Your captivity begins at the barriers and fences erected to stop prying eyes seeing what is being done to us all; change begins when we highlight the existence of those barriers for all to see.
‘WEIRD’ Journal
‘WEIRD’ is the Free Range Network's journal, providing an alternative viewpoint on the environment, economics, and the politics of technology.
WEIRD’s starting point (the acronym, ‘White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic’) is to disregard the status quo of consumerism, to ask, “What is required to create a good life for all human and non-human beings on the Earth?”.
The answer to that is pursued not out of ‘fear’, but by questioning technology and consumerism's relevance to human needs; by understanding “how technology works”; and seeking simple, practical ways in which everyone can deliberately change the role of consumption and technology in their lives.
WEIRD is free to download, and you are free to print, copy, distribute, and reuse the articles in the journal for non-profit purposes. Go to the ‘reuse’ page for details.
List of issues
All current issues of ‘WEIRD’ in reverse chronological order:
An edition for the long dark nights on why a radical change to property rights in Britain is essential to changing our global impact, looking at UK 'land rights' in the context of the ecological crisis, not simple land ownership.
A special edition on the white-heat of eco-research about British consumption 'on-the-never-Neverland'. In summary: 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.
This tortuous pathway of disengagement, ‘untechnical support’, is a process of liberation through basic re-skilling. That’s not just about learning practical skills again; it is about building confidence in a person’s own power to discern what is right for them.
A special third edition, investigating 'Britain's Energy & Climate Crisis', to demonstrate that neither side in this heated debate cares about statistical reality, or its deeper meaning.
The second edition, where we directly ‘welcome to extinction’ of what passes for normality, in the hope that people will move on and organise for something better.
How do you talk about freeing ourselves from the gadgets that define our lives, when the way everyone communicates these days is defined by those gadgets?
A Palestine Action protester was arrested for his clever choice of clothes last week, triggering an ‘embarrassing’ police de-arrest that’s now gone viral.
It was the biggest protest since the government proscribed the group in July under the Terrorism Act, making membership of or support for it a criminal offence, punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Labour has settled claims brought by 20 people, mainly former staffers, who featured in a leaked internal document about antisemitism in the party, with the costs estimated to be close to £2m.
Companies such as Murdoch’s News Corp and defence contractors like Lockheed Martin are able to conceal how much funding they are giving to APPGs by funding the secretariat, but not the APPG itself.
UN Office of the Commissioners for Human Rights, 25th July 2025:
While AI feels suspended in servers and clouds, there are material consequences on the ground, on our earth, to real living people. And those leading the charge are doing so with very little oversight.
England’s sharp wealth threshold has created a system in which care home providers focus on richer areas, with low incentive to operate in poorer, high need areas.
Labour MPs have voted to impose £2 billion-a-year cuts on disabled people who cannot work, despite a last-minute intervention by UN disability rights experts, and repeated warnings that the bill will cost lives.
Our groundbreaking analysis has uncovered a rapidly expanding network of organisations working to undermine human rights protections, targeting reproductive freedoms, LGBTI rights and promoting dangerous practices.
What if the race to save the planet is harming the people who protect it? Indigenous advocate Galina Angarova exposes the hidden cost of the green energy transition.
Just over 110 million people, or more than 20% of Europeans, are exposed to high levels of transport noise that exceed thresholds set under EU reporting rules and which harm our health, the environment and the economy.
