A Solstice message to all our friends, and especially, our opponents: “It is time!”

This begins by looking back

As we write this the next phase of our three-year project is nearing completion: the first tranche of ^BBOKK Library has just been uploaded (some had already noted phase one, when we uploaded new pages/resources from the Free Range Network at Lammas). There’s a separate post specifically about the BOKK Library. In this post we examine the broader issue of ‘why’ we are changing our focus, and the directions ‘where’ we would like to proceed.

The Free Range Network has been ‘doing stuff’ for quite a while now. That’s actually a very privileged position because, after thirty years of doing activism together in England and Wales (and occasionally beyond), that experience gives us insights on how we could and should change and adapt to new circumstances – the critical circumstance right now being the slow-motion collapse of neoliberalism, and its authoritarian fall into digital neofeudalism, as our national leaders thrash around for explanations as to why “nothing works any more”.

Emerging from the Government’s panic after the 2008 Crash, and the deregulatory frenzy that followed as politicians scrabbled for ‘growth’ over the 2010s, the Free Range Network was part of the national network opposing fracking and ‘Extreme Energy’. That attritional battle ended around 2018/19 as a nominal victory for the public; though the entirety of that struggle is still not over, and with rising authoritarianism, it might quickly return as “emergency measures become constitutional practise” (e.g., think how the ‘War on Terror’ drove public fear to precipitate the greater technologial controls we see normalized today).

After fracking we pivoted towards the new public battleground we saw already emerging: the erosion of our historically-won civil rights, as mainstream politics responded to the slow-motion collapse of neoliberalism with a drift to the (far) right. Around 2018/19 we developed a new range of materials, and began to distribute them via our ^EFree Range Exhibition at festivals.

Then, pandemic; then, social-media driven political collapse, as billionaires applied pressure to the now captive population to push the economy towards neofeudalism… also known as, “you will own nothing and you will be happy”.

The subsequent collapse of our politics at the hands of lobbyists and ideologues, which had been ‘in the post’ ever-since Brexit and Trump’s first term, has become the root of the ‘everything crisis’; both preventing progress, but also weakening our existing public policy.

We’re not going to achieve our long-desired goals without first tackling that oligarchic monster head-on. What we severely doubt is whether the groups who have traditionally been the public’s watchdogs – such as eco-campaign groups and political parties – are actually capable of that; or whether they are so preoccupied in trying to preserve their economic privilege within the current political ‘perma-crisis’, that they are now functionally incapable of delivering the scale of change required.

Quite simply, the evidence for the scale of change required to solve the ecological crisis, scares the upper-middle classes who run most of Britain’s political parties and ‘Third Sector’ so severely, that they would rather throw their lot in with the forces trying to maintain ‘business as usual’, against that body of evidence, rather than work for the radical transformation that evidence demands.

To progress we must ‘learn’,
to learn we must apply critical review

Through all of this, the thing which truly astounded us was that many active members of the public were not ‘learning’. They were not changing their tactics and method to challenge our failing political process, pushing-back against the immiseration of our communities, the continued inclosure/privatization of public spaces, and the dismantling of our civil rights. If anything – as evinced by the continued collapse of political participation and voter turnout – the dizzying and seemingly chaotic pace of change has brow-beaten many people into submission.

We need hope; but you can’t talk about hope if you can’t see reality… which is precisely what happened.

In the face of a seemingly deaf, dumb, and blind body politic, some of the remaining willing activists resorted to an equally bizarre set of ideas from which to press for change – such as supporting a ‘green’ technocratic solution to the climate catastrophe through renewable energy, carbon accountancy, and a wholly neoliberal ‘Green New Deal’. In our view, the most catastrophic example of this mind-set, especially in terms of our legal rights, were the ill-judged antics of Extinction Rebellion and its ‘fellow traveller’ groups.

The new projects we had started working on in 2018 hit a wall because of the political shit-storm created by Extinction Rebellion (especially ‘The Free Range Activism Kit’, on which we have written previously). This was clearly the result of their inability to critically examine their position as individuals within the current system, measure the scale of change required by the body of scientific evidence available, and then co-operatively change accordingly. Instead they demanded allegedly ‘radical system change’, which would in fact have preserved that globally polluting and exploitative system largely unchanged, by undertaking a style of action which reinforced the worst aspects of that system – ‘getting arrested’.

Countering the basic inability of the ‘green movement’ to learn from its past mistakes, and worse, their adoption of neoliberal tropes by calling for incremental and ineffectual ‘technological change’, is what drives our work now. We’ve spent our recent hiatus looking critically at the issues of change and activism, and why that historic process seems to have been misdirected onto a kind of ‘existential hamster-wheel’ as activists run ever-harder to stand still within a collapsing global environment.

“It is time!”

We also had to face up to a looming milestone ourselves: In 2024 the Free Range Network hit thirty years of working together as a loose mutual aid network. In 2023, that realization generated a three-year project to revisit all of our past work, in order to update the sprawling 2-gigabyte/6,500 file Free Range Activism Website, to re-focus on our shared goal since the early 1990s – communicating the deeper theory, skills, and evidential basis for ecological activism and change.

So, now we begin again: “It is time!”

The core of this work will be new on- AND off-line resources for self-education around the issues of public research and activism for change; in turn, creating a resistance to the new ‘hostile environment’ we now find ourselves in, as the economic oligarchy rips apart the ‘democratic rules’ that Western states have practised for the last seven decades.

The first product of this is the ^BBOKK Library. It’s an information archive and keyword index which collects and connects the entire content of the ^ZFRAW site, and the resources across the Internet to which the FRAW site refers – allowing the site’s users to find all references to certain issues, events, or publications from across the FRAW site with just a few clicks. We’re releasing the first tranche of the Library’s content at the Winter Solstice; but as the Library itself weaves together the entire content of the FRAW site, it will not be complete until late 2026 or 2027 when the next four phases of the site-wide update have been completed.

Within all of this work there is a specific radical focus, away from the highly compromised ‘environmentalism’ promoted by the mainstream media and corporations, and towards: A deep ecological perspective on ‘do-it-yourself’ activities to extricate ourselves from technological servitude; creating a ‘free culture’ of skills and media to circumvent the economic and political collapse of neoliberal consumerism; and running through all of that, direct action to oppose the imposition of worse rights and conditions upon us as our ‘leader & betters’ enact ever-more authoritarian policies to preserve their faltering control. Note: Not the alleged direct action of bourgeois representative protest which ‘asks for change’ (e.g., Extinction Rebellion); but true direct action, where people seek to create alternative, parallel, prefigurative structures to oppose the state’s accelerating slip into the authoritarian politics of ecological collapse.

Even if ecological and economic breakdown – and its hostile best-friend, fascism – is unstoppable, that doesn’t mean preparing for that eventuality is a waste of time. The preparation to live sustainably ‘beyond consumerism’. are so close to the actions required to oppose digital neofeudalism, that we can do both at the same time – and create a self-sustaining culture of resistance to oppose the authoritarian agenda driving our national politics today.

Our new agenda

There is no ‘do nothing’ option here: As we outlined in ‘WEIRD Journal’ No.5, “We are not in a situation of having ‘problems’ with ‘possible solutions’; we are in a ‘predicament’ with only a few, mostly unwelcome ‘outcomes’ to choose from.”

We simply have to accept that the current status quo, representing the economic rights of historic power and privilege, is not going to mildly hand-over the controls of our world to those seeking a more sane alternative. We must construct that alternative, ourselves, within the cracks opening-up in the fabric of society.

We’re going to be talking about food, and camping outdoors, and disconnecting from mobile phones and manipulative algorithms; and taking-back control over the essential structures which we all require to live free from the techno-psychological controls of Industrial Society. That may seem a rather ‘WEIRD’ combination of themes, but the reality of our present circumstance is that change is not possible unless we have the structures to deliver it; and if the present political process will not deliver those structures for us, then we will have to create our own vehicle for radical change.

The key to that is reskilling a population deskilled by consumerism, and the best way to do that is: With own-made food, to escape the agribusiness and food processing industries; camping outdoors with few resources, to learn the essential skills which render consumerism redundant; and learning how to work co-operatively without the digital technological machine, in order to create a new civic politics without the moderating censorship of algorithms and AI.

Where were heading is pretty-much where the Free Range Network started back in 1994: It’s about the basics of self-organizing to change the world around us. We’ll progressively create more resources on this over 2026/27, which we’ll publish on the FRAW for others to use freely. To follow that process you could wait for that work to be completed, but we’d far prefer if people took the the materials already available on the FRAW site and improvized some ideas of their own, ‘do-it-yourself’-style!