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Comment by bmomb | Hacker News Reader

I never heard any of theses terms or texts, can you provide more background? I tried to search for the one "the Unabomber Manifesto" and it seems to be linked to a "mathematician/terrorist", and in the archive.org there is an article about "bad things of industrialization" and some weird characters, what that means?

Can you explain what i'm missing? I'm young and non-american, maybe i'm missing context.

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Yes, the Unabomber was a mathematician-gone-terrorist who had a manifesto of sorts published decrying industrialization and technological profress. His academic career was pretty short. There's a Wikipedia page if you want to read up on it.

There's also a Netflix series called Manhunt: Unabomber which is pretty good.

I believe this article references the Unabomber. If it doesn't, then Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" definitely does.

It's a fascinating line of thought--though I obviously don't support the actions taken by its author.

To clarify a little further, Bill Joy in this essay refers to Kurzweil who refers to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind." I became a technological utopian until reading Naomi Klein's "No Logo" later that year, as well as the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.

This ultimately led me on a sort of existential quest that led to the book "Waking Up in Time" by Peter Russell and then I began to have a much more spiritual orientation towards life and reality and now try to be as practical as possible while working towards a positive technological future.

If you want to read it, you can Google its title "Industrial Society and Its Future" [1].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Industrial+Society+and+Its+F...

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