power to induce the type of righteous anger at the social system we’ve all been failed by. Harassment Architecture could almost be described like a memetic drug, particularly to those of us who have had experiences similar to the author. I recommend reading this book, I recommend reading it after reading “Industrial Society and its Future.” Harassment architecture is, as I see it, a closing statement to Theodore Kaczynski’s thesis, and in so being represents a justification for his entire philosophy.
This book will either disgust you within the first chapter, or carry you into an epistemological rollercoaster of experience. Not sure either option is healthy, but it is probably necessary. It’s the experience of those of us who once glimpsed freedom and felt it torn away.
>I'm sitting outside on the terrace and an unexpected calmness washes over me. I'm looking at the trees and the birds in them, jumping from branch to branch. Looks like they're having more fun than myself. I'm looking at all of this through a different lens of emotion and it makes me think about how badly I'd like to embrace nature and live in its purity. In the same thought, I'm aware that by the time I've driven out to a sizable piece of land with all the necessary tools to survive that I'll lose the ambition to follow that feeling. This limbo between a desire to return to the primal world and the realization that it isn't so easy gives me a sense of how deep I've fallen into my comfort zone. Both the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
>At this point, the only resolution is for something to wash it all away, forcing me into the nearest flush of woods, feeding on the land and the animals I kill. Wash me all away, and this. How sad is it to desire such a thing? A system that was not that long ago a completely standard way of life. There are pieces and places of the world where it is still so — to enter them as a tainted modern man though, that's a cruel poison.
>No, I'm not Thoreau; I haven't exiled myself to a cut of barren woods and written down my findings. I'm just some son of a bitch sitting outside his home beside a beautiful piece of property. I don't care if I'm pretentious. Everything is pretentious when everyone is a nihilist. Everything is pretentious on the downwards pointed Earth. Everyone is all rotting and talk. There's no purity left to us here because the apathetic tailspinners have consolidated life into one big joke. Sincerity is dead or laughed at. That's why it's so peaceful inside the liquid dream, the thoughts that move inside me when I do. There are no twenty-something liberal arts majors to tell me that what I'm writing about comes off as hollow. They're hollow. Their personality is the legal intellectual property of a television series. They are ugly and expendable. They are burdens hiding in clearance rack mall clothes. They are the rape of the world.
I felt this. One of my ex-friends, probably the closest I ever got to someone in the last decade, was a massive fan of Thoreau and would talk about building a ted shed in the middle of nowhere, moving to Sicily so he could live out that dream of self sufficiency in some beautiful field where he can make his daily bread peacefully.