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Scorched Earth

Crary's 2022 polemic calling for a radical break from the internet complex entirely — the most confrontational statement of his framework and the one that most directly raises the question of whether diagnosis implies withdrawal.

Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (Verso, 2022) advances the argument that the internet complex — the total system of digital technologies, platforms, and infrastructures that mediates contemporary life — is not reformable. The book treats digital capitalism not as a tool that humans use but as an environment that humans inhabit, and argues that the environment is incompatible with the conditions required for ecological survival, democratic politics, and human flourishing. The only adequate response, Crary argues, is refusal: a collective withdrawal from the digital substrate and the construction of alternative modes of life organized around different principles.

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The book is the most polemical of Crary's works and the most contested. Where 24/7 diagnosed a condition, Scorched Earth prescribes a response. The prescription — total refusal — has been criticized as impractical, nostalgic, and in some readings self-defeating, since the book itself was written, printed, distributed, and

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