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
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…
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.
> 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...
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?
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!
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.
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.