I remember reading it many years ago. He made some good points - which is disconcerting.
Has anyone else read it? What did you think?
Yeah, couple times, but not for years now. Fetishizing pre-industrial times sounds nice if you aren’t one of the many people who would have died or lived with an untreated illness or condition your whole life. You should look into what they did to that man in college. Then find someone more stable making similar points and saying similar things. Industrial skepticism isn’t unique to Ted Kaczynski. The truama and subsequent mental illness that pervade his theory and philosophy is.
Honestly despite some decent points he kinda comes off as the first incel. We was all sorts of angry the girl he met while working for his brother (she did too,) rejected him. He never got over it and harassed her so much his brother fired him and he returned to the cabin.
He can be all 3, an incel, right about technology enslaving and destroying our collective knowledge and a goddamn monster for bombing people.
Technology is just a tool. It’s just like blaming cars for all the carcrashes.
Watch out, someone may come in and make the same comparison about guns.
Fellow wendigooner? He made some great points yeah but he also falsely attributed most of societies misgivings to the progress of technology rather than the actual culprit, capitalism.
Besides that he was basically just a grifter and didn’t really care much about the exact ideology. He only really cared about how it justified his hatred for people and love for nature.
Anarcho-primitivism in a nutshell: my misanthropy isn’t due to poverty or alienation, in fact I am enlightened in hating all of you monsters.
Sure, the guy was a murderer and somewhat nuts, but this quote of his always rang true with me. This is, in a nutshell, the future: “But I am suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What I do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”
Not exactly an original thought though. This had been a staple of SF writers for decades. E M Forster’s The Machine Stops from 1909 being a fine example.
And certainly not the last to do it: that’s essentially the plot of Wall-E.
That 1909 story came up with the -same- conclusion … complete dependence (with the machine enforcing it). Except, in the story, the Repair machine is malfunctioning.
Speaking of which - the other day I found this video, which might be useful to both those who’ve read it (or don’t have the time). Besides an analysis, it includes some fine SF artwork.
“The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster - Short Story Analysis” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2XXkauk0eU
I remember watching the Netflix series about him. I was shocked because I actually agreed with a lot of what he had to say about the society we’re living in right now. We’re at the brink of AI being a force that is no longer controllable. We’re seeing deepfakes and other shit that will ruin peoples life. And we’re moving towards a society where everything can be replaced with code.
I myself have grown up to these changes and it’s insane how much our world has changed over the last 30 years. It’s shocking.
I think the next hundred years will bring more changes to humanity than the last 10,000 years have. We have devised methods to gaslight ourselves; we’re moving into a world where the concept of truth is malleable and unknowable. The machines will get smarter, the rich will get richer. I’ll be 66 years old in about a month. I have many more yesterdays than tomorrows. I’m not looking forward to leaving this world, but I’m not particularly interested in being a participant in what comes next.
i had this disconcerting experience several years ago, i was talking with a friend of a friend who i’d had a couple of classes with but never really spoken to, and we were talking about technology in some context, and i made some off-handed reference to the unabomber’s manifesto. he didn’t know what i was talking about, so i briefly explained the themes, industrial alienation, etc. and then he asked who the unabomber was, so i explained that whole thing. and i had to explain that like, i was not really serious about wanting to live in a cabin in the woods, it was just sort of a dark humor joke, then he said ‘oh no it’s okay, i totally understand,’ and then he got serious and said, ‘personally, i really agree with charles manson. the race wars are coming’ i was like ‘uh,’ and diligently avoided ever being in the same room with him again. i’m not even white??
Yeah sure you can find good takes in isolation from many texts, but you can’t really take them in isolation. Think of intentionally quoting something from Mein Kampf because “it resonated with you”
For example, the following:
Godess of peace can walk only in the company of god of war and that every great act of peace must be protected and assisted by force
I’d think most people would agree with that but no one in their right mind would use those exact words quoting one of the worst man in history of mankind nor suggest “Hitler kinda has a point”
Yeah. He was part anarcho-primitivist, but also part proto-alt-right.
No.
There is no value to be gained by reading the ramblings of right-wingers. If you’ve heard one you’ve heard them all.
Deranged, incoherent, internally inconsistent ramblings.
