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?
Hmm, I’m not sure I buy your contention. You can point to an individual instance of applying a specific technology and say “it is an extension of a particular human intention”, sure. But this is not commutative; Person A’s application of Technology X to Situation 1 is “extension of human intention”, but to Person B who is also in Situation 1, Technology X is “counter force in opposition to (Person B’s) humanity”. See for instance social media recommendation algorithms. I know a girl who can’t use TikTok because she loves pets and can’t look away from families grieving their pets - even starting from a blank slate, the algorithm quickly detects that grief videos engage her, and so inevitably fills up her feed with dead dogs. She absolutely experiences this particular technology as a distinct, and distinctly anti-human, counter force.
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.
The issue with that argument is that it is way too general.
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.
Tech can start out as an extension, but what people fail to understand is that it can become slowly become autonomous over time, kinda like how a party gets out of control and people start putting holes in walls.
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?
I think you really nailed the ultimately question: Can technology have agency?
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.
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 watched a TV show about the Unabomber a while back that was really good. I remember one of the detectives investigating him became sympathetic after reading his manifesto. I don't think the Unabomber was as much anti-tech as he was against tech controlling our lives. A valid concern in the AI era.
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.
Getting a faculty job at 25 is extremely impressive, the mistake he made was using violence to spread his message - in his manifesto he even states that he uses it to make sure message heard - but if he had just held on, resisted the urge and played the long game he could have had a much bigger voice in the world - even if he never became an academic, outside of the system as a pundit, youtuber, hacker, etc. The world was gotten more technologically authoritarian but the tools and means to live outside or even in opposition to it also has vastly increased.
The point being, if you want to fight and be a rebel, it's better to do it from a position of liberty..
He lacked any normal social skills. If you work in the tech industry it's easy to forget how important those are to influence anyone who doesn't spend all their lives in front of a screen.
> but if he had just held on, resisted the urge and played the long game
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.
> 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.
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.
This article is just agit prop trying to use the news peg of Kaczynsci's death to associate his ideas with The Guardian's political opponents like Musk and Carlson, to make them seem "dangerous," and justify some response to this new fictional danger. I'd insult the author and editors but kicking down at journalists only reinforces the spite that drives them to produce things like this.
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.
Most of the article seems to be based on an interview with a certain Sean Fleming. He’s a research fellow at the University of Nottingham, who is writing the first book-length study of the Unabomber’s ideology.
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.»
I feel very sympathetic to his complaints about society. But he offers no solutions that would not embarrass a 4 year old. He wanted people, all people everywhere to give up tech. And he never bothered to address either of the obvious issues with this: (a) that whoever didn't would have a huge military advantage over those that did and would soon be in charge and (b) that we can only stay alive in the numbers we currently have because of modern agriculture so we'd need to starve a lot of people to death.
It's sad that he could so well summarise the problem AND offer no, even remotely workable, solution.
<Replies to own comment as it is too late to edit>
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...
I'm a Marxian leftist, but the one time I tried reading his essay I found it incomprehensible, ramblings of an ill person. It could've been about any topic, the style was redundant overconfident rambling.
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.
Couldn't agree more. Which makes sense, he only experienced life through books in near total isolation. You can't really provide anything of value about life or society that way, you're just stuck in your own mental projection of the world.
I’m not in the “he was right” camp but I don’t see how you can call it incomprehensible. It’s certainly not well-written, but it lacks the opaque prose that leftists especially are so fond of, and is easy enough to follow.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. In this case you did it with ideological flamewar, but there were plenty of other cases of unsubstantive/flamebait comments, including personal attacks, so no we're not Marxians.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
I would need to read his second book and is elucidated on his thoughts more, but I think a theme that he made without trying was on centralized technologies. It has been a bit, but there was a part regarding power plants where he points out the centralized nature of it. Further, technology is good and an extension of ourselves, but when we go from a nice tool to have to mandatory, I think we should be cautious.
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.
And separation of ideas from the violence, counter to the premise of the article, which it mentions only once, late, in passing:
“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.”
Kaczynski needs to be understood as much as a brilliant propagandist as a philosopher. Dismissing him as a philosopher because he drew his ideas from others misses the point. Regardless of what one thinks of the man, his ideas and actions (and I strongly disagree with many of his ideas and all of his violent actions), he has clearly been more influential than Ellul in the US by a wide margin.
I would urge everyone to read the manifesto directly, and not The Guardian's selective summary, that gives no hints the manifesto has chapters such as "The Psychology of Modern Leftism".
We had to read this in college, in a lit course on "dangerous discussions".
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.
> After the terrorist’s death was announced, the entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted that Kaczynski “might not be wrong” in his diagnosis that technology had been a disaster for humanity, one of a list of Silicon Valley figures who have praised the clarity of the bomber’s reasoning (while condemning his violent acts).
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.
If you haven't read the manifesto, do yourself a favor and read it and come to your own conclusions. In my opinion it's a weird mix of extremely coherent and well reasoned points that come to a sort of nonsensensical conclusion but that doesn't deter from how good the good parts are and they are definitely worth reading
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
Kaczynski was a loser. He couldn't manage to turn a Harvard degree into a productive role in society so he waged a cowardly war on people who did nothing to harm him.
He did less damage than a Harvard grad who went on to run a hedge fund, or went on to work in private equity, or work for McKinsey, or become a lobbyist.
Where's the detailed list of victims of globalization and finance?
Yes. Repetitive, I know, but the standard reminder applies: we are talking about a man who deliberately attempted to down a commercial jetliner, and almost succeeded. There's no rationalizing to do here.
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."
He was a sympathetic villain. Hollywood writers would struggle to develop one as good. Like all sympathetic villains you are supposed to read the first half of his story (what happened to him) and come away feeling bad for him and understanding his desire for revenge. You are then supposed to look at what he did to achieve that vengeance and hate him. It’s a step over the line from an anti-hero. Had he targeted CIA offices and politicians that supported them we would consider him an anti hero more like the punisher, Gerald Butler in Law Abiding Citizen, or John Wick. Instead he chose to kill random people that had nothing to do with his tragic origin story so he is just a sympathetic villain that needed to be put down. Of course there is a segment of society that would put down anti heroes as well as sympathetic villains so your position on the topic it really more a judgement statement about your moral stance than an objective statement.
Everything that I've read about him indicates he was a rising star that willingly chose to withdraw from society, possibly due to mental illness. Far from the "vengeful deadbeat" that GP is claiming he was.
Agreed, Kaczynski was a loser. Why anyone sees fit to try and promulgate his ideas is far beyond my reasoning. Not as violent as war? Seriously? That's the best you can do?
One important difference between Kaczynski and political leaders is that Kaczynski acted on his own autonomy. Political and military leaders require others to carry out their violence which defuses the moral stain by making so many others complicit (including the voters in democracies). Even an autocratic leader like Putin relies on his citizenry to carry out his will in such a way that it is difficult to even make sense of how the will of Putin differs from the will of the Russian nation.
The quest for novelty finds itself in the "but what if the bad guy were right" thing very often. I can tell you that I enjoy stories where I'm the bad guy - either accidentally or through some discovery of harm (video games do this in a fun way). But in the end, it's just fantasy. This guy couldn't separate real life from a poor model of the world. In the end, intelligence is a composite measure and he lacked it in sufficient form. Pity.
I never found his argument convincing.
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?
Hmm, I’m not sure I buy your contention. You can point to an individual instance of applying a specific technology and say “it is an extension of a particular human intention”, sure. But this is not commutative; Person A’s application of Technology X to Situation 1 is “extension of human intention”, but to Person B who is also in Situation 1, Technology X is “counter force in opposition to (Person B’s) humanity”. See for instance social media recommendation algorithms. I know a girl who can’t use TikTok because she loves pets and can’t look away from families grieving their pets - even starting from a blank slate, the algorithm quickly detects that grief videos engage her, and so inevitably fills up her feed with dead dogs. She absolutely experiences this particular technology as a distinct, and distinctly anti-human, counter force.
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.
The issue with that argument is that it is way too general.
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.
1 reply →
Tech can start out as an extension, but what people fail to understand is that it can become slowly become autonomous over time, kinda like how a party gets out of control and people start putting holes in walls.
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?
I think you really nailed the ultimately question: Can technology have agency?
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.
4 replies →
Humans are tool users. That's technology.
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 watched a TV show about the Unabomber a while back that was really good. I remember one of the detectives investigating him became sympathetic after reading his manifesto. I don't think the Unabomber was as much anti-tech as he was against tech controlling our lives. A valid concern in the AI era.
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.
Manhunt: Unabomber https://reelgood.com/show/manhunt-unabomber-2017
I loved it too. It used to be on Netflix but they took it down.
It's still up... On Piratebay.
hXXps://thepiratebay DOT org/description.php?id=18642823
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The referenced TV show is likely the first season of Manhunt [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhunt_(2017_TV_series)
Getting a faculty job at 25 is extremely impressive, the mistake he made was using violence to spread his message - in his manifesto he even states that he uses it to make sure message heard - but if he had just held on, resisted the urge and played the long game he could have had a much bigger voice in the world - even if he never became an academic, outside of the system as a pundit, youtuber, hacker, etc. The world was gotten more technologically authoritarian but the tools and means to live outside or even in opposition to it also has vastly increased.
The point being, if you want to fight and be a rebel, it's better to do it from a position of liberty..
He lacked any normal social skills. If you work in the tech industry it's easy to forget how important those are to influence anyone who doesn't spend all their lives in front of a screen.
Truer words couldn't have been said. Life isn't just using some API and then automatically get something done or delivered.
> but if he had just held on, resisted the urge and played the long game
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.
> 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.
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.
This article is just agit prop trying to use the news peg of Kaczynsci's death to associate his ideas with The Guardian's political opponents like Musk and Carlson, to make them seem "dangerous," and justify some response to this new fictional danger. I'd insult the author and editors but kicking down at journalists only reinforces the spite that drives them to produce things like this.
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.
Most of the article seems to be based on an interview with a certain Sean Fleming. He’s a research fellow at the University of Nottingham, who is writing the first book-length study of the Unabomber’s ideology.
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.»
I feel very sympathetic to his complaints about society. But he offers no solutions that would not embarrass a 4 year old. He wanted people, all people everywhere to give up tech. And he never bothered to address either of the obvious issues with this: (a) that whoever didn't would have a huge military advantage over those that did and would soon be in charge and (b) that we can only stay alive in the numbers we currently have because of modern agriculture so we'd need to starve a lot of people to death.
It's sad that he could so well summarise the problem AND offer no, even remotely workable, solution.
<Replies to own comment as it is too late to edit>
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...
A bit like Marx in that regard.
Or anarchists or whatever other ideology you have.
Great problem descriptions, unworkable solutions. So far, no one has created a well working social order from first principles.
1 reply →
I would have said Libertarians
1. Person X wants attention to their manifesto.
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.
I'm a Marxian leftist, but the one time I tried reading his essay I found it incomprehensible, ramblings of an ill person. It could've been about any topic, the style was redundant overconfident rambling.
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.
Couldn't agree more. Which makes sense, he only experienced life through books in near total isolation. You can't really provide anything of value about life or society that way, you're just stuck in your own mental projection of the world.
I’m not in the “he was right” camp but I don’t see how you can call it incomprehensible. It’s certainly not well-written, but it lacks the opaque prose that leftists especially are so fond of, and is easy enough to follow.
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We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. In this case you did it with ideological flamewar, but there were plenty of other cases of unsubstantive/flamebait comments, including personal attacks, so no we're not Marxians.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. It will eventually get your main account banned as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I would need to read his second book and is elucidated on his thoughts more, but I think a theme that he made without trying was on centralized technologies. It has been a bit, but there was a part regarding power plants where he points out the centralized nature of it. Further, technology is good and an extension of ourselves, but when we go from a nice tool to have to mandatory, I think we should be cautious.
Points I would raise, from the article:
And separation of ideas from the violence, counter to the premise of the article, which it mentions only once, late, in passing:
Well summarized elsewhere. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16850733
Kaczynski needs to be understood as much as a brilliant propagandist as a philosopher. Dismissing him as a philosopher because he drew his ideas from others misses the point. Regardless of what one thinks of the man, his ideas and actions (and I strongly disagree with many of his ideas and all of his violent actions), he has clearly been more influential than Ellul in the US by a wide margin.
The manifesto itself isn't dangerous, but the way that Kaczynski drove attention towards it certainly was
Technically he got it published buy promising to stop bombing. He drew attention to it by stopping terrorism.
Not trying to excuse anything. Just sayin'.
two things can be true at the same time:
- his ideas were interesting & worthy of consideration
- his actions were deplorable
I would urge everyone to read the manifesto directly, and not The Guardian's selective summary, that gives no hints the manifesto has chapters such as "The Psychology of Modern Leftism".
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national...
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We had to read this in college, in a lit course on "dangerous discussions".
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.
> After the terrorist’s death was announced, the entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted that Kaczynski “might not be wrong” in his diagnosis that technology had been a disaster for humanity, one of a list of Silicon Valley figures who have praised the clarity of the bomber’s reasoning (while condemning his violent acts).
I play both sides, so I always come out on top!
Dude. Read the tweet in context [1]. He was responding to this headline:
“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...
If that's the case, it's still hypocritical - he was one of the early investors in OpenAI: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-openai-reason-exis...
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> 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.
Better than some "we just want to make the world a better place" true believer.
If you haven't read the manifesto, do yourself a favor and read it and come to your own conclusions. In my opinion it's a weird mix of extremely coherent and well reasoned points that come to a sort of nonsensensical conclusion but that doesn't deter from how good the good parts are and they are definitely worth reading
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
Kaczynski was a loser. He couldn't manage to turn a Harvard degree into a productive role in society so he waged a cowardly war on people who did nothing to harm him.
The detailed list of specific injuries to victims here is sad... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
He did less damage than a Harvard grad who went on to run a hedge fund, or went on to work in private equity, or work for McKinsey, or become a lobbyist.
Where's the detailed list of victims of globalization and finance?
For the sake of argument, 100% agreed.
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.
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Or invading another country and killing somewhere on the order of 100K-1M innocent civilians.
If we're going to make a rank order list of genocidal maniacs, Ted Kaczynski isn't anywhere near the top.
Kill ten people and you're a serial killer. Kill ten million and you're a politician.
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that's some rich whataboutism
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Yes. Repetitive, I know, but the standard reminder applies: we are talking about a man who deliberately attempted to down a commercial jetliner, and almost succeeded. There's no rationalizing to do here.
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."
He was a sympathetic villain. Hollywood writers would struggle to develop one as good. Like all sympathetic villains you are supposed to read the first half of his story (what happened to him) and come away feeling bad for him and understanding his desire for revenge. You are then supposed to look at what he did to achieve that vengeance and hate him. It’s a step over the line from an anti-hero. Had he targeted CIA offices and politicians that supported them we would consider him an anti hero more like the punisher, Gerald Butler in Law Abiding Citizen, or John Wick. Instead he chose to kill random people that had nothing to do with his tragic origin story so he is just a sympathetic villain that needed to be put down. Of course there is a segment of society that would put down anti heroes as well as sympathetic villains so your position on the topic it really more a judgement statement about your moral stance than an objective statement.
I’d forgotten about the airliner. I wonder how Ted’s Cultural Revolution would have worked out.
Imagine how HN would feel if he’d gone after Ritchie, Kernigan or Linus.
What? Didn’t he get an associate professorship, and at a pretty young age? That’s not productive? Not to mention the doctoral dissertation itself.
Everything that I've read about him indicates he was a rising star that willingly chose to withdraw from society, possibly due to mental illness. Far from the "vengeful deadbeat" that GP is claiming he was.
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Agreed, Kaczynski was a loser. Why anyone sees fit to try and promulgate his ideas is far beyond my reasoning. Not as violent as war? Seriously? That's the best you can do?
I know this is off-topic, but wow, he died not too long ago (June 10)
There are many ivy league legacy graduates doing absolutely nothing with their pampered lives.
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Ukraine getting support in defending their territorial integrity from Russian separatists seems really out of place in your list.
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One important difference between Kaczynski and political leaders is that Kaczynski acted on his own autonomy. Political and military leaders require others to carry out their violence which defuses the moral stain by making so many others complicit (including the voters in democracies). Even an autocratic leader like Putin relies on his citizenry to carry out his will in such a way that it is difficult to even make sense of how the will of Putin differs from the will of the Russian nation.
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The movie fight club is a direct editorialized adaption of the Manifesto
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The quest for novelty finds itself in the "but what if the bad guy were right" thing very often. I can tell you that I enjoy stories where I'm the bad guy - either accidentally or through some discovery of harm (video games do this in a fun way). But in the end, it's just fantasy. This guy couldn't separate real life from a poor model of the world. In the end, intelligence is a composite measure and he lacked it in sufficient form. Pity.