The People Who Rage Against the Machine

STORY, WYOMING — It’s open mic night at The Wagon Box inn. The crowd has just been treated to two love poems, an ancient Byzantine chant, and a Twitter thread on raw milk, read aloud. Now, a local 19-year-old named Matt is going to play the accordion for everyone; he just has to loosen up his gun belt first. An electronic musician is trying to persuade the proprietor, Paul McNiel, to let him play his piece over the speakers. Verdict: no tech. Live music only.

“This piece requires a string quartet and church organ,” the musician protests.

“Well then, you should’ve brought the strings,” someone pipes up. 

It’s Labor Day weekend, and I’m in Wyoming for the second annual “The Machine and (Human) Nature” retreat. Fifty of us have schlepped to the town of Story, population 983, a six-hour drive from the Denver airport, to stay in the buses and RVs and walled tents that dot the 20 acres of land around The Wagon Box. Amid the pines and aspens, wreathed by a freezing-cold, trout-rich creek, we are here to discuss modernity’s effect “on families, the environment, autonomy, and class politics,” and “to discuss and showcase forms of creative resistance.” 

If the American political scene is divided between the liberal establishment—the domain of Dick and Liz Cheney, and Kamala Harris—and the renegade rebel alliance—which includes Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard—this conference represents the intelligentsia, or the culturati, of the renegades. They code right—although it’s noted at the conference that the left-right political divide is a “foreign French import,” and doesn’t apply—but only because the left is the establishment now, and they are antiestablishment. They see themselves as the vanguard of whatever comes after the establishment finally collapses under its own weight, and they call themselves by a paradoxical name. 

“We’re excited to have the Doomer Optimist scene here,” McNiel, 42, said, on the first day of the conference. “Whatever it is.”

It appeared to be many things, all at once. There were homesteaders; there were doomsday preppers. A long-haul trucker, a radiologist, law students, veterans, activists, ecologists, minor Twitter celebs, and a self-described “would-be professional cell tower toppler.” A digital artist couple and a venture capitalist couple and a traditionalist Catholic couple. 

“If you’re not familiar with the milieu, you might be like, ‘What hangs all these people together?’ ” Ashley Fitzgerald, 39, one of the organizers of the conference, told me. She coined the term Doomer Optimist in a tweet on January 23, 2021, and since then it’s come to summarize what they all have in common. 

First, they’re doomers. They believe that we’re at “the end of industrial modernity,” said Fitzgerald, or “the end of the end of history,” or they think that liberalism is over, or that we’re living within “a collapsing global empire”—a million different ways of saying that, in short, we’re screwed.

Second, they’re optimists. Collapse could be a long process, Fitzgerald assured me. “And maybe it’s not even collapse, maybe it’s just a transformation.” And everyone in this cohort, she said, is trying to live a good life, to forge ahead, despite their doomerism—“trying to find meaning in an alienated world.”

For the various people here, that meaning might come from starting new publishing houses or living off the grid, finding God, or fighting their HOA to allow for backyard chickens, “real decent-sized ones.” 

“Whoever hasn’t thrown themselves into some kind of sad nihilism is trying to build something heaven-like,” as McNiel put it, addressing the retreat at the outset. “And that’s what we’re here for.”

You could also, if you wanted, go bird hunting.  

Even if you’re not convinced that thermonuclear war, or widespread political violence, or an AI overlord is coming for us in the near future, you can probably recognize what the Doomer Optimists are seeing. The signs of decline are everywhere. Public trust in our institutions, and in each other, is low. A third of Americans think the 2020 election results were fraudulent, and a third of Republican voters are predicting chaos come November. The availability of good-paying manufacturing jobs is shrinking, and has been for forty years. We’ve started to realize that our smartphones and social media are very bad for us, especially our kids. But it’s unclear what we should do about any of it.

That’s what the Doomer Optimists are trying to figure out.

How can you be a patriot if you distrust the entire government and everyone who works within it? If you believe that communism is bad, how can you also believe that America should step away from the world stage, given China would surely fill the power vacuum? And if not liberal democracy, which got us here, then what? 

There are many tensions in the nascent ideology brewing at The Wagon Box. The retreat was billed as an opportunity to disagree about the specifics. A labor organizer told me that his politics differ from most of the people here, but that “this happened to be the place where people are open-minded.” 

Impassioned resistance to reigning dogma—about the environment, nutrition, gender, you name it—has a tendency to take you to far-out places. I was sitting down for dinner on the first night—crab rangoon, egg rolls, and elk that McNiel, the proprietor, had recently shot—when I overheard a woman ask, “Okay, so it wasn’t a vaccine injury?”