Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]

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61 pointsdanielovichdk42 comments

I remember reading this as a young person and being impressed by how intellectual it sounded. Reading it as an adult, it now sounds like a dressed-up rant from your uncle who spends far too much time watching a certain cable news network.

I remember when they were stopping and harassing people who were wearing hoodies and sunglasses around town, because of that silly and totally inaccurate Wanted poster.

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/unabomber-ted-kaczynski-...

You'd think he'd be smart enough not to go out strolling the city streets wearing the same exact hoodie and sunglasses as the "Unibom Law Enforcement Task Force" put on his wanted poster.

For the longest time, I had my fb photo set to that sketch. Turns out, the famous sketch linked above that we know is not accurate, may have been the original sketch artist, as considerable time had passed between the sighting and the sketch. https://www.bustle.com/p/who-was-the-unabomber-sketch-artist...

Ted Kaczynski offered a critique of 'leftism' that still seems to be accurate. The 'Bay Area Liberal' stereotype that prioritizes defense of victims over all other matters.. well we've definitely seen explosions in that arena.

The larger picture of technology taking over society seems to be accurate as well. It was only 13 years ago when we got the iphone, it's bizarre to think that people didn't stare at their phones constantly only 15 years ago.

> Ted Kaczynski offered a critique of 'leftism' that still seems to be accurate.

I highly doubt that's his own analysis, rather it's Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morality" dressed up in a more modern vernacular.

And just like how I interpret Nietzsche in the context of him being the third wheel in an open relationship, this feels like someone who is reacting because they feel let down by the promises of "leftism" or society in general. It says more about the psychic state of the author than about the truth of the world.

> Ted Kaczynski offered a critique of 'leftism' that still seems to be accurate.

Funny, I totally disagree and it looks to me like he was constructing an elaborate strawman. People made the same sorts of generalizations about certain ethnic groups in the past, and I felt like he was doing the same thing and lazily running sed 's/jews/leftists'.

Yeah, have to admit that having heard Kaczynski's manifesto was actually thoughtful and insightful and not at all what you'd expect from someone most known for committing atrocities, I wasn't expecting the first part to be dedicated to a cranky subreddit level of analysis of 'leftist' thought. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. YAWN. Putting parenthical (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc. ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.) comments in to show how much more open-minded he is than the libs he's owning (because, he argues there's no reason the left could display interest in helping minorities other than believing minorities are inferior). YAWN

Frankly that sort of political ranting is exactly what you'd expect to find in the 'manifesto' of somebody better known for violent crime (as well as the writings of a lot of people who aren't). There seems to be an awful lot of projection going on in there, for a start, but even that angle probably isn't particularly insightful since non-sociopaths and even people who mostly come across as pretty well-adjusted and happy also write this sort of generalization about their political adversaries.

I always appreciated Ted's insight into the bad things about technology. His manifesto is well written and makes a strong case. However, I could never understand how he gets from pointing out that technology has some harmful side-effects, to believing that his conclusion is a justifiable rationale for murdering people.

I would say that perhaps writing the paper itself was the spark that he needed to begin bombing people. From the fourth paragraph in the paper: "We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence;"

hmm i am not sure that is the case, (though i only watched the netflix series, and read the manifesto, so i am not very familiar with his life), but i thought it is more a gesture of helplessness.

There is a saying in my country, that is hard to translate in English, but it goes something like: powerlessness births violence.

Same. He made some interesting points philosophically re: our growing dependence on technology and its implications.

In the document he specifically says that he killed people to get attention for his manifesto.

One wonders whether that only occurred to him after the bombings had begun

The guy was a terrorist and serial killer. Though very intelligent, you can hardly expect his conclusions to be rational ones - he clearly fell off a cliff mentally and never recovered.

I think you're mixing up a few things here: ability to reason, empathy for other people, and a well-balanced mind. There are plenty of terrible people who are perfectly rational. They come to conclusions the rest of us find obscene not because they're bad at reasoning, but because they have different values and priorities.

Quote a few current nations were founded by serial or parallel killer revolutionary warriors -- er, terrorists.

if you study him you'll find he makes many references to Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (La Technique). It's a very deep read. If you follow what he read it all makes a lot more sense. Ted radicalized himself in isolation as he tried to escape modern society, and was unable to get away (they built a highway through where he lived which he viewed as destruction of the habitat. he ended up having to avoid hikers and tourists).

Another great book that also touch on that is James C Scott The Art of Not Being Governed[2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

[2] https://libcom.org/files/Art.pdf

He was a subject of unethical human experiments while at Harvard for one. That may have influenced his opinion. His crusade against academic scientists may have been more personal than even he consciously realized.

I think this is probably understated.

I can’t imagine being dosed with that much LSD while people are yelling at you and trying to scare you (this went on for years?) Doesn’t surprise me that that could break a person.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Harvard_Colleg...

Holy wow. I had never heard of this. That's monstrous. It's a recipe for lasting trauma.

You can find the same logic among a lot of extremists. My take is that they start with an outcome they're excited about and reason toward it, choosing facts to fit. For those who have dealt with narcissists and abusers, it's common there, too.

For those who haven't seen it up close but want to understand it, I strongly recommend this long dive into the forums for "estranged parents": http://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/

The gist is that plenty of kids with narcissistic or abusive parents grow up and eventually cut off contact with their parents. For some, I'm sure, this forces a reckoning: they really look at what they've done and try to get better. But many do what they've done their whole lives: find ways to explain why they are still right.

Dashiell Hammett in The Thin Man gives a good description of what it's like dealing with people like this: "Most people [...] get discouraged after you’ve caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you’ve got to be careful or you’ll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you’re tired of disbelieving her." A description more familiar to people these days, I'm sure.

I was 6 years old when this document was released to the public. It was written by a man who mailed bombs to people, killing several. He mailed this document to many large newspapers, demanding they publish it under the threat of further acts of terrorism. Eventually, law enforcement pushed for publication by the New York Times and the Washington Post, hoping that a member of the public could help identify the author. In 1996, about half a year after its publication, Kaczynsky was arrested.

It seems to me that, given all of this, we have something of a moral obligation to ignore this document. The ideas it contains are quite widespread; you can read them elsewhere. Of course you must listen to your own conscience, but how is publicizing this not giving a murderous terrorist exactly what he wanted?

I remember reading this when it was first published, in the newspapers.

It was an eye-opening experience -- previous reports had all described the manifesto as rambling, incoherent, crazy, etc. It turned out to not be like that at all.

It was the first time I really had my eyes opened to how deceptive the media can be.

His manifesto is remarkably close to the blue smurfs’ position in the movie Avatar.

Curious why this was flagged. I read the posting guidelines and didn’t find anything it clearly violates

It's Battle of the Manifestos day on HN! Compare and contrast this with "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22585733

It is quite plausible that cruel psychological experiments, that were carried out on Ted Kaczynski, turned him into a terrorist: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...

Alston Chase, the author of the Atlantic article, appears in this radiolab episode https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91721...

To summarize, Ted's main point is that man has been alienated from our "true nature" as a result of industrialization, and this is making us sad. He argues that we should leave the harmful industrialized world, and return to nature, which is exactly what he did in a cabin in Montana.

This specific style of anti-modernity (industrialization leads to alienation) is at least as old as Rilke[1], who wrote about it extensively in his 1910 book, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge[2], and I get a chuckle thinking to myself that this is the most viable path to a truly "post-modern" world devoid of modernity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke [2] https://archive.org/stream/TheNotebooksOfMalteLauridsBrigge/...

I’d say you can go back to Blake’s “dark satanic mills” for some of those critiques. The anti-industrialist strain of Romanticism is almost as old as industrialism itself.

Need some help. A friend of mine who is blind studies society and technology. He has wanted to read this for some time, but we've not been able to find an audiobook version. Does anyone know if there is an audio reading of this?

There's gotta be some quality pdf reader online. A quick search yields an Adobe product

https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/reader.html

A quick search on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5ITyifcYy8

Omg. Never thought to check you too. Thank you!

Text2speech is very, very good these days. Check out google's tts, ttsreader (completely free), or the various ml models on github.

Try https://archive.org/details/TheodoreJohnKaczynskiIndustrialS... ?

He was smart (if unstable) but overall a huge pessimist.

Technology has reduced suffering to an incredible degree. It's created some of its own suffering, sure, but overall I'd much rather live today than any time in the past.

And 100 years from now we'll have created a world with incredibly low amount of suffering. It's inevitable if we don't suffer a major setback like nuclear war.

He seemed depressed and pessimistic. Not a good state of mind for evaluating the world objectively.

I agree he was a chronic pessimist, world is overall a better place than it used to be.I hope the trend will keep on, especially for the weakest and poorest.op

Just one point with suffering - too little makes us 'weak' when we inevitably have to face it at some point, in some amount. I still prefer it this way, but as with everything, there are some drawbacks.

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

Soon mankind will be tested due to covid pretty harshly I believe.

Suffering has a lot to do with the current psychological state of our minds and how our surroundings affect our subjective perception.

You are thinking in terms of materialistic well-being which plays only a part of the whole well-being we can achieve.

The thing is that right now, even if you are in the "comfort zone" of the society it doesn't mean you will feel happy, fulfilled and in a balanced state of mind, because we are all filled with those destructive/unbalanced parts of our "cultural DNA" that together with our subjective destructive/unbalanced behavior will make the whole life experience not that much fulfilling the way we know it can be.

Particularly, i think our societies are "culturally sick" in a lot of areas and there's a lot of evidence of our downfall in those areas.

I can bet with you that i life in a remote tribe in Africa for instance would feel much more fulfilling and happy than a life in our society surrounded with material comfort and tech gadgets that make our lives more bearable.

I wonder if we are actually inclined to invent those stuff, because we feel miserable and we think that they will remedy this problem at least a little bit (guy invent a social network because he feel lonely).

Sure, the answer is not to go back and live in tribes, but i wonder what we have lost in the way. This civilization where at the same time, we are so proud of, but is also the reason we will feel more sadness than happiness, because in the end our problem is not in how materially safe we are, but how contempt we feel with our current situation.

Also lets not forget how about making more things, we ended up in a state where we need more things to feel happiness in our current cultural status quo.

Wanting things and not being able to have them, is part of our misery, and we are always creating new things so people will have the urge to desire them.

The paradox is that the material comfort gives you with one hand, and take with the other.

On the other hand, i think we are having better lives, because we are becoming more civilized as a whole and more educated and sophisticated. The social sphere and how we relate to others is a key part to our happiness.

How much tech and progress are helping us to achieve this? (and other possible side-effects that actually contribute to our mood balance)

My God. I couldn’t make past paragraph. Person claims that industrial revolution was a disaster? This is so far from truth. Over last hundred years world hunger was basically eliminated. Ye. May be “third world countries” are not as amazing as whatever author thinks, but people are not dying from hunger anymore.

We live in era of unprecedented prosperity. Author has too much time and ignorance on his hands.

a bit off topic, but if you enjoy questioning the value of technology and the impact on our society, check out Neil Postman's "The Surrender of Culture to Technology"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlrv7DIHllE

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