‘His ideas resonate’: how the Unabomber’s dangerous anti-tech manifesto lives on
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The main tension in his manifesto is motivated by an underlying assumption that isn’t accurate. He sees technology as being a distinct force in opposition to humanity rather than an extension of humanity and that is the source of his fears. There are a lot of reasons to believe that technology is not an opposing force, like the idea of embedded cognition and embedded action.
I think technology is better understand as something connected to human intention and we can evaluate technology by how well it maps on to our unique quirks and needs. So for example when you look at a bee hive do you see it as a diabolical prison made by bees for bees or a complicated construction connected to a set of intentions that fulfill the needs of bees?
I think technologists rarely, if ever, talk about this because a lot of what enables our blind pursuit of technology is to say that technology must be an extension of humans and so it can never become autonomous. When ppl talk about AGI and paperclip maximizers, I think it's a way of pushing the problem far into the horizon and ignoring that the boundary is fluid and pushing.
Imagine if all the people at Google and Facebook stopped thinking that they're making the world a better place?
If not, then it's just another tool for humans. We are excellent tool users, and leverage everything we can to expand our senses and abilities. We already successfully wield tools of unimaginable power.
If technology itself can have agency, then it truly is a paradigm shift for the millennia. There has never been an entity that is better at tool-use than us humans. All bets are off.
Point being: technology, so far, has never been autonomous. But technology also doesn't grow on trees, nor does it stick out from the ground like a valuable rock. Technology is actively invented, and requires costly reproduction and maintenance. It only sticks around if enough people deem it worthy to have enough resources allocated to birth and propagate some piece of technology.
In other words: there is always someone commissioning the technology. Someone with use for it. When considering the gains and ills of progress, it is IMO wrong to focus on technology itself. Especially when talking ills, it's a good way for the actual cause of suffering to remain hidden. Every technology that ever harmed anyone was commissioned and deployed by somebody. Perhaps commissioned with ill intent from the start, or perhaps only repurposed for evil. But it's not technology that does the damage, but people - and these days, organizations, which is both government branches and businesses.
Going back to agency and autonomy - technology doesn't have agency, but people do, and importantly, large organizations seem to have separate agency of their own. Sans of GAI, no tech will turn on all humans on its own - but a corporation might, and corporations wield the most powerful of technologies.
It's ultimately still a group of humans making the decisions, and they are almost always rational decisions, may just not look that way from the outside with only a partial view.
This is true in the same sense that a human is just a group of cells. There, too, is clear governance. The brain cells together make the decisions and the endocrine system provides oversight. Or something.
A corporation is a dynamic system. There are roles with various responsibilities, but no one - not even CEO - is truly free to make decisions. Everyone is dependent on someone else; there are feedback loops both internal, and those connecting the corporation to the rest of the economy. Then there's information flow within, and capability of various corporate organs to act in coordinated fashion. All that is mediated by a system called "bureaucracy", which if you look at it, is nothing but a runtime executing software on top of human beings[0]. There are some good articles postulating that corporations are, in fact, the first AI agents humanity created. They just doesn't feel like it, because they think at the speed of bureaucracy, which isn't very fast. But it is clear that corporations can and do make decisions that seem to benefit the organization itself more than any specific individual within it[1].
--
[0] - You send a letter to a corporation, it is received, turned into a bunch of e-mails or memos traveling back and forth, culminating in the corporation updating some records about you, and you getting a letter in response. That looks very much like a regular RPC, except running on humans instead of silicon.
With that in mind, it shouldn't be surprising that the history of software is deeply tied to corporations, enterprise systems, office suites, databases, forms - all kinds of bureaucracy that existed before, but was done on paper. Software slots into these processes extremely well, because it's mostly just porting existing code, so it runs on silicon instead of humans, as computers are both faster and cheaper than people.
[1] - Compare a common observation about non-profit orgs, where lack of profit motive makes it clearer that, at some point, the whole organization seems to focus on perpetuating itself - even if it means exacerbating the problems it was trying to solve. C-suites and workers both come and go, leaving to be replaced by new hires - yet the organization itself prevails.
Even if every instance of technology has its origins as an extension of human intention, it is still valid to look at the unintended consequences that are anti-humanity, and it is valid to filter for just these negative experiences and say “technology is a counter force”.
That’s not disagreeing with your contention that it is an extension, by the way - it’s saying “also”.
It’s been a long time since I read Kaczynski’s manifesto and I only skimmed it at the time, so I can’t recall whether he makes this claim, or whether I had this thought myself as an obvious patch to his claims. But I think he did say this.
IE, suppose one lion has shaper teeth. It uses those teeth to catch antelope more efficiently. The other lions see those sharp teeth as inherently anti-lion because those teeth deprive the rest of them of delicious antelope.
I mean, imagine that the lion went on to catch more antelope than it needs to eat, and started to sell the surplus in exchange for cleaning its beard or some other services. The other lions then figure out this is not a bad strategy, and start doing their best to also capture a surplus to trade - perhaps going as far as inventing tricks and tools that let them hunt even more efficiently than the original lion with sharper teeth. This continues for a while, until antelope population crashes and most of the lions starve.
Survivors, should they be smart enough, pass on the story of those events - aptly calling it the Tragedy of Commons. Perhaps a couple generations later, when a lion with sharper teeth starts setting up antelope carcass trade again, they wisely band together to form a lion government, and dispense hunting quotas.
Thus is the story of civilization and technology, in a nutshell.
But the Luddites of the 19th century didn't like being devalued by tech. Like the Hulk, Luddites smash!
San Francisco's Great Fire of 1906 would not have happened if the city hadn't been plumbed for gas - new tech at the time that apparently did not have human safety in mind.
In the early 20th century there was an uneasy relationship with electricity, easily demonstrated by Thomas Edison's gruesome staged electrocution of animals and also by the the more whimsical cartoons of Rube Goldberg.
These stresses have been ongoing and increasing, the Unabomber just being one more example.
I think it has to do with people not handling the amount of new complexity all at once. And that seems like a wonderful design problem.
I'll never forget the one scene where the detective was driving an empty road late at night and came up to a red light at an intersection where there was no other cars in sight. We have all had this experience. You can see that the detective was slowly realizing the Unabomber's point as he waited a long time for the piece of technology, that had complete control over him at that moment, to allow him to proceed.
I loved it too. It used to be on Netflix but they took it down.
hXXps://thepiratebay DOT org/description.php?id=18642823
Enjoy!
The point being, if you want to fight and be a rebel, it's better to do it from a position of liberty..
I don't think everyone having wireless devices that connect to a global information network in their pockets at all times is something one could've really foreseen in 1978.
and, even so, it's not as though it's really feasible to make any sort of shock-to-the-system sentiment widely and broadly heard, today, while abstaining from violence—even our modern societies are still trying to grapple with the question of, how much violence and destruction is justified in order to make a point about something, as seen in the last few years.
had Kaczynski chosen peaceful decades-later contemporary Internet discourse as his means of promoting his ideas, he'd simply be tarred and feathered as an "alt-right" nutjob, just like everyone else with views that contradict the present Western civilization status quo. The System has gotten extremely efficient in perpetuating itself, and silencing anything resembling Actual Dissent.
So what? Anyone with an ounce of spirituality knows that living your life to be admired in your lifetime is not the real goal. Ivan Illich spent his life being as lefty and now he's trendy on the right (making similar critiques, btw). Truth is beautiful when it's spoken for its own sake -- insecurity makes it ugly. It can't be forced into the world by terror.
Kaczynski killed because he was unbalanced and insecure, not because he held (partial) truth. Better thinkers on the issue were dime-a-dozen, even in his day (E.M. Forester, Samuel Butler, McLuhan). And it wasn't his terrorism but sophomoricly intellectual "incel" rage and religious fundamentalist movements that are finally waking people up.
edit: ... and this isn't to say that truth never justifies any form of violence, just that there is absolutely nothing to learn from Kaczynski's brand -- which was ignoble and totally futile to his intended ends.
The conceit of Kaczynsci and other rebels is that they think forming sound criticisms absolves them from the responsibility to prevail. If you want to change the world, maybe try making something it wants.
If you are frustrated because nobody wants to listen to you, maybe index on solving that problem instead of forcing people to listen to you with bizarre political acts and attacking prominent individuals so as to capture some of the reflected attention for your tedious opinions. While that advice is for journalists, it's perhaps also applicable to would-be immitators of Kaczynski as well.
From the article: «If Kaczynski did raise valid points, Fleming says, it is because he took them from others, including the French sociologist Jacques Ellul, whose 1954 text, The Technological Society, electrified the bomber as a young man.»
It's sad that he could so well summarise the problem AND offer no, even remotely workable, solution.
Great problem descriptions, unworkable solutions. So far, no one has created a well working social order from first principles.
There was a reply here correcting me and saying Kaczynski DID in fact have a plan: to target weak points of the modern industrial economy, disable them in a co-ordinated attack, and then rely on the fact we would then lack the tech to do high tech work and have already used the resources available with low tech tools (eg we have mostly exhausted the easy-to-access mineral deposits, so removing our ability to access deeper ones would force humanity back to pre-industrial life.
I have only come across this idea in Atwood's Oryx and Crake (fiction). I wondered if it (a) true as an idea (the examples I've seen are very unconvincing) and (b) what he was actually proposing...
2. Person X becomes a terrorist for that purpose.
3. People say "Y'know, because of all those terrible things X did, I took a look at their manifesto, and they have some interesting ideas."
4. Person Y sees this, and repeat.
Suggestion: When people actually care about ideas, there are plenty of thinkers they could read and talk about, without encouraging future terrorists.
So, I never cared for the overanalysis of this, the media obsession and spectacle is pretending he had anything comprehensible to say at all.
I.e., his ideas resonate for people who have not actually read leftist writing. Or maybe they resonate for accelerationists, tankies, and the like.
If Kaczynski did raise valid points, he says, it is because he took them from others, including the French sociologist Jacques Ellul, whose 1954 text, The Technological Society, electrified the bomber as a young man. “Few of his arguments are actually original,” Fleming says. “He borrowed most of his ideas from fairly mainstream academic authors who would never have condoned his violence.
“I don’t think we should read Kaczynski as a theorist or philosopher, and try to separate his ideas from his violence,” he says. “He’s a self-described terrorist, and revolutionary, and this is how I read him.”
Not trying to excuse anything. Just sayin'.
- his ideas were interesting & worthy of consideration
- his actions were deplorable
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national...
Marx, Mein Kampf, SNCC manifestos, The Turner Diaries, chunks of the Koran and the Bible, a short look at Juche, some Ding Xiaoping Thought, etc.
And among others, the Unibomber Manifesto. The professor had printouts that he gave to us so that we didn't have to search for it. True for a lot of the documents, actually.
It felt uncomfortably prescient then, and more so now. He makes a lot of good points but doesn't tie them together well, IMO, and his conclusion is kind of weak. Still, his points sting when you look at how we're sliding to a cyberpunk future that we can all see coming but won't make changes to prevent.
I play both sides, so I always come out on top!
How anyone thinks this guy has the time to be chief engineer at SpaceX when all he does is shitpost on twitter all day is the real grift.
I'm a big proponent of Musk corps, solely because of the team within them and entirely despite of Elon (though he did serve a purpose); but the former channer in me also likes seeing how sage level trolling has not only made him immensely wealthy but also functions as a sort of psyop to gauge to how effective social media really is/remains in the collective psyche.
It's like the more advanced version of, 'stick your smartphone in the microwave for full charge' kind of thing: perverse and diabolical in a way but also necessary to put a finger on the pulse of the collective IQ of the modern internet sort of thing.
“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
Most likely, he was thinking of the dangers of AI (hence “might” - because we still don’t know).
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1667627403089268739?s=46...
He founded OpenAI to prevent an outcome where AGI is developed closed source by a single corporation - which he thought would likely be Google. Elon founding OpenAI actually led to him falling out with Larry Page, who used to be a good friend of Elon (but who didn’t share these concerns about AI).
It is ironic that it’s now OpenAI that partnered with Microsoft and runs GPT-3/4/x on a closed source basis. This is the opposite of what Elon wanted to achieve, and what he had in mind when he named the venture “OpenAI”.
Elon (who left OpenAI in 2018) has criticized OpenAI for this many times over the last months. He says OpenAI has taken donations as a non profit and then turned around and made themselves into a closed source for-profit.
If you strip out the call for revolution stuff which is very poorly argued anyway and I think just transparently will never happen, the remaining 80% of the manifesto is very well written
The detailed list of specific injuries to victims here is sad... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
Where's the detailed list of victims of globalization and finance?
If we're going to make a rank order list of genocidal maniacs, Ted Kaczynski isn't anywhere near the top.
Getting into or graduating from Harvard as an undergrad doesn't mean much. Granted, Kaczynski didn't buy his way in, but the comment as written doesn't differentiate between some rich kid buying their way in and some genius earning their way in.
"he did less damage" - "then a lobbyist or McKinsey" is a wild statement. He was a purposeful murderer. Trying to lump McKinsey consultants and politicians (horrible people, most of them, I am sure) with a serial killer is normalizing murder. Murder is a line that, I imagine, is drawn in concrete for any person who expects to be welcome in the modern society.
I will take my chances in being the subject to damage done by any randomly picked lobbyist vs Unabomber. Won't you?
What is going on with HN if this is the kind of discourse that's getting upvoted and approved.
I think half a million dead Iraqis would say the latter.
Best of luck.
I'm sorry this makes you feel bad.
I'm not trying to excuse, or minimize, Kaczynski's crimes. I am asking you to understand that in the case of revolutionaries and political leaders, the difference between heroes and terrorists is ultimately decided by the people of the future. It is very easy to see serial killers and bomb makers as individually evil, because its a very personal sort of violence, and the motivations are expressed and enacted on a very personal level.
But how do you deal with more indirect motivations and indirect violence? Was Churchill's inaction during the Bengal famine murder? What about all the collateral damage during Bush's tenure with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is Barack Obama a murderer for ordering the death of Anwar Al-Awlaki? Or was it the drone operator who followed the order?
This is to say nothing of the original comment, that Kaczynski did less damage than the average Harvard grad (depicted as someone in finances. The extent to which working in finances causes damage and death is, I think, a lot less direct than even the damage done by a head of state enacting national policy).
I don't think Kaczynski did the right thing, or that his underlying motivations were even coherent, let alone morally correct. Do not misunderstand me. But if we're stack-ranking history's greatest monsters (and Harvard graduates), actual effectiveness counts at least as much as intent.
A factual correction: George W. Bush was both an undergradate at Yale (Class of 1968) and got his MBA at Harvard (HBS Class of 1975)
(Megadeth - Captive Honour, by way of Jean Rostand)
However, that's still irrelevant and does nothing to alleviate the fact that he killed many innocent people.
Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say.
Surely no one making decisions of consequence in our world. They certainly prefer tit for tat.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Note this isn't a diagnosis or an excuse (people often confuse explanations for excuses a lot), but it was a very interesting comparison that illuminated a lot of things. It provides a lot of potentials as to why for the steps in his life, opposed to the narratives which tend to be "prodigy turned evil" or "vengeful deadbeat" that are common in public narratives. I get why people like those narratives though, it's far less to process when we can paint someone in absolute ways.
People cheerleading Kaczynski tend not to know this, and I think that's because for the most part they're not really engaged with the story; rather, it's just much more interesting, for Internet conversation purposes, if there are buried intellectual gems to unearth from Kaczynski's project. Because of the powerful bias towards "fun to talk about", there will always be people around to say "Mail bombs are mostly always bad, but what about Iraq, maybe he was right about some things."
Imagine how HN would feel if he’d gone after Ritchie, Kernigan or Linus.