Ted Kaczynski has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A small bomb in a package that used razor blazes, nails, and other bits of metal to nearly tear his head off while his young family was in the house with him.
And it turns out the victim was the “wrong” man, as he didn’t even work on the project Kaczynski wanted to bring “retribution” for.
Kaczynski May have said some interesting things, but he physically tore apart the lives of many, leaving a wake of destruction during his crusade.
Actions speak louder than words. Even eloquent ones.
edit: Only one of 3 victims was killed in his home:
> In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed after opening a mail bomb sent to his home in New Jersey. In a letter to The New York Times, Kaczynski wrote he had sent the bomb because of Mosser's work repairing the public image of Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Unabomber: In His Own Words
There's an angle where this whole tragedy is just blowback from MK ULTRA.
If you were to read his works you might find that he wasn't so deranged after all, quite the opposite.
Edit: In terms of the philosophy/view I mean. The bombings were made out of bitterness and anger and are inexusable.
That is fucking deranged. Describing it as deranged is an understatement, and it blows my mind that you’re defending it _on an internet forum_. Only someone who’s never seen someone die of violence or disease could ever say some shit like that.
Today is reminding me that I need to take hacker news commenters much less seriously…
In any case it sounds like you're describing a trolley problem (where people die whatever option you choose and you might pick the one killing less).
I don’t see “no action or choice is perfectly good” as an excuse to take bs like “what if disease and famine and ignorance are good for us” seriously.
And that’s not really what the trolley problem is about, AFAIU it’s about agency and culpability - I think you’re more discussing basic utilitarianism?
I mean unless his stance was that a higher population is inherently bad because there’s more people to experience suffering? But surely all these people in this thread don’t support something THAT dumb.
I’m so lost and his wiki page isn’t helping
And please don't mistake people explaining his theories with supporting them.
Thanks for the explanation, I really appreciate you taking the time!
Now, one can say "No, that's wrong!", but that doesn't make it wrong, though it can certainly cause it to appear that way.
If Ted is bad for his body count of innocent people, then what of us?
I re-skimmed the manifesto earlier today. It's not uninteresting, but I don't think it's the sort of thing which can be considered or appreciated outside the context of his violent acts. For one, no one would have read it if Kacynzski had been a nonviolent academic.
As for bitterness and anger, well, here's a quote I pulled somewhat randomly from the text.
"We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society. Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society."
I've heard the name TK first when reading Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us".
15 years later I was burnt out and increasingly aware that Tech was not a force of good. I went on a 3 year journey trying to understand what made TK chose violence. It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly, however hard that is. I started by studying his manifest. I dissected it like a surgeon, then read every book/reference that he gave. What would happen if I read every book he read. How does a bright young man go from reading philosophy and science conclude that men can't be saved.
How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse. TK was an accelerationist who believed the means justifies the end. TK felt that it was a necessary evil to collaborate with those he disagrees with (fascists, neo-nazis etc) as long as they can help bring down the current world order.
One dominat figure that kept popping up repeatedly when going through TK ramblings was Jaques Ellul, a French philosopher, not too well known outside France[1][2]. Ellul must have left quite the impact because even his manifesto is a homage on Ellul's biggest work: The Technological Society (La Technique)[1].
Ellul doesn't just talk about Technology but the whole domain of what we today call Systems Thinking. And he opens your eyes about edge cases and the victims of this thinking in ways even heavyweights like Nassim Taleb will seem like a rookies in comparison.
Ca 2018 I've read everything Ellul wrote and also read multiple times what TK wrote. I was depressed, like really really bad. There is no way out. I still wasn't criminally insane though. There had to be more than just "self-radicalization by information". Something was missing. It was isolation!
So I went on to teach myself bushcraft living off grid for a year in a similar way as TK. "Living off the land" as we call it in infosec (only it's the literal land :)). And this made me understand why TK had so much hate for civilization. It's the same hate the Sentinelese people must have for those visiting their shores[3].
Although I had no guns to feed myself with game meat as TK did. And I did not spend the same time out there. But after a few months without human contact I did understand what humanity has lost and how our connection to mother Earth has been severed.
While I never turned criminally insane and always disagreed with violence, I managed to understand what radicalized TK. It was being isolated. It happens in less severe ways to all of humanity via algorithm and screen time.
If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?
Jacques Ellul is not an easy read when you're vulnerable and searching for answers. Ellul will push you off the cliff of society and do something that today is unthinkable: to question technology and technological progress itself.
TK is not comprehensible to anyone functioning and depending within society because he hated society and he believed it needed to be destroyed. It's pretty hard to have any empathy with this. Because he caused a lot of pain and suffering he robbed himself of leaving a legacy or a lesson.
[1] The technological society https://archive.org/details/TheBetrayalByTechnologyAPortrait...
[2] https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Ellul%2C+Jacqu...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2019/08/01/747368557/the-story-behind-jo...
Edit: yes heavily edited, lots of typos, lots of context cleared up. It still has potential to be misunderstood ofc
What are you up to nowadays after this profound experience? Ever tried psilocybin?
As TK complained himself (paraphrasing) "you can not learn from academic papers or books about how to thrive in the wilderness. it's something you need to pick up out there.", and I too think it is pointless to put this in a blog.
Never tried psilocybin but once ate some shit mushrooms by accident that gave me the runs and resulted in some pretty bad dehydration. No fun when you need to go every 15 minutes and it's 3 AM and all you have for a toilet is a shovel to dig a ditch and leaves from a tree to wipe :D
never tied psilocybin and generally don't experiment with drugs when in nature. always wanted to try it though. but I'm too old for such things now
This feels like a joke. Even more than "I lived in the woods for years so I could figure out a mailbomber"
TK was mentally ill. Cutting himself off from society was a symptom, not the cause. Being a mimic doesn't give insight into the original aside from the act.
Nassim Taleb is not a heavyweight by any stretch.
I don't think this is as radical of an idea as you think as I think about this quite often. Basically the grim realizations of the harm I bring upon the earth in pursuit of my career, hobbies, and other lifestyle choices. It honestly bothers me regularly enough to make me question myself and my identity.
As for trying to understand TK - Did at any point you acknowledge - "I neither have his unique psyche and the lifetime of unique input that shaped it?" You didn't turn to criminality because you aren't TK. No amount of cosplaying will make you think like TK.
Without those modes, the subject returns to civilization seeing only what civilization deprives one of: the great expanses of unspoiled wilderness.
And that produces the existential crisis and criminal insanity of TK.
So it boils down to a question: would you exchange the life of a lone top predator (in a forest with a firearm) to any other kind of life?
For some people the answer would be in favor of the top predator life. To choose the life of a tiger, one just should stop loving anyone. After this, killing becomes mere killing (predators do not "murder"), and the whole idea of destroying everyone else, or at least reducing them to a comparable state of a worthy adversary, becomes pretty natural. Of course technology becomes an enemy, because it gives the rest of humans an unfair advantage; first of all, the key human technology, the society. Certainly a city is an uninhabitable place for a lone tiger, and of course it limits the tiger's freedom in uncomfortable ways.
Some people just really want to see the world burn.
Tigers live lonely and avoid fighting other tigers to death (even the extreme case of males both courting the same female rarely leads to such an issue), probably in order to preserve their genus.
Lions live in 'societies' (well-structured prides) and routinely kill other lions (even cubs).
The average lion, albeit way less physically formidable than a tiger, is a very dangerous contender against a tiger: he hits to kill.
If we need an example of a highly social predator species that rarely kill each other in conflicts, that'd be wolves.
Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system.
'In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment" led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition. Electrodes monitored the subject's physiological reactions. These encounters were filmed, and subjects' expressions of anger and rage were later played back to them repeatedly. The experiment lasted three years, with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Kaczynski each week. Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.'
^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_st...
(He was 17 years old during his second year at Harvard).
> Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system.
"Because Mkultra" is not a valid mitigation or explanation of TK's mental health or lack of it. After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?
Sometimes a sausage is just a sausage, and sometimes an evil murderer is just an evil murderer.
There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil.
You mean it is easier to just jail or execute them?
Short term, sure, but if we want to solve murder in the long term, or just enjoy a stable society, held together by free choice and not fear or domination - then there is really no other choice in trying to understand what makes people go boom, so we can prevent that.
The alternative would be living in fortresses and going out only heavily armed.
Also, do you have a clear definition of "evil" at all?
I don't and I think it is kind of complicated. Starting with the old paradoxon: murder many people while you are in a army and you are a hero. Murder them on the street and you are a villain. So some say, all soldiers are evil murderers (and leave open the question on how to deal with the situation when they come for them or their children). Some say states are the evil. Others say stateless is the root of evil, etc.
And the Unabomber believed he did god, as he tried to end suffering. From a pure philosophical point of view, I can accept that there is a hypothetical chance, that he might be right. But in all practical matters he was a crazy, dangerous fanatic (something I translate to "evil").
But the thing is, many people think actually like him, even though most don't act on it. But they might soon. So now is a time, when one can still reach them. But that only works, when you try to understand their motivations.
And understand why they got there.
> You mean it is easier to just jail or execute them?
No, I did not. That's you reading something that was never said.
My point is that you cannot say, as you are saying right now, that there is always an environmental reason for why someone is the way they are.
That certainly isn't true. What I've found is that people who go looking for an environmental reason always find one!
What these people don't explain is why all those other people with a virtually identical environment didn't become mass murderers!
I am curious how you conclude that their environment is "virtually identical". I seriously doubt that. What is a paradise for someone can be hell for someone else and to the observer it looks the same.
So this would rather be an indication that the modelling is flawed.
And in the Unabombers case we have among ideological things the actual MKUltra experiment(I think no participant enjoyed it). A experiment designed to break someones mind. But to me it sounds you just concluded that he is evil and this wasn't a factor because other participants did not became mass murderers?
Side question, do you consider the designers of MKUltra as evil?
Cigarettes cause cancer, and someone’s cancer can be directly linked to smoking even if not everyone who smokes gets cancer. There is no point diagnosing a dead person we don’t know personally, but dismissing the effect of an organised and long period of psychological torture just because not every participant ended up a terrorist sounds a bit myopic. For example, we don’t know about the raving lunatics that don’t make headlines.
And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic?
There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment". All the participants in that environment had the same agency, but it was only TK that went down this particular path.
TBH, if the sample size was small (a dozen or two mkultra subjects), then there's not enough data to tell if it was the environment or the individual.
If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.
Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.
That’s just his statistics work… Making a rare event more common does not make it a certainty. Again, we don’t know about any possible other people who might have been seriously disturbed in other, less attention-grabbing ways.
Nobody said that it was the only reason, but let’s be honest: if you take unstable people and condition them that way, such outcomes are not inconceivable. Saying that the experiment (weekly hours of psychological torture) did not affect this is not really believable.
> There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment".
It’s a good thing nobody said that, then…
> If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.
Regardless of sample size, people who go full rogue that way are exceedingly rare in the first place. You’d need thousands upon thousands of subjects to detect increases over a baseline chance of 1:10000000.
> Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.
Again, nobody said that. In any case, I certainly did not. I think we can have a rational discourse between “he was inhuman and absolutely evil” (he was not) and “he was actually right” (he was not either). In the end, he was just a human. His nature, upbringing, and environment all played roles.
I've seen this argument a few times in this thread, and I hope I can explain my disagreement here. Even if not everyone subjected to this experiment becomes a terrorist, and even if there is something specific to Ted K.'s psychological makeup that made him become a terrorist after undergoing the experiment, that does not mean we can totally shift the blame away from the experimenters. Suppose that in the parallel world where he did not get experimented on, he would not have become a terrorist, we can still blame Murray (and/or the CIA) for taking (abnormal and extreme) actions that turned him into a terrorist.
By craving for material comfort we want: to possess more => better yield => economies of scale.
This leads us to live in conditions which aren't appropriate to our current 'nature': large urban areas (where we often interact with people we don't know: this is stress-inducing esp. for males), specialization (we aren't ants), centralization and bureaucracy (we aren't cogs)...
Pertinent views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#The_Breakdown_of_...
There's a name for people who go into the woods and live all alone: hermits. They don't tend to lose all empathy for others.
Is this a typo? Do you mean instead that the ends justify the means?
> It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly
I just happened to research this recently, rabbit hole a propos nothing: (1) in English, "Polack" is an ethnic slur for a Polish person; (2) in a handful of unrelated European languages, Polak is just the word for a Pole; just so y'all know.
It's important to remember that living alone for any significant period of time is not natural for human beings. It's not something that brings you closer to yourself, it is a stress on your mind that distorts your real, social self into something else.
Some people will be able to stay healthy after such an experience, some will not - just like any other stressor on our bodies. But losing empathy is a mental illness in itself, not some rediscovery of a bond with nature.
Don't want to be that meme guy who criticizes the person complaining about modern society via an iPhone, but it feel a touch hypocritical to be a genius planning to actively destroy modern society while living on handouts from that society while cosplaying at being an independent self-made man.
We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but I'd stress the mental illness part so perhaps society will get serious about treating mental illness with seriousness. Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczynski?
No we aren't, because that's not a real thing.
That's just something people make up when they want to demonize someone for their words, but don't have any actual evidence that their words are causing harm.
People aren't random agents of evil, that may or may not trigger. That's simply not a description of reality.
That is not what stochastic terrorism means.
Stochastic terrorism is the observation that while you can not express specifically, where and how terror will occur, you know that with prob 1, it will occur and is a consequence of people rallying and exploiting crazy people.
Of course, anyone can deny that they explicitly told people to commit acts of terror, because they didn’t, and therefore they can not be held responsible for what the mentally ill did; that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cause and effect.
A constant barrage of people expressing “think of the children”, or blaming minorities for the perils of society is going to slowly but surely deteriorate and rally people into supporting murder and other heinous acts by distorting their reality and allowing them to justify atrocities.
Expressing that some [hero] needs to do something, nudge nudge wink wink doesn’t mean you did not cause an event, people don’t exist in vacuums, and all of our interactions provably matter.
Someone could say, but his mental illness made him believe he has to kill those people for the good of humankind. Firstly, how do we truly know this as true? Perhaps he just loved the feeling of power it gave him so he came up with the justification. Being an intelligent man he came up with a convincing story.
Unfortunately the brain is rather complex and can break in surprisingly many ways. One such example is the shooter who had cancer that pressed against his [iirc] amygdala.
For Ted, we know that he was a subject of mkultra experiments, and that he was tortured. We know that he was deeply troubled and had communication issues. Perhaps he felt that the bombings were the only way he could garner focus on the problems he saw; but that is likely rationalisation on my end. It should also be noted that Ted lived very isolated, and that can cause severe damage to the brain. If you find yourself alone in a foreign country that you work in and no social support system or many interactions, you might experience this and see yourself changing.
In Greek αιτιολογώ and δικαιολογώ exist, where the former identifies causality and uses that to reason on the events and the latter is the same as justifying. To my knowledge the former doesn’t have a translation in English.
In an effort to understand your post, I ran those through the English Wiktionary which some may not know, also has foreign words.
αιτιολογώ: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B1%CE%B9%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%B...
δικαιολογία: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B4%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B...
My personal interpretation is that this like the difference between an explanation and an excuse, but perhaps someone here has a better interpretation.
So this is purely causal without imposing the person’s subjective judgement onto the action or event; simply expressing that given the circumstances, it makes sense that the events occurred, whether the person was right or justified in acting as they did is a different story. So given the events I can reason why the action occurred.
For δικαιολογία / δικαιολογώ, the words are derived from δίκαιο and λόγος again; the former meaning the person is in the right, or is morally correct from the perspective of the person expressing it. Thus, justifying is closer to δικαιολογώ.
For an example; chores are boring, so I didn’t do them even though I promised I would. You can reason why I didn’t do them but you can’t claim I was justified in not doing them. I promised I would and breaking promises is generally immoral without s good justification or a reason.
Separately I like the phrase "a reason is not an excuse" quite a lot. I can empathise with people who make terrible decisions and understand their reasoning, but that doesn't make me excuse the choices that they made.
Take as an example pedophiles. There is a movement in the netherlands which tries to implore them to speak up about their "dark" desires and seek help. In which case they should be helped. But once they have acted on their inner demons I don't see how we should just say well they weren't themselves.
It's not an excuse, it's an explanation for simple evil. At times I feel like people confuse these two.
Surely Ted believed what he was doing was a great good
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65867291
In his own journals he wrote that he didn't claim to be "altruist or to
be acting for the 'good' (whatever that is) of the human race", instead
insisting that he acted "merely from a desire for revenge".What sort of thing does this word "evil" refer to? Is it simply the wish to do harm? Is it evil to want to harm someone that is harming you?
I think the word only makes sense in the context of religious (or pseudo-religious) beliefs about metaphysical forces that drive events. I don't believe in such forces. Believing in evil is like believing in God.
One problem I have with the word is that once you define a person as evil, you've placed them beyond the reach of reason or persuasion. The only reasonable response becomes to remove them completely.
Not all mentally ill person are movitvated as these evil few.
That last word in this quote should’ve been a red flag.
Most folks with mental illness simply suffer. This is the real reason we should "get serious" about treating mental illness.
coherence of thought may be a yardstick, and if so ted is as coherent and articulate as it can be. was he wrongly inspired? did he hate so much the current political organization that emasculates any single individual from achieving much? or causing a consequential national debate? did he take his anger too far? thinking about these, and having read all his material, i think we shouldn’t consign him to mental illness. it’s too convenient, it’s a worthless external judgement, and one that he vehemently rejected.
ted was a sane man acting on his belief. no different than me praying every morning and going to church every sunday to thank god for how far he has brought me.
Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are
they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczynski?
His crimes seemed to begin shortly after he was fired from the family
business by his brother for posting abusive limericks to a female colleague
who had dumped him after two dates.
From there he retreated to the Montana wildness and to the cabin he
had built by hand, without heating, plumbing or electricity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....
However, I think there's a difference between sympathy, empathy, and understanding.
I apologize in advance; the rest of this comment will be a bit long-winded (rambly?), but it's hard to make cultural points concisely:
One of the reactions after World War II was "Never Forget," and we built a whole infrastructure to understand how what happened came to pass. People study many of the most murderous madmen of history, because it's important to understand.
Any serious study will be complex. Germany went from being basically a ruined nation to an economic, military, and industrial superpower in a short amount of time. Hitler did many things to come to power which were effective. The old saying "Mussolini made the trains run on time" isn't quite true, but if he had, any study would show how he did it.
Those are important problems to study. I'll take the Mussolini example, since it's not quite true. Compare two universes:
1) Only Mussolini could make the trains run on time
2) Anyone could make the trains run on time
Which one is more likely to lead to another Mussolini?
This may sound crass in American culture -- there is a tendency to equate any discussion of Hitler with hate -- but I come from a culture which took a different (and I think more effective) stance. We look at what happened, and try to understand, without glorification or downplaying of the problems. The most difficult lies are those which mix fact with fiction, and it's actually important to tease the two apart. If we all acknowledge the facts, the next madman can't use them to support a fiction.
“My delivery was delayed”
Maybe not the place for it.
It also makes a map of human affect. We can all pretend such a thing matters, but most horrors never touch our life and would never be known without the news.
The fact that a random guy gave his spare time to help others is notable. The key point is the Christmas tree deliverer being a first responder. It's a hell of a thing.
I think you're mistaken - I think it's precisely the right place for such a comment.
That take is strange to me.
He reminds me a lot of people I've been close to who suffered mental illness. He didn't want to be considered mentally ill, and his apologists don't like it either, and further, many who focus on his victims and crimes don't like it. But for me, that's the major story about him. It was clear to me the first time i tried to read the manifesto many years ago.
From that, his story is sad. He didn't need to go insane and start bombing people. He had potential to do other, better things.
I watched the Netflix documentary, and the commentary from his brother and sister in law was very moving. The brother, because he still loved him, but had to come to terms with what he did and do the right thing. The brother's wife, who it seemed flagged him as mentally ill from nearly the beginning.
It's actually a pretty interesting read so far. His thoughts on "leftism" and general society conformance seem to me to be quite well thought out.
I guess mental illness, and logical, rational thoughts aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
This is not to excuse all his actions as we cannot know really the full extent of the experiment he participated in without a proper understanding of what was going to happen to him and the potential outcomes.
His positions in his manifesto aren't exactly bad positions to take, his actions in bringing attention to it were bad and hurt many innocents.
I think it's possible to condemn his actions while also recognizing his non-violent contributions and the elements in his life that may have contributed to the creation of the Unabomber. After reading about the experiments he attended, it's very hard for me to remove those as a contributor to the Unabomber; they weren't the sole contributor, but I can't imagine having such derision and psychological abuse for 200+ hours without walking out of it maladjusted.
The purpose of such statements I think isn't to excuse Kaczynski's actions, but instead to ensure that we aren't just imagining some video game or movie villain that appeared and the FBI heroically stopped; he was a human being who lived a pretty normal life, and then he changed and became the Unabomber. The latter is extremely sad and appalling given the damage, and I think the latter is made even worse by remembering the former; he used to be a pretty smart guy and contributed well to society.
It's a sad story no matter how you view Kaczynski, but I think that we are worse off if we don't recognize that he was at some point a fairly normal human being, teaching maths and studying maths, who went through a lot of psychological issues, and came out as the Unabomber.
Only if you have a stigmatizing view of mental illness.
> but I think people forget he really was a very good mathematician
Famously, so was John Nash, who was schizophrenic. To say nothing about the large number of very accomplished people in many fields. Mentally ill people can be very smart and talented.
> and that he very likely was a subject in the MK-Ultra experiments without realizing it.
The onset of schizophrenia tends to happen in late adolescence. This lines up with his time at Harvard. I think it's wrong to blame the psychological experiment thing for this. It's like people who blame drugs for making people schizophrenic, without understanding that they may have had the condition before.
I would recommend the Netflix doc.
Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.
If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one. Also radically of the future and forgotten is FM-2030 [6] [7].
All in all, blowing up people is easy, blowing up antiquated concepts, grasping for the grounds of a new metaphysics, painstakingly implementing and debugging is the hard part.
Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive after following to conclusions systems such as the Grotthuss proton translocation mechanism driving motion in a F_0/F_1-ATP synthase rotation mechanism [8] [9].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Anders
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon
[4] Gilbert Simondon - 'The Technical Object as Such', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXDtG74hCL4
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kittler
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030
[7] Futurist FM-2030 Appears on CNN's Future Watch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT__dTtX2ik
[8] Prof Levin, Prof Frasch (2022) Mitochondria, bioenergetics, information, electric fields, https://youtu.be/MEhrMR-Jaw0?t=3429
[9] 2021, Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.65072...
The same could be said about Capitalism.
Indeed, in all large-scale supposed “non-capitalist” societies today there is capital—it doesn’t stop being so if a few people use unlimited power and oppression to install arbitrary rules and restrictions on capital for others without having being subject to any checks or balances themselves; it just becomes more contrived and perhaps perverted.
Some would probably say that it’s the infectious external influence of other capitalist countries that precludes full abolition of capital, but another way to look at it is that said external influence is in fact what gives such a regime life in the first place—i.e., if you remove the agitating antagonistic existence of “capitalism”, the pretend “non-capitalism capitalism” would not suddenly turn into a perfectly “non-capitalism non-capitalism” but rather revert to capitalism, regardless of whether it would be called so or not or whether it would happen violently or peacefully.
civil and political life is terrible and still better than it has ever been
>"He sounds like an ecofascist to me, someone willing to use violence in pursuit of a "green" ideology."
The use of "green" ideology is pretty sarcastic remark from the political right, or climate deniers.
If your politics are too vile to discuss and defend, then don't participate in political discussions. And stop trying to inject your own politics while telling others not to mention their, like you've been hypocritically doing repeatedly.
The 23rd Century shouldn't belong to ecofascists.
Perhaps an even better parallel would have been Alexander Grothendieck [3], the mathematician of the 20th century (maybe even of the 21st century if concepts as the topos [4] are made into usable tools for deep neural networks [5]), but also a person who was teaching mathematics in Vietnam [6] while hiding from bombs. When the world burns, all that remains is the Glasperlenspiel [7].
[1] 2022, Governing progress: From cybernetic homeostasis to Simondon’s politics of metastability, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380261221084...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topos
[5] 2021, Topos and Stacks of Deep Neural Networks, https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14587
[6] 2013, Grothendieck’s 1967 Lectures in the Forest in Vietnam, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00283-013-9368-6
At no point the impromptu syllabus from above defends anyone or anything. In fact, it is so tame it didn't even mention more problematic, although arguably important and interesting, works such as Martin Heidegger's [1]. To think referencing someone as Günther Anders defends fascism is just too ludicrously functionally illiterate for any other words to be further possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Techno...
Whoever decided to not name him Adolf did the guy a huge favor.
Also worth mentioning what was essentially a partial autobiography by Kaczynsky: Truth Versus Lies[1]. I'm not sure it was ever completed and there are a couple versions floating around. He was still working on it well into the mid 2010s.
---
[1] One version: https://archive.org/details/TruthVersusLiesPart1
That's Ted Kaczynski. He may have had two good ideas for every bad one, but he was still a piece of shit who deserved to be isolated from society where he couldn't hurt anyone, and there are better advocates for whatever good came out of his head.
Or to paraphrase the dril classic: you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
edit: to be clear, I think the dude was little more than an ecofascist and not worth taking seriously. But if you're going to, you ought to know he was the worst advocate for any position he held. You can do better than propping up a dead asshole.
You have to remember that when he performed the bombing in the 70s environmental protections had bipartisan support (Nixon famously created the EPA [1]).
It wasn't until much later that being green turned into a radical partisan issue. I mostly blame Rush Limbaugh [2] and the Koch brothers [3] for that shift. Turns out, a lot of big oil propaganda [4] can really sway public opinion.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa
[2] https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-cli...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch...
[4] https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga...
As a way to discret the whole of the scientific and academic establishment in the minds of enough (voting) people, so as to delay the inevitable consensus that fossil fuel consumption is killing everyone slowly
If one half of the global turned to ecofascisim and they got a non-technical world they desired, the other half would immediately capitalize on this and take over.
In a way I find Ted's idea fascinating in the same way I find a lot of smarter spiritual teacher fascinating. Here is this simple base idea, now here is 500 things you have to watch out for how the most simplistic path will cause more harm than good. To that, I don't think he had a complete picture on how to achieve what he wanted.
Like Ram Dass saying, be here now, but take it too far and you will go insane!
He had some great ideas and simultaneously pushed back any real change by decades for his own self gain interest.
Normally I could write something like that over a week end but this article... it is an absolute doozy and the further in I go the worse it gets!
The issue is, you cannot really condense his writings down without doing a total dis-service to the points being made. Either you are going to misrepresent a point and it get wildly misinterpreted OR you come off a little to in praise of it.
It is very clear that TK had an academic background, even going so far as numbering the paragraphs - and in his book, The Anti-tech revolution : Why and how - he is very clear at the beginnings that these writings are not meant to be just read but studied. I don't disagree, they are written in a very tight manner. So while Industrial society and its future is 35,000 words, it is very specific in those words. It is about a 2 hour read, or you can just find a audio version on youtube.
If I had to summarize the essence of his works, he had a very decent analysis of the flaws of technology based societies. He had absolutely no idea on how to actually bring about change or even know where to start. The subsequent 27 years of writing from jail showed that he could analyses the problems and potential failings of revolutionary tactics but had no idea of how to actually analyze what technology as good or bad.
There is a reason he was called an insane Genius.
Personally speaking, yeah he was right on a lot of things... now what?
I ain't going to do what he did and try to bomb the world into submission, that is just idiotic. It is all just a some really good analysis but with no means of achievable execution. I more worry about others that are coming after him that will do a lot more damage. Anders Beivik who killed many at a youth summer came in 2011 also deeply reference TK's works in his manifest - an example of how this line of thinking can only lead down a dark and terrible path. But doesn't mean you shouldn't read these things.
One can read these things and take away some very good points without having to internalize the whole thing. Aristotle said something like that, you can read and think about ideas as though they are true and not necessarily have to believe them.
I was writing a whole thing about why I find looking for nuggets of wisdom in a work that you fundamentally find severely flawed is a waste of time, but I think it’s best dropped. “Did you find these critiques interesting” isn’t even something I could really convince somebody to change their mind on lol, given all the paragraphs in Hacker News
Why do you have to be an extremist about something or it doesn't count.
Think this is all the same mistaken view that a lot of extremists have. IF you can't be 100% dedicated without any slips then you are a failure and hypocrite.
So what if a vegan is stuck in an airport and has to cheat once and eat a burger, or I have family over for dinner and we do 'waste' more, or if I am vegan but on Thanksgiving, it is easier to eat some turkey and not argue about it.
You see, your view is the extreme one.
And also there is always Moloch. I may see technology and capitalism heading toward a brick wall, but I still do have to eat and live in the world. I'm not an extremists.
I don’t think he had just some “good points”, I think he’s completely right on the matter that modern (post steam engine & guns) technology is harmful for human life.
Isn't that the definition of agreeing (or not) with someone ?
> but that's not the same thing.
How so ?
Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all dead anyway and if this is the price to pay to stop it, it will have been worth it.
Also unless you’re a government you probably shouldn’t be applying utilitarian ideas of ethics to your actions, you do not have a right to decide on behalf of anyone but yourself as an individual, so even by utilitarian standards you are likely being unethical.
Second, the "imagine you truly believed X" defense is a good argument for sympathy, but not a good argument for justification or credence.
Unlike Hitler's opinions on snow, Ted Kaczynski's murders are inextricably linked to his ideology.
Few if any called Ellul a madman or characterized his ides as absolutely insane, but as far as I know he didn't kill anyone.
Yeah, probably some sort of causal relationship there.
On a more personal note, I am always getting panicked by emails from virus vendors about some grand new threat till I walk around for fifteen minutes. I bought toed shoes believing it would transform my experience of walking and hiking. I worried about Congress canceling NPR back in the 90s. When I try to remove some plastic toxic stuff from my diet,mit is extremely hard to avoid a big slide into “purity eating” where a choice to make a slight alteration to the effects on my world i to a matter of moral virtue. From “less antibiotics for the chickens slowing the spread of anti-biopics” to “why do you ask me to consume this swill of the devil?!” Is a small delta in my mind.
For a year or so I listened to all kinds of crypto podcasts or YouTubes / twitter spaces, and it was never long till people brought up anti-vax or global finance conspiracy ideas. I have watched flat earth / scientist debates, and the words of the flat earthers don’t parse as insane.
I think you're falling prey to the trap many engineers and scientists do, by assuming that they are ultimately capable of pure logical discussion and analysis, and that their biases are known and minimal - and that others can be seen in that light, too. In such a world, perhaps it would make sense to give Hitler a fair shake.
In our current world, I see us all as flawed little monkeys who can be pulled this way and that by provocative rhetoric and incomplete information. Dismissing someone's ideology completely because it was a central part of their campaign to kill millions is by far the logical and ethical choice. To do otherwise is intellectual hubris, IMO.
All this is, of course, in addition to the "there's a billion books out there, why does Hitler get to the top of the list? What about his life, ideas, or the summaries of his books makes you think that his ideas are any better than a million political blogs you have yet to read?"
B) seeing “moralist” in this context seems a little absurd. He didn’t swear a lot or start an OnlyFans, he tried to kill dozens of people…
It's unfortunate that people stop at the Manifesto, as Kaczynski has other critiques, but also admits to limitations or failures in his thinking. In one correspondence he admits he has no criteria to decide if a given technology is benign (small scale) or harmful (organization-dependent), a critical distinction! He tries to shore it up with analyzing a primitive Steam Engine, but I would point to Bronze as a contradiction harboring both characteristics. My interpretation is that the distinction is political, not based on any aspect of the technology itself including production. Technology acts as a magnitude, and how we apply it is the essence of our social/political organization.
This is, of course, one interpretation among many. Like professor Ellul, there are many other voices. There is Society of the Spectacle (a style ISAIF is imitating), or the works of Jean Baudrillard where he (early years) analyzes commodities under Consumerism or (later years) his work on Spectacle and Image. Even Karl Marx has a detailed understanding and critique of Machine Society in Chapter 15 of Capital [0].
Finally, Kaczynski is harmful to many anarchist spaces. His True Crime reputation attracts tons of media footage and mystique, which furthers misunderstandings. Crimethink has a great essay, "The Unabomber’s Unending 15 Minutes of Fame" [1], which details how this warps perceptions and action while ignoring who the victims are.
> As individuals within a movement professing a desire to reconstitute the world on the basis of love, harmony, peace, and sharing, an ethical question arises when a means inconsistent with an end is presented. In this case, the tactic of non-self-defense violence. This is not a question of armed defense such as was the case during the 1930s Spanish revolution, for instance, but rather, the validity of aggressive violence against those who are designated as The Enemy.
> The question of who is our enemy is a slippery one. Most of the dead and maimed from the Unabomber campaign were involved in this massive, almost entirely inclusive system of destruction and repression in a manner little different from most of us. Under the Unabomber rubric of complicity, almost all of us are potential targets. It should be remembered, his toll of three dead and 29 wounded was severely limited only when his bombs failed to go off in an airliner and outside a university classroom. Apparently, all of us were indiscriminately designated as The Enemy.
> I don’t have a lot of interest in people who advocate “armed struggle.” In this country, it usually comes down to those enthusiasts for armed adventures constituting a rooting section without taking the leap into the fray themselves. This is often accompanied by an arrogance and set of judgmental politics that condemn anyone not in the claque as timid, or reformist, or worse, counter-revolutionary. The latter, by the way, has historically been a pre-execution category, so I watch my back when ever I hear that phrase being thrown my way even by someone claiming to be an anarchist.
> My experience is that advocates of violence have a short shelf life. They break windows or plant a few bombs while furiously condemning everyone else for a lack of revolutionary ardor and then they are gone, usually with some wreckage that has to be cleaned up by those committed to long range organizing.
[0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
[1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/walker-lane-pseudony...
Who would care about Kaczynski's ravings without the murders?
> The solution is to simply view technique as objects that can be useful to us and recognize it for what it is, just another thing among many others, instead of believing in technique for its own sake or that of society.
Which I would summarize as "we should examine technology as a means to an end, rather than a good unto itself". On the other hand, I would summarize Ted's thoughts (without having read the manifesto myself) as "technology of all kinds is inherently evil, and we have a moral imperative to dismantle and destroy basically all of it as quickly as possible."
Those two ideas seem related in that they're talking about some of the same concepts, but it kinda ends there for me...
I refuse to read or become exposed to some ideas because one of their proponents murdered people.
I want this strategy to be less effective, not more.
Invariably, people take the opportunity to publicly declare how opposed they are to various abhorrent people, indirectly making others aware of them and their ideas. This entire page of comments on HN is a good example.
It's hilarious that people don't recognize that when they say "I will not read this" it is an advertisement.
Interested in his ideas? Read better manifestos by people who gained notice for their words and ideas, not because they murdered a bunch of people. Maybe there were explanations for why he did what he did, but at the end of the day his was a wasted life that made the world a worse place.
I found some degree of edification in reading his manifesto, and I see no justification for your attempt to dissuade others from reading it.
Put down the strawman, it's already dead.
Edit: In all seriousness, it's been a while since I read it. His general ideas are that technology has been a disaster for humankind because, among other reasons, it's freed up time for us to be preoccupied with unimportant bullshit, to the point that it causes mental problems with people. People start to act out in various ways in resistance of our current state because we 'know' somewhere in our bodies that this existence is meaningless. People without the luxury of free time do not have to preoccupy themselves with this struggle for meaning.
He also goes on at length about how leftists are self-hating people and worship victimhood, and their mentality is partly a product of this existential dilemma.
But these are just a couple of points I took away. It's much more well-written than I could personally attempt to summarize in an internet comment.
It's really that. He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed, when men lived meaningful lives in peaceful harmony with nature... juxtaposed with all the purported moral, societal, and environmental decay of today.
Many people find it alluring today, but the themes are evergreen. They crop up in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages, and throughout history.
Misplaced nostalgia aside, another problem with most such ideologies is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right. Whether that's blowing things up or taking away your rights is just an implementation detail.
There's the opposite problem most have: the inability to understand that there are people who have actually experienced the past (within their lives) and might prefer it for reasons other than the cliche "they were young then, that's why they like it" compared to the present.
And that, depending on your inclinations and ideas about how to live, it's not true that nothing better "ever existed".
>is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right
Well, the future comes at people with force too. People thrown out of employment into poverty because of technology and being told "just learn to code" for example.
Or things getting integrated with the state and business world, and becoming increasingly necessary to have, even if you don't want them.
As the saying goes, the only constant is change.
Everyone alive has only been in a modern time. Now what characteristics you want your world to have, certainly many people are fighting for different visions. The idea that a particular balance of corporate and legislative power is inevitable is just the messaging from those corporate powers. And it isn’t more than PR - when society gets unbalanced enough, you get changes even if most think it is impossible. Anything from the French Revolution to the end of Apartheid.
And if your ideas of how to live examine other metrics, there are much better times in the past.
Especially since if changes to bring back aspects of the past that were better were taken today, it wouldn't mean we have to give up technologies that improved the mortality rates. How about that, huh?
In fact, even if your ideas of how to live are solely about less childhood mortality and long and healthy lives, you might be better served with a couple decades past:
https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2023/04/26/research-update-u-s-se...
I do particularly look forward to the highways being dug up and rewilded, while we get around with Cat Buses or blimps or jet packs. I didn’t get the idea you were advocating that we improve what we have; it came across as what we have sucks and we need to go back, back to the closet, back to less power, back to less information, back to the culture of conformity for the powerful and the culture of fear for the oppressed.
People should read “Beginning of Infinity” for a strong counter argument.
I didn't read it like that, it was more like "I don't want a six lane highway in front of my house", "Oh, you're just against progress and modernism, so shut up", "Ok, maybe I blow your shit up"...
Someone like the Unabomber doesn’t long back to the past of being a Middle Age serf…! Get real.
He also is definitely not any kind of primitive man utopia shill, that's why he rants in the beginning against 'green anarchy' type ideology. He is more of an evolutionist saying even if we returned to primitive life before the industrial revolution we would at least still be human and would have to accept all kinds of terrible things that come with primitive life as the alternative is being a spiritless organism serving machines (again his ideology not mine).
The author postulates that if computer scientists develop intelligent machines that can do all things better than humans, all work will be done by machines and no human effort will be necessary.
There are two possibilities: either the machines make all their own decisions without human oversight or human control over the machines is retained.
173. If machines _are_ allowed to make all their own decisions, it is impossible to predict the outcome and the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. The author suggests that society may become so dependent on machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of their decisions, eventually leading to a stage where machines are in effective control and turning them off would amount to suicide.
174. If human control over machines is _retained_, the average person may have control over certain private machines, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite. The elite will have greater control over the masses and because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous.
If computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence and human work remains necessary, machines will still take care of simpler tasks resulting in an increasing surplus of human workers at lower levels of ability. Employed workers will face ever-increasing demands and will need more training, ability and conformity. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized and out of touch with the real world.
The author envisions scenarios where machines take over most important work while humans are kept busy with relatively unimportant work in the service industries, which the author finds contemptible.
The author acknowledges that the outlined scenarios do not exhaust all possibilities but indicates that if the industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, individuals will be more dependent on large organizations and their physical and mental qualities will be engineered into them.
Technology is creating a new physical and social environment for humans that is radically different from the environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race and humans will either be adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered or through natural selection.
179. The author concludes that it would be better to dump the whole system and take the consequences.
(That was all summarized by ChatGPT. I have removed concluding sentences from some paragraphs containing deeply pessimistic motives of insubordination, enslavement, and extermination)
I do not agree with everything he wrote in the manifesto, and certainly not with his violent methods, but it's stuck with me in this era of naive techno-optimism which I find myself more disillusioned with by the day.
If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs.
As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism and alienation we see today; he's not arguing as a 21st century conservative, but as a third position that is not represented by any mainstream camp. I had to read the manifesto of a killer to remind myself that there is more social critique to explore than the binary Liberal vs Conservative that's all the rage in our politicised world.
Realistically his opinions are held by a substantial amount of people that most would label conservative, although it's not mainstream conservatism for sure. And certainly not mainstream republicanism.
The point of Kaczynski is that both camps are mostly composed of middle-class Western academics living a sheltered life that are deciding who is socially accepted and who need to be cancelled. Our culture wars are not minorities shouting for a better life, our culture war is made of middle-class white people getting offended on behalf of minorities. They are no Martin Luther King, no Malcolm X, they just are posers that are making the racial (and gender and sexual) divide even worse than it is, by polarising or alienating the silent neutral majority.
This is a longer argument that's put more eloquently in the manifesto than I could ever write on a comment box.
Thank god there's a divide, otherwise I would be obliged to agree with you.
Genuinely amazed someone identifying with the Left would find these ideas interesting, and if so, they're going to love the deep philosophical musings on leftism offered by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Ron de Sanctis!
Andreas Breivik copied large part of it in his manifesto, but then again he is murderer too.
Breivik is a right-wing fascist obsessed with racial and religious purity, Kaczynski's manifesto is critique of the Industrial Age not very distant from any 19th century anarchist essay. I'm not sure if he got more politicised in his later work, I'm only talking about that document.
The point I'm trying to make is that people are more nuanced than your observation is trying to imply.
I think primitivism is a later invention. Certainly Kropotkin is very pro-mechanization. If there is a point of contention, it's to do with ownership, not technology itself.
I assure you a lot of incredibly smart writing doing absolutely accurate predictions is ignored by schools and clubs.
Literally only thing that sets Kaczynsky apart are the bombs.
> , I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism and alienation we see today
Considering overwhelming majority of violence, authoritarianism and fictionalized is from right, by a large margin, this is massive meh.
Or more, they only mean whatever the person speaking them means to say.
Example: Some of the most infamous acts of violence of the 20th century were sanctioned by a left-wing radical. Or a right-wing radical. It simply depends on which specific ideals you want to vilify when you by associating them with Hitler.
Were the 2020 US riots were ultra surprising to you because they mostly left wingers burning cities and violently declaring demilitarized zones, or were they "meh" because right wingers are the only violent ones?
It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the human mind-body, and we should all abandon society and go do that instead.
Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads.
There are probably better examples (horses just came to mind). We tend to choose the more "advanced" option because it seems more convenient, without considering the externalities of that convenience, whether that's pollution or handing over part of our self-sufficiency in order to do so.
Something like a Carrington event would cripple us and cause utter chaos. Just think of the huge amount of technology that we rely on in daily life and it's not changing direction. At all. We are not becoming more resilient, we're becoming less. We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical.
Technology can potentially enable us to have more freedom, autonomy and self-sufficiency, but for it to be sustainable it would need to be at the top of the decision-making tree.
Right now it's mostly a balancing act between convenience and affordability on behalf of consumers and profitability of producers. And well, mix in some environmental concerns (but those tend to be secondary as well as almost always reactionary).
And yes I'm probably somewhat of a neo-luddite. I take pride in being self-sufficient, to the extent possible. And I'm more than willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.
How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.
Would've been easier had your example played out 10k years ago when there were still native horses in America. :)
For domesticating horses, it doesn't rely on huge factories. You need basic tools (stone would suffice) to cut down some trees in order to create an enclosure where you train the horses. Then basic tech like cloth and rope making, and/or leather, for making saddles and bridles etc. Nothing a couple of people can't cobble together with basic knowledge. No reliance on huge complicated factories and supply chains or tech unobtainable by resourceful people, locally.
For ships we've been building various boats for ages, with very simple tools. Building a small boat is something a single person can do in weeks to years depending on the size. And larger ones is mostly a question of adding more laborers (engineering calculations and considerations get more complicated with size so there are practical limits built in).
Making iron helps in both cases. That doesn't require a ton of technology either but granted it's quite difficult to bootstrap. Still, once up and running doesn't take more than a small community to maintain.
Ideally, in my mind, any "acceptable" tech should be manageable by a community of 150 people or less. I keep coming back to the Dunbar number whenever I think of human systems/societies.
Your questioning bring up an interesting comparison point:
Wood as building material vs. plastics. Wood being 100% recyclable plus it literally grows on trees, while plastics require immense knowledge and expertise in chemistry and raw materials include fossil fuels. The externalities for the latter are huge and will thus require an immense amount of interconnected people and technologies to create and maintain. Way more than 150.
I do also realize that there are edge cases where distinctions become difficult, but that's the case with everything. The main idea here is that I think technology should be judged on a spectrum of self-reliance/freedom. Defining a hard limit in the middle can be difficult (or impossible). Although, not impossible or necessarily even hard if the community of people deciding where the limit is is small enough.
Ok A) I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow, horse or no, unless you were in the Great Plains or smtn.
B) saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”. Do you think the untold millions who died (and continue to die) of starvation in subsistence-farming based society were just dumb? It’s hard, dangerous, luck-driven work, assuming you don’t get killed by animals or other humans.
> We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical.
Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible, why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?
To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle? Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?
> I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow
I never said it would be faster or easier.
> saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”.
Yes! And you cannot build a modern car. You could, say, in 1940 (probably over quite a wide range of decades), but try building one now and getting it road-legal. You are arguing my point.
> Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible
I don't want to disregard that since you are yet again furthering my point. :) Our blind quest at throwing technological solutions at problems have lead us past this irreversible point (among many others). Money and greed made farming into huge corporations and technology (fertilizers made using fossil fuels) was one of the main tools to achieve that. To grow beyond the point of self-reliance.
This is why the realization of this tends to lead to the necessity of some kind of destruction - downscaling has simply gotten (seemingly) too difficult.
> why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?
I had a paragraph that I edited out in the end about many people not caring about self-sufficiency - many naturally gravitate towards relying on others. I thought I loosely covered this in the end paragraph by mentioning that I take pride in self-sufficiency, as did Kaczynski.
But also it becomes a basic incredient when you expand the scope of systems to small communities of people, rather than just one or a family. Or larger. But! The important idea is that the smaller the community of self-sufficiency is, the more resilience it has.
> To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle?
To assess the values and virtues of technology I think it should be judged in terms of characteristics like:
- can I create it myself (tools, raw materials, licensing) - can I repair it myself? - what's the life-cycle and if not practically infinite (Ship of Theseus) how much of it can be recycled/reused/repurposed? - etc.
So if your material synthesizer relies on a proprietary miniature fusion-reactor with the proprietary tech owned by a multinational conglomerate where, once humanity has grown to rely on the device will effectively be enslaved by it, I don't think it's that great of an idea (although the tech by itself sounds awesome). I wouldn't destroy it, but I think it'd be a terrible idea to adopt it worldwide.
If however it was powered by open-source tech, where any reasonably equipped small factory can produce spare parts for it, that sould like it could be quite a revolutionary thing!
> Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?
Not sure how this is more near-term but no, I have nothing against interstellar travel, that seems like the obvious thing for any life form to do - to try to propagate outwards/further as much as possible.
However! All life forms also tend to respect the boundaries in the environment and find an equilibrium. Animals tend to stay where there are resources available to sustain them. The problem with humans is that we, using our large brains and us-vs-them views, use technology to expand at the expense of everything else. If we were to solve this conundrum and find a happy balance, we might not even want to venture out to the stars (for much more than redundancy purposes as a species).
Our planet is quite an incredible place, as is our minds. If we'd started looking more inwards we might find that we don't need to perpetually evolve external things in order to be happy.
I would say we fundamentally differ on basic assumptions, which I would perhaps characterize as: I think the world/universe is an inhospitable place that needs human cooperation to stave off some of the immense suffering it naturally causes, whereas you see the natural order as a fundamentally satisfying one. I guess when I say it like that it sounds like the obvious justification for primitivism, but still, your points are well received and novel to me.
The perfect expression of that is the “magical object-creation machine” and your decision that no, you would not embrace/encourage it (presumably such a thing would be far too complex to make or repair alone). Im personally thinking less about resilience than of people dying of cancer, a child without enough food, a family shivering in a harsh winter, etc.
Maybe another angle is “what is the purpose of life?” I’d say it is (at least partially) to reduce suffering in ourselves and our fellow man. I’m curious, if you have any more time - do you see your “natural balance > cooperative advancement” ethos as a better way to reach the same goal, or would you express your aim differently?
> Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.
Technology how it's wielded today, by lobbyists and government, controls and rules over us. But technology is a tool, and there is an unexplored problem space of using technology not to separate us from nature into rigid control structures, but to enhance our lives, to actually let us live longer, in harmony with nature.
Technology is neutral, but has mostly been used against us and this is becoming unsustainable and unacceptable.
Nope, only in steppe-like environments, where horses are native.
If anything, technical civilization tends to de-fragment environments worldwide. You can drive the same car in Patagonia or Borneo as long as the road is there, and your phone will use the same stack of communication protocols.
Of course, it has externalities. The question is how these externalities can be mitigated. But a humanity numbering 8 billion people can't realistically think of individual self-sufficiency at a scale, and not even tribes of hunters and gatherers, 1000x less numerous, were ever composed of self-sufficient individuals.
We might be more fragile than our ancestors, but we also gained some other forms of resiliency that they didn't have. Humanity actually passed through a bottleneck event about 70 thousand years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#:~:tex....
It would be a lot harder for a single natural disaster to threaten survival of the entire Homo sapiens species today.
The initial adoption of those technologies should've been discussed and decided through a different lens rather than through convenience and monetary profits.
And now that we're past the point, any solution would involve destruction of some sort. That's a large conundrum.
Which isn’t crazy if you strip it of its politics and just consider the lifestyle itself.
Many people latch onto what are effectively caveman diets (especially that). And other people justify doing whatever “weird” stuff by saying that it works similar to how we used to do things, like defecating in a squat position instead of sitting on a throne. And indeed, some of the biomechanics are corroborated by findings that tell us that “sitting is the new smoking”.
Then you have the deluge of news about how you literally can’t do anything, ever, in modern society (lightning, food, air quality) without giving yourself X and Y (bad stuff).
That “caveman” philosophy is basically the most conservative approach to living that exists; better the evil you know than the evil you don’t (modern society changing all the time; see for example smart phones which are quite new).
Of course, the caveat to the above paragraph is that we don’t truly know how to “caveman” since we didn’t grow up like that. So it’s not strictly true that it is an uber-conservative approach.
Where anarcho-primitivism fails is that we’re seven billion people on this earth, way too many to go back to hunting deer and rabbits and whatever. The Unabomber figured out that he couldn’t simply make the individualistic choice (see: liberalism) of going out into the woods and start living by himself, because the found out that Civilization would encroach on him. And what’s a hermit got to say to the federal government giving him an Eminent Domain claim or whatever it’s called?
And then he took it in a bad political direction.
Ask an anthropologist if this is true.
You’re effectively just saying that whatever the status quo is right now, that’s what we naturally gravitate towards.
I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes. But for different reasons. (Basically: more population density leads to agriculture which leads to food stores which leads to a ruling class that can hoard the food stores which leads to things that can be raided (what’s there to be steal from hunter-gatherers except for slaves?) which leads to competition, and so on.)
This is roughly what I meant to express. Didn’t mean to imply we’d return to where we are now, but ultimately the drive to survive and thrive would bring us back to some kind of organized society.
My core point being that “cavemanship” isn’t some kind of stable state like Kaczynski insists. It’s an ephemeral/unstable state on the way to some higher level organized society that balances tensions.
This is the saddest part, he didn't have to do it the way he did.
No one thinks themselves evil. Every evil act, or most of them, was conducted by a person who thought they were doing what’s best.
I disagree. His ideas are not novel or new. There are large bodies of work around the evils of technology, increasing polarization, isolation, disconnection from nature etc. Leftists are trending toward authoritarianism is old hat. It's all pretty standard stuff. There have been literally hundreds of popular books and films about these very subjects.
The only reason people are reading it is because he murdered people. He said as much:
“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”
You can get everything he said elsewhere, without accidentally or intentionally lionizing a murderer.
Especially as his predictions were also true in technology in the past decades and is now more relevant with AI.
As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to win (= survive as a culture against encroachment from different cultures) without violence.
Today's mantra of pacifism and non-violence is just propaganda from current governments (all of which were originally installed through bloodshed, and kept in power through never-ending bloodshed) to keep the masses impotent and avoid being toppled like their predecessors
Nonviolent change (toward peace)is somewhere down the imaginary page, but it can be effective. It is both less timely and long lasting.
As I’m reading through The Devil’s Chessboard (recommend a few weeks ago in another thread) I’m increasingly despondent about the “people”’s role in the US (i.e. we are now just chattel for the ruling class), and I haven’t even gotten to MKUltra yet!
Ok. You topple one. If you do not create a replacement government you will have people preyed upon by violent gangs when eventually one become powerful enough to form new government. And if you do you are back to square one. So maybe it is better to try to fix what you have while trying to avoid violence. I am not telling it is always possible but at least it can be a goal.
The threat of violence can be both effective and nonviolent. Every battle is won before it is ever fought- and by corollary, it is possible to win without ever having fought.
I'm not sure who would define "orthodox" nonviolence (ahimsa) -- maybe Mahavira? -- but whichever definition we chose, I suspect it would differ from yours on the subject of threats.
Not that you're wrong, necessarily.
But you can't play by only bluffing, can you? In optimal (say) poker play, the different actions, including what amounts to bluffing, are all chosen with some probability (a "mixed strategy"), fundamentally at random.
Have you ever read Jewish history? That's a culture that has survived for millenia, without perpetrating virtually any violence between the time they were exiled from Israel and the time they took over Palestine, while facing constant discrimination and violence against them.
Not to mention that their culture set the foundations of the two biggest religions on Earth today.
Frankly, I don't see any reason to gate keep my own curiosity. Moral filtering just breeds ignorance.
His premises aren’t grounded in reality, and his conclusions don’t follow logically from his premises. It’s also lacks humanity or empathy.
It’s an interesting read, because you can really see a broken mind at work, but there’s really not anything to learn from the ideas themselves. E.g., his mental model of “leftists” is truly bizarre. It would be funny except I know what it lead to.
> Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far from clear what we mean by the word “leftist.” There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about this. To- day leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist movements ...
> To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judg- ment in deciding who is a leftist.
So yeah, just pick whoever you want as leftist. Some characteristics of the leftists:
> He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically “en- lightened” educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims.
Wow, sounds like those leftists are pretty cool, actually intelligent people!
Seriously, I could make fun of this shit all day, but perhaps I'll do something more productive.
Reading his manifesto at 14 after seeing endless newspaper descriptions of it as incoherent, rambling, crazy, etc. was an eye-opening moment for me:
I found the manifesto to be lucid and well-argued.
In a moment of shock I realized you can't trust the newspapers, at all -- a judgement I hold even more strongly today, with a few decades more of experience.
I'd encourage anyone who hasn't to read it themselves and form their own opinion!
> For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
To paraphrase 'ole ted "You see, affirmative action makes white people feel bad and mad at black people which is the real secret goal of leftists".
Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action? I can even grant that you think affirmative action was a bad idea for any reason you like, that's not the question. The question is, did it make you or anyone you know mad at black people? My guess is anyone mad at a black person because of affirmative action would still be mad at them without it.
This is what people mean when they say it's incoherent. He rambles for several paragraphs offering no evidence for his position (after all, he was pooping in a bucket in the middle of the woods... so not much opportunity to cross reference things). The examples he comes up with are laughably dumb.
I don't mean this too harshly, but maybe you reread the manifesto with a more critical eye. 14 is too young to be reading stuff like this critically. You simply weren't old enough to spot the bullshit.
No. It's more like "Leftist activists push AA and other policies with no concern for the impact on the communities they're purportedly intended to help."
> Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action?
I'm pretty sure you could find a ton of people who do if you searched for it. But even if the harm wasn't real I think the point is that activists don't care about collateral damage.
I disagree mainly because of this:
> Helping black people is not their real goal.
It's a weakening of Kaczynski's argument to say it's about activists not caring about collateral. His point is more that "leftist crave power and hate themselves so they'll push policies to punish their race and social class using a moral justification. These policies actively hurt those they are supposed to help"
He absolutely mixes in there insinuations that this is all by some secret design. He spends ungodly amounts of paper writing secret about the motives of the leftist.
Maybe, but what you say here isn't supported by the bit you quoted.
That bit actually seemed completely level headed and well written. He defined his terms (leftist) and admitted it's a sloppy term, and then he wrote something I feel is true about most political ideologues - that they care more about their arguments and winning than the correctness of the arguments or value of their opinions.
> He absolutely mixes in there insinuations that this is all by some secret design.
Again, maybe in the overall manifesto, but not there. In the quote provided he just says "Xs works for the goals of X, even if their message is 'Save the Ys'"
That's not hard to believe, it's something we all need to try to avoid in our own thinking.
> ungodly amounts of paper writing about the motives of the leftist.
:D Have you ever read what leftists themselves write? You could fill libraries just with analyses of Marx.
I think the scary thing is that Ted is very well read and could be writing for the New Yorker ... and he justifies violence.
But not because he's the only one doing so, he's just the one who decided to take it into his own hands instead of the acceptable ways to call for violence - to advocate using our military to do it, or hoping that someone 'punches' them for 'being a nazi'.
He's scary because he disproves the narrative of a barely literate, ignorant, conservative-adjacent, god-fearing, terrorist who hates us because of our freedoms, or whatever. He is us, one of the best of us at one time, and we can be vicious.
>To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judgment in deciding who is a leftist.
"You'll know one when you see it" is lazy handwaving for a guy who spent this much time blaming leftism, and it conveniently sets up the reader to rely on their own prejudice when determining who belongs to his problem group. Pass.
It has it's roots in antisemitism and is likely older than that. We've been having pogroms for centuries because of the fear of what outsiders might be doing behind closed doors. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews_during_the...
Never seen that happen
Maybe related to something like Piaget's theory of cognitive development, I believe that if you advance too fast intellectually, there are other things, developmentally, that are trodden on, or left completely behind.
> The big break in the case came in 1995. The Unabomber sent us a 35,000 word essay claiming to explain his motives and views of the ills of modern society. After much debate about the wisdom of “giving in to terrorists,” FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno approved the task force’s recommendation to publish the essay in hopes that a reader could identify the author.
> After the manifesto appeared in The Washington Post, thousands of people suggested possible suspects. One stood out: David Kaczynski described his troubled brother Ted, who had grown up in Chicago, taught at the University of California at Berkeley (where two of the bombs had been placed), then lived for a time in Salt Lake City before settling permanently into the primitive 10’ x 14’ cabin that the brothers had constructed near Lincoln, Montana.
> Most importantly, David provided letters and documents written by his brother. Our linguistic analysis determined that the author of those papers and the manifesto were almost certainly the same. When combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski’s life, that analysis provided the basis for a search warrant.
My issue with reading Kaczynski, which I have not but have an idea of his manifesto, is that he was trying to bring about change through force and destruction. Through out the history of men, force has always been a temporary fix. It may seem like a relatively easy fix but once force is removed, we all return to whatever the force was trying to change.
The only way change can thrive is through consensus. The majority needs to agree that a change should happen. That type of change is very time consuming, messy and long. But it's the only way to bring about long term change.
There are better more deserving thought-leaders that people should read. Kaczynski is not one of them. His actions should really erase him from history rather than praise him.
User californiadreem posted a few authors on a comment here that can get people started.
Rest in peace.
We act like the KGB/FSB is this unfathomable, foreign evil. We have the bigger, scarier thing that killed it in our backyard.
Did the CIA fabricate and mail the bombs?
Do you suppose the elite hit squad that came to kill him simply added an extra bullet by mistake?
Make up your mind on this.
How many redlines they gotta cross and ops they gotta run before they rival the KGB for you?
"A Freedom of Information Act document released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2018 states that "a considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence suggests that Theodore Kaczynski. also known as the Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MK-ULTRA experiments conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962".[26] Chase and others have also suggested that this experience may have motivated Kaczynski's criminal activities"
[1] https://exploringyourmind.com/the-harvard-experiment-that-le...
The entire thing was horrible and profoundly unethical. His brother has stated it really changed Kaczynski.
Some people have claimed that it was run by the CIA as part of MKUltra. This is certainly possible but not really substantiated by clear evidence as far as I've seen, and even if the CIA has some relationship they probably didn't instigate the experiments but just asked for research notes or something relatively benign like that. We'll probably never know for sure though.
Whatever the case may be, of the group of students that were subjected to these abusive experiments only one became a terrorist, so "the CIA created the Unabomber" is rather simplistic IMO. The primary blame remains with Kaczynski, no matter what.
Source? What is the incidence of terrorism in that group and in the general population?
Also: many people (myself included) were extensively and viciously bullied in their childhood and/or teen years. Many suffer profoundly negative effects from this, sometimes for decades or even their entire lives, but most are not terrorists. And even if it did turn out that the incidence of terrorists was higher: that still doesn't absolve them or their own responsibility in committing violent acts against random people (i.e. terrorism).
See https://exploringyourmind.com/the-harvard-experiment-that-le....
if the answer is no... there you go.
What do you mean by " it reads like something /pol/ or reddit would write "? Does Kaczynsky use tired cartoon memes? Does he accuse the left of insufficient weightlifting? Does he challenge them to a 1v1 in a Nintendo fighting game?
What part of his criticism do you actually find wrong?
Could it be that on the left there are more endurance sports, for health. And on the right there are more muscle building sports, so they can strike cool poses with their guns?
I disagree with a lot of Kaczynski's ideas and methods, but I still regard him as an important thinker and wish people would read his output in full rather than rushing to have the hottest take (not meant as a dig at you, rather the avalanche of attempted zingers on Twitter and in the media over the weekend).
It's definitely not the standard fare you would find on those 2 sites you mentioned just a brief 'don't trust these activists they want the philosopher stone for themselves'.
(set aside that it often builds up to violent inner conflicts)
they really don't, and this is one of the reasons why there is so much fracturing in the left, usually.
TK was post-left before it was cool.
A bit of a bait and switch. Get attention with something shocking and violent, then appeal to worries through apocalyptic boogeymen. The solution, of course, is a sense of comforting tradition that the naturalness of the past is safe. A killer combo!
I don't think it implies any of that. The GP just means some people can't or won't separate the art from the artist.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
My post was a call for being smarter about who we invest in. I always wonder about people who call for separating art and artist over such mediocre artistry.
As the parent says in their reply below:
> My post was a call for being smarter about who we invest in.
Nobody said anything about a “final solution” or gulags.
“We can do better” and “calling for having taste” certainly seems to imply a command-economy approach to the marketplace of ideas.
If that’s not what you intended, what do you mean by “have taste” and “do better”?
No. This is a trunk of ideas, not a "marketplace of ideas." I have some wares in there. You can move on if none of it appeals to you.
I'm just some strings in your computer. I can't make you do anything. There's no policy work being done here.
What you said assumes that people will give up on that and jump to coercion. Maybe your cynicism is warranted.
I'm just going to make up an example: let's say the quote in question is "Democracy requires active participation." If I saw this posted by an anonymous internet commenter in a political discussion, I would completely agree. The obvious interpretation is that democracy works better when people vote, speak to your representative, organize, etc.
Now let's say the commenter reveals that this is a quote from a presidential assassin. Well, now I'm a little uncomfortable. Why did they choose this particular quote? Do they agree with the assassin's fringe definition of "active participation"? The intended meaning has completely changed with this new information. The identity of the author is part of the message, because we aren't talking about objectively true or false statements, we're talking about philosophical ideas that are much bigger than the quote provided.
"If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower"
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people"
He was quite a speaker, old Adi.
...Which suggests (cpr. the "treasure" quote) how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given broad statements.
> I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few
...Which suggests - hopefully - how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given its non exhaustive intrinsic nature.
--
Edit: related (with the first branch):
> He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future
Put the three together ("treasure", "battlefield", "owning"), the whole idea gets a sinister tone; take "treasure" alone, it may even raise "awww"s - without substance.
He proposes that we just go back to wilderness, which is bad for many obvious reasons. Technology and division of labor has allowed us to spend our days improving humanity rather than finding food just to survive. We need to find better coordination mechanisms that allow us to apply technology towards good things.
What does “improving humanity” even mean? What’s the metric we are optimizing for? Are we, humanity, any happier than we were when we were hunter-gatherer tribes? I don’t think so - we’ve just found new metrics to focus on and to be disappointed in ourselves in.
His writing encouraged me to consider that we are evolutionarily ill-suited for our current situation. We have resources far in excess of our needs, and yet we struggle. We find new issues to focus on, new problems, new fights, new causes. Our desire to “improve humanity” will never end, because it cannot end. When it does, we will find something new to take its place.
Maybe our purpose in life is to find food to survive. It is the task our ancestors evolved to do for millions and millions of years. It is our inheritance, in that way.
This seems crazy to me, leaning heavily on the proof that you yourself obviously are not choosing that life when you easily could. It’s possible in the same way that anything is possible, but cmon - the world is objectively less violent, sick, and ignorant. Sure we might be sad because the economy sucks, but I’d rather be sad than, ya know, fighting for my life…
A basic rundown from GPT expresses why I think this. Curious to hear where you disagree!
“Sure, let's consider these factors:
1. *Pleasure (Epicurus)*: Likely harder in a tribal society. Threats of violence and disease may significantly limit opportunities for pleasure and heighten experiences of pain.
2. *Virtuous Life (Aristotle)*: Potentially harder in a tribal society due to the pressures of survival, which might necessitate actions that conflict with virtues like honesty and generosity.
3. *Self-Actualization (Maslow)*: Much harder in a tribal society. The constant threats of violence and disease could make fulfilling basic needs a priority, leaving little room for self-actualization.
4. *Moderation (Confucius)*: Easier in a tribal society, as the threat of violence or disease could necessitate moderation and caution to ensure survival.
5. *Freedom (Sartre)*: Likely easier in modern society. The risks of violence and disease in tribal societies may limit the opportunity for individual freedom and choice.
6. *Inner Peace (Buddha)*: Likely harder in tribal societies, where the constant threat of violence and disease might disrupt efforts towards finding inner peace.
7. *Authenticity (Heidegger)*: Likely harder in a tribal society, where survival concerns might pressure individuals to adopt roles for the group's benefit rather than personal authenticity.
8. *Community (Marx)*: Likely easier in tribal societies, as the constant threats would necessitate cooperation and mutual support, fostering a strong sense of community.
9. *Mindfulness (Thich Nhat Hanh)*: Likely harder in a tribal society, where the constant threats could make it difficult to focus on the present moment and achieve mindfulness.
10. *Acceptance (Stoics)*: Equal in both societies; acceptance is about personal perspective and can be challenging in any circumstance, including violence or disease.
11. *Physical Well-being (Plato)*: Much harder in a tribal society due to a higher risk of injury from violence, more limited medical knowledge and treatment, and potential prevalence of disease.
12. *Purpose (Nietzsche)*: Likely harder in a tribal society, where survival threats might narrow the scope of one's purpose to primarily physical survival.
13. *Knowledge (Socrates)*: Easier in modern society due to broader access to information, whereas tribal societies may lack the resources to gain knowledge beyond immediate survival needs.
14. *Creativity (Fromm)*: Harder in a tribal society where threats of violence and disease might limit the time, resources, and mental energy available for creative pursuits.
15. *Love (Fromm)*: Possibly harder in tribal societies, where the constant threats could overshadow relationships and the expression of love.”
Can someone do this? Find a place you can live and hunt for free that isn't incredibly difficult to survive in because of its inhospitable climate or lack of resources.
“For free” is also pretty much impossible, especially if you factor in travel, but my intuition tells me that a very modest American or European savings could buy access to land somewhere. Especially if you sold all your possessions, or used credit without intending to pay it back.
Re: resources… I mean that’s kinda the deal? Living immersed in nature without society’s support doesn’t mean relaxing in Eden in the vast vast majority of places, it means fighting like hell. Imo.
To take a single (or even a couple) of fully formed adults without any of that lifelong education and training, who are accustomed to a wholly different environment and way of life, and to drop them into a survival situation without that surrounding community to rely on, seems like an obvious recipe for failure.
Not that I’m arguing that tribal life is actually desirable over a modern western lifestyle.
The man needed health care, not a shack in the woods…
inner peace is a peace which cannot be disturbed by external circumstances.
inner peace means peace even amid disease. peace even amid violence.
Yeah, you know who already did that? The Unabomber! And instead of just keeping to himself, he eventually realized by all the development being done near him that Civilization would eventually encroach upon him and keep him out.
As a politics, “choosing that life” is not sufficient because only a small amount of people can do that; it is not sustainable for a large mass of people to opt into that lifestyle since we (at least in population dense areas) haven’t been able to live like that for thousands of years.
The idea that you can just shut up, f off and “choose that life” is a liberal fantasy. But political liberalism is the dominant ideology so that’s the usual response.
I’d say that if people who value a self-sufficient primitive existence decide they can’t coexist with me in my tech-enhanced world, my natural response is “suck it up”. The idea that they like something that a huge majority of people don’t so we all need to comply to make room for them feels selfish to the point of narcissism. It doesn’t help that, as you said, going this route today would necessitate a massive… let’s charitably say “intentional population decrease”.
Not sure if you're endorsing such views or not, but point well taken - I see how some would find self-sufficiency unsatisfying if they can’t escape all traces of the rest of society.
That aside I’ll focus on the Maslow point since I think it’s the easiest to discuss and has the most obvious carryover to a lot of the other points. Maslow tells us we have a hierarchy of needs. At the top of that is self-actualization, but we need to fulfill all the lower-level needs before we feel any need for self actualization. I strongly doubt anyone would be disappointed that they are not “actualizing themselves” if they were fighting every day for food, shelter, etc. self-actualization is basically what Ted describes as a “surrogate activity” - a need we have made up because all our “real” needs have been met, and now we have all this spare time with which we have to do something. So we create new needs for ourselves to fill our time.
You can carry this concept, of our needs being relative to our position in life, over to a lot of the other philosophies you listed. Concepts like love, generosity, pleasure, purpose, are all relative. From a modern western perspective, generosity might be buying a friend a nice gift, cooking someone dinner, etc. Those are much smaller in magnitude than, say, sharing the limited food and resources you gathered with your tribe so that they can all survive. We today think of pleasure as sex, or achieving a goal, or seeing something that makes us happy in passing. Those probably pale in comparison to the sense of pleasure of knowing a hard day’s work allowed you to live another day in a hostile environment. We think of purpose as what we were put on this earth to do. Had we not all the resources we needed, and had to work for them, I think it’s very reasonable to expect our sense of “purpose” would change to match our capabilities.
You can even see evidence of this in modern society by comparing high and low income areas. Children from lower income areas, where their physical and emotional needs are not being met, don’t get as good of grades. Why should they care about who built the pyramids or how to work a Bunsen burner when they don’t know where dinner is coming from?
On the rest of it… I think i asked a bunch of questions last night and am now facing the harsh reality that the answer is “some people see the whole shape of the world and human experience completely differently than I do and always have”. So not too much to discuss lol
To illustrate that, consider “ I strongly doubt anyone would be disappointed that they are not “actualizing themselves” if they were fighting every day for food, shelter, etc.”. I find this absolutely insane (no offense). You bring up poor modern people in the end, and I think that’s a great example of my concerns: being poor sucks, not knowing where your next meal come from feels terrible, and watching loved ones die of preventable causes is fucking heartbreaking. The idea that poverty/primitivism would lead to better self-actualization is so, so far from how I see the world that I think debate is impossible
Thanks for the detailed response! Appreciate the dialogue, for sure.
EDIT: on re-read it appears your point is that if we’re struggling for the lower needs, we won’t miss the higher ones. That’s not my understanding of Maslow, but since his theory isn’t really about happiness at all but motivation, I can’t appeal to the author there. It just seems very counter-intuitive that higher needs would not be missed while struggling to achieve lower ones; for example, does someone without shelter not miss love?
Having lived a modern life, we know that the diseases primitive societies face are preventable. We know that we don’t need to struggle for food. If we didn’t know that, we’d probably feel differently. For example, a lot of primitive cultures have very different relationships and views of death.
I think that “going from modern to primitive life” versus “always living a primitive life” is a huge difference.
I don’t understand how the FBI profiled him as poorly educated.
He was right about one thing, though. No one would give his writings a second look if he wasn’t a terrorist. Even if the many copycat manifestos would be much worse.
You may enjoy reading this:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-tr...
Your intuition is correct. Here's TK's own words on the matter [0]:
> But even leaving aside all questions of “political” utility and considering only my personal predilections, I have little interest in philosophical questions such as the desirability or undesirability of the “herd mentality.” The mountains of Western Montana offered me nearly everything I needed or wanted. If those mountains could have remained just as they were when I first moved to Montana in 1971, I would have been satisfied. The rest of the world could have had a herd mentality, or an individualistic mentality or whatever, and it would have been all the same to me. But, of course, under modern conditions there was no way the mountains could have remained isolated from the rest of the world. Civilization moved in and squeezed me, so…
[0]: https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/ted-kaczynski-s-lette...
A travesty how he was treated in those medical experiments. It's always tragic to find out reasons why people hurt others.
I don't condone domestic terrorism (especially with so many innocent hurt), but I also don't condone climate change denial for shareholder profit. Is that ever going to stop? Given the velocity already created, I would say: not in my lifetime.
Morality doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not objective, it's collectively determined by society.
As a society we have decided en masse that blowing up randomly selected people to draw attention to one's political views is not acceptable.
As a society we also have decided that violent actions taken against the German government in the early 1940s were acceptable.
This isn't a contradiction, nor hypocrisy, simply the ability to have nuanced opinions.
The astute observation is that a lot of unhappiness is driven by over-socialization and a commitment to inauthentic, subjective values.
The solution, to tear down technology to force mankind to work on more primitive goals, only makes sense if there are no alternatives.
Thankfully there are many alternatives. First and foremost, I think people like Ted just need to realize that the yearning to be important and useful is natural, but something you can let go of if you stop taking life so seriously.
What exactly are they?
(the last I checked is that it's virtually impossible to live somewhere (even remote) off the land, without paying a ton in taxes, if you did succeed in some manner without attracting attention in a remote place it would soon get the attention of authorities in due course).
My understanding is that most of Kacynski’s disillusionment was born out of:
- a recognition of how artificial most people’s values and goals are
- an inability to find authentic & fulfilling values and goals
- an innate urge to be useful and important
Put another way, Kacynski didn’t want to be like the brainwashed masses that chase status, approval, and riches. But, when he looked around for better things to spend his time on, he didn’t find any bc technology is so advanced.
I think the alternative to burning everything down is learning how to disconnect from the need to feel important and useful. It’s this inability to disconnect from the need to be useful and authentic that ultimately causes the disillusionment.
The ability to do so starts with an acceptance of the absurdity of life and a release of one’s ego. To put it colloquially, learning to not take things so seriously.
In other words, being forced (or reengineered as Kaczynski writes) to take it. Not exactly an alternative now is it? Imagine telling the victims of the Holocaust, on their way to the crematoria, that they should accept the absurdity of life and release their ego, learn to not take things so seriously. Kaczynski's essential view on the destruction of the human condition by technology is of similar order to the contemporary view of Holocaust atrocities.
I don't agree with Kaczynski's philosophy as I'm as far from a luddite as one can possibly be, but I have put the time in to digest his work and I find few-if-any flaws in his major positions. Superficial dismissals of the sort one frequently encounters in this thread expose their originators as hopelessly naive and reinforce Kaczynski's message.
There's some threshold of pain over which it's reasonable to consider major restructuring of society, and it could be useful to have a discussion on where that threshold is, but the fact that you're comparing your current state to being in a Nazi labor camp doesn't make me think that's a good use of my time.
The disillusionment & accompanied emotional pain described by Kacynski simply doesn't pass the bar for me, especially when a bit of meditation and dedication to your mental health will bring happiness.
Ah? I don't think it makes sense, alternatives or not. Neither the "commitment to subjective values* nor taking down society to solve that.
RIP.
It was recently bombed into rubble.
After all, almost all smart people that identify uncomfortable truths won't go to extremes to convince strangers of actually giving their non-mainstream ideas a chance.
Quoting from memory - may not be word for word.
So, if you can believe him, then yes, he murdered as a marketing strategy.
I'm skeptical enough though (having read books about the Zodiac Killer, for example) that I see it just as likely to have been an unexpected opportunity that Kaczynski exploited.
I guess I'm not surprised that a murderer, enjoying their new-found public lectern, might engage in rationalization of their murders.
My take away is that there are and always have been sick people. Citing lack of a megaphone shouldn't even be a sliver of rationale for a murderer's behavior.
Even if he was purely driven out of self-interest and ego, the result of his actions is that today we are discussing his ideas when we should be working.
I'm just suspicious whether this was the case.
> Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski engaged in a mail bomb campaign[4] against people involved with modern technology.[5] His initial targets were universities and airlines, which the FBI shortened as UNABOM. In June 1995, Kaczynski offered to end his campaign if one of several publications (the Washington Post, New York Times, or Penthouse) would publish his critique of technology, titled Industrial Society and Its Future, which became widely known as the "Unabomber Manifesto".[6]
In a sense, he used the murders as a marketing strategy, but honestly it was more of a threat to force his manifesto to be published.
Had the American revolution not succeeded it would be relegated to being classified as a typical rebel manifesto that people basically do not care about
Same with writing books, asking people to subscribe to your blog newsletter, shouting on a street corner or asking people to vote for you.
That said, who says having some self-importance is inherently bad? Trying to be humble is a cultural and religious virtue, not an absolute truth.
Nietchze, Carl Jung, Marshall McLuhan, William S Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Fritz Lang, PK Dick, Stanley Kubrick, Jared Diamond, Pink Floyd... this list could go on for a while.
People have alleged that it was part of MKULTRA, but there's nothing to support that beyond allegations and some circumstantial things (e.g., Murray consulted for the OSS on a profile of Hitler during the war). There were also just a lot of unethical experiments done on people in the 50s and 60s.
If you’re willing to admit that they don’t really have self-agency at that point, don’t they become an object at that point? Like we would have no problem putting down a dog that bit a child, let alone a dog that blew up buildings. The only reason we’re so accepting of putting down the dog is its lack of human status.
In our courts, claiming insanity seems to give you a defense against crimes you’ve committed but also maintaining all the rights and privileges of personhood.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009858617/britney-spears-tra...
[0]https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bne7e/the-monarch-mind-cont...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_O%27Brien_(conspiracy_th...
Sirhan sirhan and Charles Manson come to mind.
Unexpected high doses of LSD, attempts at programming, manipulation and what can only honestly be described as torture… the CIA destroyed all the records of this and because we don’t have complete records we just have to make a big shrug and say “ah well JKCalhoun isn’t convinced, guess it’s not bad for you.”
What would it take to convince you that dosing unexpecting people with high amounts of LSD could have a detrimental effect on their mental health, possibly making people crazy?
Not at all. Rather, drawing a line backward from Kaczynski's bombing spree to experiments done on him as a part of MK-Ultra I think is questionable "science".
https://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/did-kanye-expose-holl...
When this information is finally released, the people around for that will say "wow, the CIA used to do some real evil stuff against our own people, good thing they would never do that these days!" as the CIA carries out some absurd level of evil that makes MK-ULTRA seem like a fender bender.
---
[1] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/project%20mk-ultra%5B15...
But…
…it’s hard not to mythologize and over-analyze Kaczynski. He had what appears to be a totally average suburban upbringing, he was unambiguously wildly intelligent, and yet he done broke bad.
You know there's plenty of people that are smarter than him, being able to produce more coherent, balanced and informed views of society, and also not murder people.
I hate murder as much as the next guy, but our political and military leaders constantly make decisions that result in needless deaths. You don't even know how upset I personally was after voting for Obama and seeing him continue using drones to target terrorists while also killing innocent civilians as collateral damage.
Please, grant me the luxury to like this one guy who killed three innocent people because I just think his manifesto was pretty good. My 'leaders' have already taught me that murder can be overlooked by the vast majority of the public, or at least one half of it, every 4-8 years. I think I'm allowed to like Uncle Ted.
Everything the US government and military does is good, and Ted Kaczynski was bad, especially the terrible things he wrote. I promise I will buy more of these new Apple products, in resistance of Mr. Kaczynski's evil message. *I place my hand on my chest patriotically.* I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
Our society already celebrates mass murder of innocents, and those who do the murdering. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
IMHO, there's a time to consider ideas, but I think it would be better not to do that when talking about a terrorist who attacked innocents to promote exposure of those ideas.
Otherwise, it would seem to be validating and rewarding terrorism, and thereby encouraging future terrorists.
https://www.history.com/news/what-happened-to-the-unabomber-...
Can you elaborate what you mean by that? I find the notion ridiculous, but I’d like more detail before I write it off.
> trending towards aggressively simplistic labeling of complex social issues
I think that’s the opposite of true.
Come to think of it, I might prefer a smaller cell over a larger one if it's clean and doesn't have "a lot of banging and shouting", but that probably says more about the general state of the US prison system than anything else.
[1]: https://news.yahoo.com/the-unabomber-s-not-so-lonely-prison-...
Though with Ted, he probably had things other than his crimes he could have published and made money from. Of course, any earnings could end up going to a civil suit or existing orders of victim restitution.
None of that seems directly related to intellectual property rights though. The prisoner retains those just like anyone else. I suppose there might be some cases of asset forfeiture for remediation or fines?
"I simply have not had the time to organize, rewrite, and complete the contents of this book. The principal reason why I have not had time is that agencies of the United States government have created unnecessary legal difficulties for me. To mention only the most important of these difficulties, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of California has formally proposed to round up and confiscate the original and every copy of everything I have ever written and turn over all such papers to my alleged "victims" through a fictitious sale that will allow the "victims" to acquire all of the papers without having to pay anything for them. Under this plan, the government would even confiscate papers that I have given to libraries, including papers that have been on library shelves for several years..." [1]
[1] https://ia800300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Sl...
I don't know how that turned out, though. He does mention his lawyers were fighting the plan. Also interesting that he keeps putting the word victims in quotes, in a book published in 2008.
He also published some books (Techno1ogica1 Slavery, Anti-tech Revolution), which is his manifesto with some additional essays and letters.
> Who holds the rights to something written in prison in the US?
The author; nothing changes about that.
So is performing torture experiments on them to see what happens them locking them up when they crack.
I don't agree with Ted's actions that directly hurt other people (not random people by the way), but god damn he was hurting too. We should all feel the same pain he felt. The world would be better if we did, and maybe then we could kick our addiction to finite resources and short-term monkey-brain thinking.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Murray#Harvard_human_exp...>
Covered in Harvard and the Unabomber : the education of an American terrorist:
<https://archive.org/details/harvardunabomber00chas/page/18/m...>
But just because humans have a revealed preference doesn’t mean that’s the way we should live.
In all honesty, I don’t think abundant food itself is a problem, but I do think the ethos of democracy basically allows everyone to ignore should questions and an addicted and obese population is the result.
Imagine showing our world to an 19th century English laborer. They would be awe of our technological achievements, but I think they’d find our social structures extremely distressing.
>But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’). Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
>What we can now see is that the first two freedoms – to relocate, and to disobey commands – often acted as a kind of scaffolding for the third, more creative one. Let us clarify some of the ways in which this ‘propping-up’ of the third freedom actually worked. As long as the first two freedoms were taken for granted, as they were in many North American societies when Europeans first encountered them, the only kings that could exist were always, in the last resort, play kings. If they overstepped the line, their erstwhile subjects could always ignore them or move someplace else. The same would go for any other hierarchy of offices or system of authority. Similarly, a police force that operated for only three months of the year, and whose membership rotated annually, was in a certain sense a play police force – which makes it slightly less bizarre that their members were sometimes recruited directly from the ranks of ritual clowns.
>It’s clear that something about human societies really has changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it might be like to live in a social order based on them.
--David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything, p. 503.
https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpre...
Prehistoric humans could barely move around and until recently slavery ment average Joe had 0 freedom.
Are we happier than we used to be? Are we more connected? Are we less lonely?
To some people, it is not enough that he is murdered/punished, he needs to be made "rightly" suffered through similar pains. Why? If there is a cure to mental illness, why would we not administer this drug and let the man free? Without free will, this concept of "punishment" would simply wither away.
I hope you just phrased that poorly, because if that attitude were widely and sincerely held it would be scary indeed. I say that, BTW, as someone who's generally optimistic about the possibilities inherent in new technology, and has even created a bit here and there. The uses and effects of technology must always be considered, not just naively assumed to be beneficial. Un-nuanced optimism is just as simplistic and "meritless" as its mirror image.
The middle ground between infinite optimism and doomerism seems to be regulation which more often than not results in very subpar conditions. I feel there's really no other position to hold.
[1]: best quality I can find right now: https://www.garygreenbergonline.com/media/unabomber_letter.p...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECNsiK5MB-4&list=PLVmRJGCDzW...
I recommend the Manifesto to the HN audience. The section on AI is particularly timely, but a lot of it holds up well - especially the discussion of surrogate activities and the problem with hobbies.
I'm poor as shit now, from an income perspective, but I've never been more fulfilled. Pity it took me 40 years to figure this all out.
RIP TedK.
Chief among them is this: if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we not end up right back here “repeating the grade” so to speak?
The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely skeptical of narratives that excessively glorify the past. I think it’s all a bunch of survivorship bias. Things often seem better in the past because we are experiencing only those cultural artifacts of the past that survived, which tend to be the most memorable or interesting.
Lastly, I have doubts about the very possibility of revisiting the past. The arrow of time is unidirectional. I can’t think of a way we could even attempt to return without an insanely totalitarian system that attempted to forcibly suppress modernity at incredible cost in human life and freedom. That would end up looking like the worst caricature of precisely the totalitarian tendencies of modernity that these authors often call out. Pol Pot is kind of an example from history of someone who tried to return a society to a pastoral mode of existence by force.
At their core these writers are critics, and I’ve come to see mere criticism of any form as broadly intellectually weak. It is far easier to criticize than it is to improve or fix things. Creation is infinitely more difficult than accusation or destruction.
All our significant problems must be very hard to solve or they would already be solved. If they seem simple it’s because we haven’t fully grasped their scope, which in most cases includes ourselves.
The reactionary is a particularly lazy kind of critic. They don’t even bother to propose an unworkable solution. That’s too much work for them. They just point back at an imagined past and blame people for having done things between then and now.
The only criticism you need is whatever it takes to frame the problem.
I’ve read Kaczynski and numerous other primitivists and reactionaries and that’s not the dominant theme. The emphasis is on a lost golden age (that I do not believe actually existed) and accusing modernity in a moralistic tone.
"Progress" doesn't occur because things are "better" it occurs because things are incentivized. A system can incentivize bad things, and at many points in life we may choose bad things for one group and good things for another. Progress is merely another point further down on the timeline, as is the past. Qualitatively judging these points in isolation is difficult, but when viewed in collective over time I think people will often reflect that some things have gotten better, some have gotten worse, and we also have new problems. I view the past less as a former grade and more as just a different state of things, neither better nor worse in totality, but I'm also not cynical enough to say that restoring a previous state is the right choice either. Somewhat anecdotally I hardly ever believe in software rollbacks, I almost always bias towards rolling forward but I understand why some people think rollbacks are something they'd want.
> The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely skeptical of narratives that excessively glorify the past. I think it’s all a bunch of survivorship bias. Things often seem better in the past because we are experiencing only those cultural artifacts of the past that survived, which tend to be the most memorable or interesting.
Again, the present doesn't necessarily mean that things are better for people. We make choices every day to marginalize a group or way of life over another. A lot of times, this is just necessary but I can understand why people don't like it.
> Lastly, I have doubts about the very possibility of revisiting the past. The arrow of time is unidirectional.
You and I agree here, in that I understand the state of the past, even yesterday, can never be fully recreated. Again, I understand why that's difficult for people to wrestle with.
It sounds like for you and I, life is mostly good, so it makes dealing with the present and optimism for the future quite palatable. For others, I think that's challenging, so the past looks favorable even if unviable.
> The reactionary is a particularly lazy kind of critic. They don’t even bother to propose an unworkable solution.
Unfortunately this is most of our politicians. Pretty much anyone that media would call a "firebrand" from Matt Gaetz to AOC is a reactionary, and they're so absorbed in their own thoughts, world, and problems that they can't help but take it out on the rest of the world. It's a symptom of a broken, tired, and frustrated system that we put trust in people who are simply meant to agitate rather than build comprehensive, intersectional systems.
This is a quite limited perspective that ignores momentum of change. In the book Against the Grain, the author observes that the earliest societies that transitioned from hunter-gatherers to agrarian worked harder and longer hours with less time to relax and have leisure and were actually less healthy and didn't live as long. That's just one example where "progress" was not such. We see this again and again though. Yea, we've amplified the amount of stuff we can grow but at the great cost of the environment and even our own health and well-being. We now ingest food filled with plastics and toxins, like mercury.
Human technological progress has occurred at rates that we cannot emotionally and biologically keep up with, and the distance is only accelerating.
> All our significant problems must be very hard to solve or they would already be solved.
Most significant problems were created by us in the first place.
Also, for those who don't know, they actually moved his cabin to a museum in DC: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-unabombers-cabin-was...
Though I think we would eventually reach this conclusion without needing to kill random people.
- Is there a problem?
- What is the problem?
- What is its cause?
- How can it be remediated / addressed?
There are a few elements, though those tend to be the big ones. It's possible to go wrong at pretty much any point in the chain.
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc...>
I just want to say here that lots of smart people fleeing to Montana fetishize the wilderness and vilify American society, even as they continue to depend on the latter in many ways large and small.
Their way has nothing to offer. A primitive existence barely above subsistence, and a closed future in a war they can’t win.
What’s more, despite his intellectual capacity, let’s pause for a moment to consider the arrogance, wrongheadedness and unhappiness tipping into insanity of a man who left civilization and assumed for himself the role of passing death sentences on sometimes random strangers.
He’s a more literate school shooter whose best offering is a form of nihilism.
The analysis, while lucidly exposed, lacks the sophistication which should reveal more major possibilities (e.g. the machine as an enhancer for the decisor and the public).
Nonetheless, we read
> On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite
where the missed addition of quantifiers and specifiers in the expression «may have control» makes said relative "lack of sophistication" even optimistic.
I hope the prison guards checked those mails thoroughly
The perversion of knowledge is a paradox that was known to the writers of Genesis: it's the Tree of Knowledge that gets the first humans in trouble.
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/project-unabom/id16276...
Many, if not most, murder investigations are resolved by confessions, or someone turning the culprit in. Absent that, after...I want to say 48 hours, the police know that they should essentially write off the case. There are obvious exceptions, especially if there's public notoriety (crudely, young white coeds or "sexy shit"), but most murders are poor drug addicts murdering other poor drug addicts.
Source: worked 2 years in DC as a freelance reporter, was ultimately not successful there, but soaked up a lot of stories/cynicism
It really defies categorization into a genre or anything but it’s really insightful.
Note: the original Luddites weren't against technology. They were against technology minimizing worker power.
I don't follow why he chose to send bombs to people. But at least to the Luddites, sabotage of the means of production was considered laudable.
His other work is better known, of course.
Another aspect to TK's story is that prior to becoming a murderer he was involved as a subject in the "MK Ultra" human experimentation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
There is a public perception that the effect of this dirty experimentation (that also involved help from good ol' dirty German Nazis, which BTW could not have been any less evil or murderous than TK, but were spared the kind of prison term that he got) was not sufficiently considered during TK's trial and sentencing.
overall i was pretty disappointed. ted's writing wasn't very good at all & his arguments did not convince me. i was surprised because of his writing seems to be universally praised in tech circles.
in my opinion it isn't worth reading. it's philosophical cosplay.
(It's generally more interesting to contribute to the conversation you find lacking or underrepresented then to meta-comment on it. I do this (contributing, not meta-comment) frequently myself.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter#Positions_on_s...
The Washington Post, profiling him in early 2017 as a potential science advisor to Donald Trump, called Gelernter "a vehement critic of modern academia" who has "condemned 'belligerent leftists' and blamed intellectualism for the disintegration of patriotism and traditional family values."[29] Shortly thereafter, The Atlantic published a rebuttal of The Washington Post profile, saying it was "hard to imagine a more misleading treatment" of the "pioneering polymath" Gelernter.[30]
Gelernter has "expressed skepticism about the reality" of anthropogenic climate change,"[31][32] rejecting the overwhelming scientific consensus in the field.[33]
In July 2019, in a review of Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, which Gelernter wrote for the Claremont Review of Books, he also rejected the scientific consensus of evolutionary biology.[34] On the other hand, Gelernter stipulates he "cannot accept" intelligent design either, saying that "as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go."[35] In "A Response to David Gelernter's Attack on Evolution", Patheos, August 26, 2019, Bob Seidensticker writes: "Let's subtitle this story, 'Guy who made his career in not-biology is convinced by other not-biologists that Biology's core theory is wrong.'"[36] Computer scientist and mathematician Jeffrey Shallit wrote: "Gelernter's review was not published in a science journal, but in a politics journal run by a far-right think tank. His review cites no scientific publications at all, and makes claims like 'Many biologists agree' and 'Most biologists think' without giving any supporting citations. So, not surprisingly ... Gelernter makes a fool of himself in his review, which resembles a 'greatest hits' of creationist misconceptions and lies."[37]
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/una...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/david-gelernter-...
I wanted to understand his point of view to see if it could be changed, but I never got a response so I dont know if one of the five eyes (US or UK) or some other entity was interfering.
My position/point of view is something caused the events, so what where they?
Those events are what need tackling, Mr Kacynski is the product in much the same way as Google users are the product!
I can’t remember, but I think the professors that ran the experiments were all mostly killed or killed themselves.
Doesn’t excuse what Kaczynski did. Others should have been brought to justice as well.
Watch the Netflix series. Really well done.
open your present!
no, you open your present!
Kaczynski Christmas.
He would have killed any of you by choice.
I think that’s sick, not heroic.
You must have missed the memo that defines "fascism to be anything someone more conservative than AOC believes in.
A politician might kill or harm many more people in the course of pursuing their objectives but they'll always have the story on their side provided they win.
K. had to understand that the achievement of his objective, publishing the manifesto, would likely lead to his capture, but he did it anyway. He sacrificed himself in the end.
If you believed you had information that would save the planet but you had to kill some innocent people to make it known? Utilitarians would say yes because saving billions of innocent lives is more important.
K. probably saw himself as someone taking revenge on an evil system that had harmed him. He's one of the more fascinating characters of modern history in that he was so effective in attaining his goals with violence.
We’re long past gone the point where anything could have been done to avert all this current dystopic madness (two years ago, when I entered a bookshop, I had to show some QR magic code that I had gotten as a result of having a needle inject me stuff in my body), but we can’t say we hadn’t been warned.