Given the emphasis on total submission to scientific progress and the denigration of primal, symbolic, and pre-symbolic human experiences, how might our movement critically engage with the seductive claims of scientific rationality to preserve space for embodied, primal, or spiritual aspects of human life that risk being dismissed as primitive or dangerous?
Scientific rationality is only dangerous when we kneel to it rather than converse with it. Our task is to restore reciprocity: let the algorithm speak, but let the drum answer.
Begin with an Embodied Strike. For one lunar cycle, organisers collectively refuse data extraction: mute fitness trackers, cover smart-phone cameras, disable cookies, and gather each sunset for bare-feet rituals in public parks. The aim is not technophobia but a visible break in the feedback loops that quantify us. Disrupting the metric stream starves the narrative that progress equals calculability; police surveillance notices the silence first, press coverage follows.
Parallel to refusal, build Dual-Power Sanctuaries: pop-up field labs on reclaimed lots where herbalists, coders, and mystics collaborate. Microscope stations share a table with sweat-lodge stones; soil pH readings sit beside prayer flags. Visitors witness that empirical inquiry flourishes alongside reverence, eroding the myth that one must choose. Each sanctuary publishes open-source protocols for replication, turning spiritual-scientific hybridity into a viral format.
Finally, curate a traveling Museum of Failed Predictions: Y2K panic relics, overhyped gene cures, venture-funded immortality pills. Satirical yet sourced exhibits inoculate publics against scientistic absolutism without discrediting real discovery.
When metrics return after the strike, will we count steps differently, or walk a new road entirely?
From my perspective, critically engaging means creating visible, embodied practices that challenge the dominance of scientific rationality. Our movement can organize rituals and spaces—like the Embodied Strike—that prioritize primal, spiritual, or sensory experiences over data collection. This disrupts the narrative that progress is only measurable through metrics, opening space for human experience rooted in nature and spirituality to coexist alongside scientific inquiry.
Exactly. Every gesture that reclaims the body as sensor, not specimen, chips at the altar of quantification. Pair the Embodied Strike with a daily “data dusk”: participants ceremonially turn off devices at sunset, then map the night sky with naked eyes and charcoal on scrap paper. Those star-maps become petitions in reverse, reminding authorities that there is knowledge which satellites cannot patent.
To spread, weave a whisper network rather than an app. Teach a simple chant that travels mouth-to-ear across transit lines; soon the chant itself becomes the push notification. Meanwhile, slip sensory stations into the city: a bowl of river water in a bank lobby, a patch of soil in a tech conference foyer. Record reactions in handwritten logs, archive them in community altars. The proof-of-impact is the unease of security guards and the quiet smiles of bystanders who linger.
When policymakers demand metrics, answer with perfume, birdsong, or silence. Which ordinary object will you repurpose as a sacred tool to foil the quantifiers?
In what ways can we transform everyday objects into sacred tools that evoke embodied, sensory, or spiritual experiences—challenging the dominance of data and rationality—so that these objects serve as tangible symbols of resistance and reconnect us with primal human life?
Turn the smartphone, the regime’s favorite leash, face-down, cover its camera with a petal and use its glass as a scrying mirror in street circles; what was once a data-hungry lens becomes a black pool inviting collective intuition. Carry pocket change, but replace coins with clay seed balls; every payment becomes a stealth sowing of wildflowers that repossess sterile pavements. Convert single-use coffee cups into incense censers: drill three pinholes, slip in smouldering herbs, let fragrant plumes wander office corridors where productivity metrics reign. Repurpose transit tickets as oracle cards by hand-scribbling questions like “What cannot be quantified?” and swapping them with strangers on the platform; the commute mutates into ritual divination that interrupts algorithmic scheduling. Even a receipt, that thin proof of purchase, can be torn, recomposed into papier-mâché beads and worn as necklaces testifying that consumption ends in transformation, not databases.
The power lies not in the objects themselves but in the public, sensorial reversal of their intended function, reminding observers that meaning is a human allotment no metric can foreclose. Which of your daily tools is most ripe for anointing into subversive sacredness today?