His manifesto is worth reading. Although he was obviously a twisted man many of his predictions for the future were eerily prescient.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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?
This is the saddest part, he didn't have to do it the way he did.
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.
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.
>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...
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.
> 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.
Frankly, I don't see any reason to gate keep my own curiosity. Moral filtering just breeds ignorance.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
Nonviolent change (toward peace)is somewhere down the imaginary page, but it can be effective. It is both less timely and long lasting.
> 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.
Never seen that happen
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.
Someone like the Unabomber doesn’t long back to the past of being a Middle Age serf…! Get real.
People should read “Beginning of Infinity” for a strong counter argument.
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.
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"...
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).
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.
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)
Especially as his predictions were also true in technology in the past decades and is now more relevant with AI.
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.