...lay around that shack, 'til the anarchy comes back.

February 26, 2009 3:32 PM

The Unabomber was right.Kevin Kelly explains.
posted by telstar (76 comments total)

Previously on Metafilter.
posted by Kevin Street at 3:41 PM on February 26

How does this not describe all systems?
posted by cmoj at 3:46 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

Say what you will about the guy, he sure knew how to store old plastic jugs.
posted by turgid dahlia at 3:46 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

Thank you for posting this.

Commentators in this BBC Horizon documentary make a similar point to Kaczynski (albeit less violently): as technology advances, decisions will become so complex that inevitably only machines will be able to make them, which will render human choice, human politics and human self-interest moot.

I find the idea pretty hard to argue with.
posted by dydecker at 3:47 PM on February 26 [2 favorites has favorites]

Isn't he really saying The Unabomber Was Right, Then Wrong?
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 3:48 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

Sounds like the Unabomber stumbled on a little blackforest hut for one.
posted by doobiedoo at 3:51 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

The Unibomber was right…

…Montana's lovely!
posted by klangklangston at 3:57 PM on February 26 [11 favorites has favorites]

What will Tide not do for product placement?
posted by troybob at 3:58 PM on February 26 [5 favorites has favorites]

Not a horrible read, but what a shitty, sensationalist title.

Reminds me of New Scientist's recent Darwin Was Wrong cover.
posted by defenestration at 4:03 PM on February 26

tl;db
posted by ooga_booga at 4:08 PM on February 26 [4 favorites has favorites]

If we're discussing Ted Kaczynski, let's not forget the strongest anti-technology message comes from the neo-conservatives. It's just plain wrong to tell other people not to invent stuff, period.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:20 PM on February 26

"...dynamic holistic system." Stopped right there.
posted by MarshallPoe at 4:21 PM on February 26 [2 favorites has favorites]

It is indeed a great article, and I agree the title is an eye-grabber; doesn't really fit the overall spirit of the article, which is more of an examination of Kaczynski's beliefs and those of similar philosophy. For example:

I’ve been reading the literature of the anti-civilization collapsatarians to find out what they have in mind after the collapse. Anti-civilization dreamers spend a lot of time devising ways to bring down civilization (befriend hackers, unbolt power towers, blow up dams), but not so much on what replaces it.

As the article says, many green anarchists talk about the way things used to be before civilization as if we were all lying under fruit trees, sleeping or screwing when we weren't eating and dancing with animals. But beyond basic survival mode, they don't offer much in terms of what we would replace civilization with.

But the most interesting parts of the article concern where Kaczynski was right, e.g., that technology serves its own needs. Definitely worth a read.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:21 PM on February 26 [7 favorites has favorites]

the final problem with destroying civilization as we know it is that the alternative, such as it has been imagined by the self-described “haters of civilization”, would not support but a fraction of the people alive today.

If Mr. Kelly knows a method for sustaining 6.7 billion human lives on this planet, there's a lot of money in it for him if he shares it with us.

If no such method exists, he may have to reconcile himself to the fact that technology-assisted overbreeding has its consequences.
posted by Joe Beese at 4:30 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

so was I, I was right, motherfuckers.
posted by dawson at 4:34 PM on February 26

From the article:

As best I understand, the Unabomber’s argument goes like this:

* Personal freedoms are constrained by society, as they must be.
* The stronger that technology makes society, the less freedoms.
* Technology destroys nature, which strengthens technology further.
* This ratchet of technological self-amplification is stronger than politics.
* Any attempt to use technology or politics to tame the system only strengthens it.
* Therefore technological civilization must be destroyed, rather than reformed.
* Since it cannot be destroyed by tech or politics, humans must push industrial society towards its inevitable end of self-collapse.
* Then pounce on it when it is down and kill it before it rises again.


This is classic paranoia and romanticized drivel, even in digest form. Technology can't slow down because we need it to stave off the overpopulation bomb created by personal freedoms. But that's not where he goes wrong at all. Personal freedom and leisure as we know it didn't even exist until technology gave them over in small doses. People have always been highly constrained by religion, morals, economics, gender bias, racism, politics, nature, disease, drugs, society, culture, families, pets, farm animals, rotten fruit, broken bones, and everything else under the sun. He doesn't mention this at all, because he is delusional and filling in the blanks to a rant. To blame technology because they stuck a dam on your favorite fishing spot is one thing, but to blame technology because you don't have enough personal freedoms is just being a spoiled rotten brat.
posted by Brian B. at 4:35 PM on February 26 [23 favorites has favorites]

i like how susan blackmore said it better, you know, without the unabomber stuff. but still a good post :)!
posted by es_de_bah at 4:36 PM on February 26

Personal freedom and leisure as we know it didn't even exist until technology gave them over in small doses. People have always been highly constrained by religion, morals, economics, gender bias, racism, politics, nature, disease, drugs, society, culture, families, pets, farm animals, rotten fruit, broken bones, and everything else under the sun.

Oh good, this thread needed some inaccurate and gross generalizations.

You're correct to say that technology enables overpopulation. I'm not so sure that's a good thing. The problem is that, naturally, as long as technology supports it population growth is unavoidable, and no amount of philosophical pondering can prevent it. I do not expect that any environmental threat will be able to decimate our population and take us all the way back to happy hunter-gatherer society. No, the current depression is not going to do that either. Humanity learns from its mistakes and, without fail, grows.
posted by shii at 4:52 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

The stronger that technology makes society, the less freedoms.

Funny, I seem to recall the invention of twin technological marvels called "magazines" and then something called "the Internet" that seemed to make a certain Mr. Kelly free to chase all sorts of pursuits.

In fact, if the Unabomber had only waited a few more years, he would've had his own free blog devoted to the unfettered spread of his insane rants.

Moreover, a few people he killed wouldn't be dead. Presumably, they could be enjoying their own free blogs devoted to kittens and photos of their grandchildren.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:55 PM on February 26 [9 favorites has favorites]

You're correct to say that technology enables overpopulation.

If by technology, you mean farming, then sure.

The problem is that, naturally, as long as technology supports it population growth is unavoidable

"Naturally." Hmm.

Strange, I seem to recall other technological marvels called "birth control pills" that control population growth so fucking well that some countries have to go out of their way to encourage people to have babies.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:59 PM on February 26 [7 favorites has favorites]

The problem is that, naturally, as long as technology supports it population growth is unavoidable

Actually, as I understand it rich, liberal states tend to go into population decline (Japan, Europe), regardless of the fact that there is better medical and social care technologies and facilities there than in poorer countries. Even the United States, which is just at the replacement mark in terms of birthrate, isn't growing all that much. So, theoretically, as more nations modernize and liberalize, the number of low-growth countries acting as population sinks for high-growth countries will expand, at the same time that the number of high-growth countries shrinks.
Of course, technological progress doesn't necessarily involve liberalization, although even China has, notoriously, been on the population control bandwagon for a while. I suppose you could posit some sort of crazy totalitarian state trying to outbreed the rest of the world or something, but that doesn't seem likely.
The question to me seems more to concern whether or not this process will go fast enough to keep us from running pell-mell into the natural sustainability limits of our planet. Or will we hit the latter before we hit peak world population?
Or before the evil robot overlords devour civilization?
posted by AdamCSnider at 5:07 PM on February 26

Of course, Cool Papa Bell said it first and much cooler. I need to preview more.
posted by AdamCSnider at 5:08 PM on February 26

Making babies means you need to take care of babies. And that's gross. If not for some primordial desire to reproduce, we'd be doomed once we realized the farms could be run by a few people with many machines. Blaming technology is great and all, but I like to blame consumerism. Suburban sprawl that eats open countryside and requires more paved roads? Desire for larger houses and more "personal" space.

Thanks to technology, we could live a life of ease, with ample time to enjoy the world at large. But most people prefer to obtain more things, requiring a larger house. You could still get paid by The Man and live in the woods, just find a line of work where you can telecommute from anywhere, or make enough money in a few hours to support your lifestyle of wandering the rest of the week.

Technology gives us options, new sorts of freedoms. No, we cannot manually pilot jets any more, but we can now transport ourselves across the world in a few hours, thanks to these dominant machines. We are tied to the rules of the roads, until we get to our destinations and wander as we wish. But these jets and roads mean it's harder to find yourself somewhere where there is no engine to be heard, or no trace of another person to be seen. This is a selfish freedom, the desire to be the only one around.
posted by filthy light thief at 5:12 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

happy hunter-gatherer society.

"Happy" as Ted?
posted by Brian B. at 5:14 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

My immediate response, throughout the first half of the essay before Kelly attacks the premises of the Unabomer's argument, was that Bill Joy did this better nine years ago. But Kelly's not really dealing with the longer-term argument of the Unabomer, but rather the immediate effects of technology.

And in the short term, it's such a clear choice as not to be barely one. I could either (a) be in my bed right now, shivering against the cold, or (b) I can be sitting on my couch in my warm apartment writing comments on Metafilter and watching a basketball game. Which would you choose?

(But I think everyone's got a little anarcho-primativism in them. Who hasn't fantasized about surviving a zombie apocalypse?)
posted by thecaddy at 5:15 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

When looking at population growth, take a look at it per country. There is no charting of how "developed" those countries are, but you can do more research with this information and draw all sorts of opinions.
posted by filthy light thief at 5:18 PM on February 26

I have to admit, I mostly agree with the Unabomber, and I have for a while. You can call me a hypocrite for being a software developer. But I don't think anyone who has actually read the manifesto would counter his argument with facile claims about how internet technology gives us more options. He would say, rightly so, that you are free to exercise these options as long as they have no significant chance of disturbing modern society. In other words, you can have all the unimportant freedoms you want. Use your freedom of speech to rant and rail on the internet, AT the internet, as if that will change the big picture. This is basically the freedom to do nothing, since the internet will never kill itself. As for loss of freedom due to the need to survive in a pre-technological society, he didn't see this as a bad thing, although his reasoning is a bit more specious here in my opinion. But overall, there is no question that the man had some very good points.
posted by Edgewise at 5:25 PM on February 26 [3 favorites has favorites]

I'm sick of hearing about Kevin Kelly.
posted by jayder at 5:27 PM on February 26

But overall, there is no question that the man had some very good points.

Give him your postal address. I'm sure he has more insights he would love to share with you.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 5:59 PM on February 26 [3 favorites has favorites]

I lol'd.
posted by mullingitover at 6:05 PM on February 26

Humanity learns from its mistakes and, without fail, grows.

Until it doesn't.
posted by marble at 6:09 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

hey, thanks, great post. just wish mister kelly hadn't felt a need to apologize for ted's actions and life.

i'm not sure how you can argue against ted's suppositions that tech will take control. we are creating pretty vast systems that will require interpreters and we are not capable on a biological scale. we just can't process fast enough. maybe one day we'll augment ourselves into that scope. maybe not.

ted's argument cum definition for tech is pretty deleuzian in that he sees it as an autonomous system operating nearly outside of the human purview much the same way deleuze and guattari define the war machine in 'on mille plateau'. their conception is a group-mind contraption (sorta) that constitutes using human beings as its assemblage. ted sees us as becoming slaves to our own machinations. other narratives of the future see us as working in conjunction with our future extensors and prowess-enhancements. still others we might postulate as our becoming tyrants and despots over the technological futures we place ourselves in.

lest we forgot, our technology is extending into bio-tech. why not design 'people' whose sole purpose is to function as bio-computers? and they can just float around in their miasma pods thinking and postulating and processing information on scales we cannot currently fathom. it could be a symbiotic relation between us norms and the oracle of our techno-delphi. or they could be like brainless cows who keep our society running on fear of early retirement.

i think that could be pretty grotesque on a visceral level, but might be pretty cool on a functional one. maybe cooler than building giant world machines to help us govern, manage and navigate whatever we view as our frontiers in 100, 200 or a thousand years. it's a lot easier to feed met-ultra-supra genius bio-machines and dispose of their waste than managing big, ol' machines.

i don't think ted would be so opposed to living in a world that has more technology in its systemic sense if there was more history that showed us as a smart and geared for social justice type of being. as kelly points out, even as the indigenous types were fleeing western expansion they didn't hesitate to pick up guns and lug 'em off. but who can blame them; eventually it'll take the machine to kill the machine. that might be why your so-called anarcho-primitivist is eating donuts, drinking coffee and learning typesetting.
posted by artof.mulata at 6:15 PM on February 26 [2 favorites has favorites]

as technology advances, decisions will become so complex that inevitably only machines will be able to make them, which will render human choice, human politics and human self-interest moot

Beats the hell out of being blown to bits by crazy neckbeard, don't it?

Or is that just what the ROU wants you to think?
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:21 PM on February 26 [4 favorites has favorites]

The 'omg technology is taking over SCARY!' argument is...disappointing. The same conversation could be taking place between two stem cells in a developing fetus. Yes, the world will change. Guess what? Nothing we can do will ever stop it, and the idea that we can/should somehow 'defeat' technology is absurd.

Step back, take a deep breath, and realize that everything we do, at every scale, is natural.
posted by mullingitover at 6:28 PM on February 26 [3 favorites has favorites]

If by technology, you mean farming, then sure.

and granaries, aqueducts, sewer systems, supermarkets, railways, the Antibiotics Wonder, etc . . .
posted by troy at 6:37 PM on February 26 [2 favorites has favorites]

You're correct to say that technology enables overpopulation.

No, no, no. My not killing you is what enables overpopulation.

Really, this is the most do you have a point / clue thing I've seen in a long time. I mean, well here:

Prior to civilization there generally existed ample leisure time, considerable gender autonomy and equality, a non-destructive approach to the natural world, the absence of organized violence, no mediating or formal institutions...

I'm not sure I'd call running a whole herd a mammoths (or was is mastodons) off a cliff a non-destructive approach to the natural world. The other stuff was generally not an issue because they were too busy trying to not die from exposure or starvation or be eaten.

...and strong health and robusticity.

Right up to the moment you weren't strong and robust. Then you died.

The Unibomber, the green anarchists and whoever else are all buying into the same like of BS that makes people elevate their great grandparent's poverty food as a symbol of lost innocence. I mean look at Kaczynski's cabin. Clinging to all the cast off technology you can shove into an overglorified packing crate is not getting back to nature.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 6:39 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

He would say, rightly so, that you are free to exercise these options as long as they have no significant chance of disturbing modern society.

But when has this not been true?

There seems to be a fundamental disjunction here among freedoms: those that threaten the community and those that don't, and those that don't are by definition trivial. I don't understand how those that do are important freedoms to have, though. It sounds like Ted is lamenting the lack of freedom to decide the appropriate level of freedom for everyone else.

At bottom, it smells like a Scotsman.
posted by fatbird at 6:41 PM on February 26 [3 favorites has favorites]

In his own words the Unabomber says: "The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”

But, Ted... You killed people.
posted by longsleeves at 7:03 PM on February 26 [2 favorites has favorites]

And, ironically, this message is delivered to us all by...the internet.
posted by Xoebe at 7:13 PM on February 26

Unabombers are like any other human - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.
posted by quadog at 7:18 PM on February 26

Huh? The problem with this nonsense is that it's nuts from start to finish. Let us suppose, someone, (oh, let's just say ME) is unwilling to give up technology. What are you going to do about it. Sissy slap me? Throw poop at me? I think guns and armored vehicles would be more than a match for that. We've been in an arms race since the first hominids figured out how to sharpen sticks.

Of course, no one can just build a tank. It takes lots of people working together. And they're not off hunting and gathering, so there needs to be a lot of excess food. And all those materials. And the technology to design the tank. And to build the tools to build it. And ship the parts around. Crap. We need a modern technological society just to have the tools we'll need to hunt down and destroy the people who won't give up their technology.

This is seriously like listening to a bunch of zebras arguing that we should all just get rid of teeth. Then things would be great. Except, you kind of need them. For chewing. Plus: good luck getting the lions to agree to that one. If we could ask ancient people how they felt they were proceeding along their paths to self-actualization, I think their heads would explode. They weren't all hunter gatherers and substence farmers just because after talking the their guidence councilors they decided that's what would make them happiest. Rather, they modified their behavior to fit the needs of the system. Except with more dying from the plague.

I work really hard, but I don't know if it's really much more than people did 10000 years ago. In some ways, my life kind of sucks, but I have a lot of control over it, and I've mostly worked on stuff that I thought was really interesting. There's been a few times that I thought I maybe was going to die, but I was saved by modern medicine. Maybe that was a mistake. No one I know has starved to death.
posted by Humanzee at 7:19 PM on February 26

When I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it" His voice trails off; he pauses, then continues, "You just can't imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge. That wasn't the first time I ever did any monkey wrenching, but at that point, that sort of thing became a priority for me.

So, the moral of the story is: If his stupid-ass plateau wasn't bulldozed he wouldn't have gone all manifesto-y and kill happy?
posted by amuseDetachment at 7:53 PM on February 26

The elephant in the room: would anyone have read this article if the author hadn't put the Unabomber in the headline? This bugs me, but I'm not exactly sure why. However, I decided not to read the article, because of that. Is that wrong?
posted by storybored at 7:58 PM on February 26

When I was in art school, I had to listen to a fellow student rant about the tyranny of his birth, about how he didn't choose to be born, how he didn't choose his parents. He thought this was a fairly profound point, and would get really worked up about it, and do really crappy performance art based on it.

That's ultimately the feeling I get reading Kelly on Kaczynski. The ultimate point, to the extent that the manifesto isn't simply an articulation of rage at his plateau being developed, seems to be the same sort of railing against the fundamental conditions under which we all exist: we are not perfectly free; there is a world around us that moves in certain ways and not others, and we can't individually control it or change it or prevent it. We can't decide the basic conditions under which we exist. It's doubtful we even collectively have much control or influence over the mass of ourselves.

So to get to the point of killing because of this is insane in the same way that believing one doesn't need food or water to survive is insane. You can believe it, and you can live it, but in the end reality will prevail, and you'll be dead.
posted by fatbird at 8:05 PM on February 26 [4 favorites has favorites]

Kelly lost me at his sweeping generalizations about "billions of people migrat[ing] from mountain shacks... all around the world."
posted by salvia at 8:08 PM on February 26

ted sees us as becoming slaves to our own machinations.

The problem is that everyone who actually thinks for a hobby already says that, but they don't take it literally. Maybe that's because non-abstract slavery by other humans was entrenched as an institution well before we had the technology to write anything else down. Ted's just making shit up if he thinks he can tell us there was no slavery in the prehistoric times, by technology or any other means. More to the point, he is dreaming if he thinks that he didn't completely discredit his own ideas by first dropping out of society and by next becoming a terrorist.

Finally, knowledge and technology are not minor things for a free-born boomer zealot to threaten with destruction in the name of anti-slavery:

...Lincoln’s Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in September of 1859...the Lectures on Discoveries and Inventions show Lincoln’s reflections on the nature of labor, technology and progress and their relation to the slavery question. In these pieces Lincoln argues for a “right to rise” and that the use of technology and education can liberate man from the soil and give him a more sure ownership over himself by allowing him to better own his own labor.
posted by Brian B. at 8:13 PM on February 26

"the Antibiotics Wonder"

Yeah, it was pretty good, but still can't beat Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
posted by krinklyfig at 8:19 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

This bugs me, but I'm not exactly sure why. However, I decided not to read the article, because of that. Is that wrong?

The headline was unnecessarily sensationalist, sure, but the Unabomber was not the first person to ever write about the possible dangerous effects of technology on society and humanity as a whole. Lots of people write about it, and lots of people read it. They just, you know, manage not to send bombs in the mail that kill people.
posted by Sangermaine at 8:20 PM on February 26

Ted explicitly claims in his manifesto that he murdered so people would give his words the kind of attention we are. It's point 96.
posted by Missiles K. Monster at 8:28 PM on February 26

Ted explicitly claims in his manifesto that he murdered so people would give his words the kind of attention we are.

I think that Ted was hoping for more of a debate on the content of his essay, rather than everyone who knows of him now wondering about the connection between rejection of technology and becoming a terrorist.
posted by fatbird at 8:32 PM on February 26

I think Plant Earth will reboot before we hit the point of technological complexity theorized in Kelly's piece.
posted by cinemafiend at 8:35 PM on February 26

The ultimate outcome of tech's ultimate domination over human nature is realized in John Lilly's (admittedly drug-addled....Ketamine, specifically) autobiography The Scientist. I think his premise of carbon-based life forms giving way to silcon-based life forms makes perfect sense, whether you feel horror or delight in the prospect. This is just an extension of Ted K's manifestos, I think.
posted by kozad at 8:57 PM on February 26

c.f. Dawkins, Richard; The Extended Phenotype
posted by wobh at 9:24 PM on February 26

The ultimate outcome of tech's ultimate domination over human nature is realized in John Lilly's (admittedly drug-addled....Ketamine, specifically) autobiography The Scientist. I think his premise of carbon-based life forms giving way to silcon-based life forms makes perfect sense, whether you feel horror or delight in the prospect. This is just an extension of Ted K's manifestos, I think.

Boron-based, I tell ya! Look at the periodic table.

Always with the Silicon-based. Sheesh.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 9:37 PM on February 26

It is easy to sympathize with Kaczynski’s plight.

One quiet cool Sacramento morning, when I was a kid, a colleague and friend of my father, who's main crime in life was being a lobbyist who represented (among others) clients from the California forestry industry, arrived at his office to find a package on his desk.

He opened it, it dispatched the upper half of his body across the office, and his young wife and kids no longer had a husband and father.

Its easy for me to sympathize with their plight. I have no interest in any plight of Kaczynski much less any of his rantings - regardless of what he may or may not have been right about, he's wrong on levels that most humans will never achieve.
posted by allkindsoftime at 9:39 PM on February 26 [5 favorites has favorites]

a colleague and friend of my father, who's main crime in life was being a lobbyist who represented [...] clients from the [...] forestry industry

Some people would say that's a pretty big crime, sizzlechest.
posted by uncanny hengeman at 9:48 PM on February 26

"It is easy to sympathize with Kaczynski’s plight. You politely try to escape the squeeze of technological civilization . . . and then the beast of civilization/development/industrial technology stalks you and destroys your paradise."

With a single road to nowhere! The bastards! They all must die!

(Sorry. Can't sympathize. If you want to be a loner, you should at least be open to the possibility that others might want to get away from it all too... and might want a way to get there.)
posted by markkraft at 10:05 PM on February 26

There's no question that Ted Kaczynski is both a criminal and a madman. He's certainly wrong in any moral sense, and I don't think anyone here is advocating sympathy for him. But the point of Kelly's article (and I guess this FPP), is to look at the ideas in his manifesto, both as a map of Kaczynski's thinking, and as concepts that can be examined in their own right - concepts that are often advocated by more mainstream, non-homicidal thinkers.
posted by Kevin Street at 10:30 PM on February 26 [1 favorite has favorites]

People sans technology aren't free either; they have to spend their whole lives working in order to eat. In fact, slavery was very common in pre-technological societies. So you must either work constantly or be a slave (unless you're one of the few elites).

Obviously there are tradeoffs, as in a modern society those in power are so far removed from the individual's who's lives they control, so rather then work against nature to survive, you have to navigate societies rules you replace a 'direct' cause/effect connection with one mediated imperfectly by other people.

Technology can't slow down because we need it to stave off the overpopulation bomb created by personal freedoms.

Huh? Without technology, humans wouldn't have enough to eat, most of them would die, and there would no longer be an overpopulation problem. That happens in animal populations all the time. It isn't 'personal freedoms' that create the 'population bomb', but rather the technology itself we need to feed those people. Traditional, poor, and third world societies are much more fertile then those in the first world. One of the personal freedom people are most interested in is birth control.
posted by delmoi at 10:48 PM on February 26

But when has this not been true?

There seems to be a fundamental disjunction here among freedoms: those that threaten the community and those that don't, and those that don't are by definition trivial.

I think that Kaczynski's point was that, over time, as modern society becomes increasingly interdependent and complex, there will be more things considered "threats to the community," more ability to control said threats. In the long run, the citizens would practically be begging the government to take our freedoms.

Let's start with the practically Godwinesque example of 9/11. Observe how the hijackers were able to turn the tools of modern society back on itself. Also note how many people were willing to turn their freedom over to a centralized authority to stop this from happening again. Think about all those jetliners flying across the sky, missiles waiting to be aimed by human guidance systems. This is precisely the dynamic Kaczynski would be talking about.

Now, if you, like myself, disliked how eager Bush and his supporters were to encroach upon various freedoms, you may be thinking that we're back on track, and all's well that ends well. To that, I ask you how you would feel if garage biochemists were able to release their own custom killer viruses at whim? At that point, I think we'd all be willing to give up a few freedoms, to put it mildly.

People sans technology aren't free either; they have to spend their whole lives working in order to eat.

There are many flavors of freedom, as well as senses in which the word is used...ultimately, it comes down to the question of which ones you value. Some people see freedom less as a matter of the number of options available to them, and more as a question of ownership of one's own life and dignity. Obviously, the Unabomber is almost exclusively concerned with the latter category.

i don't think ted would be so opposed to living in a world that has more technology in its systemic sense if there was more history that showed us as a smart and geared for social justice type of being.

Just guessing...I'd guess otherwise. He seems pretty anthrocentric to me, and that sentiment sounds too "leftist" for him, if you know what I mean. I think the Unabomber isn't saying that we're too "weak" for technology, but that the nature of it's corrupting influence of freedom is extremely powerful and intrinsic.

My immediate response, throughout the first half of the essay before Kelly attacks the premises of the Unabomer's argument, was that Bill Joy did this better nine years ago. But Kelly's not really dealing with the longer-term argument of the Unabomer, but rather the immediate effects of technology.

Thanks for the link, terrific article! Also, I'm in total agreement with the bolded portion.
posted by Edgewise at 11:42 PM on February 26 [2 favorites has favorites]

Just forgot to finish this thought:

In the long run, the citizens would practically be begging the government to take our freedoms.

To which I add:

From there, Kaczynski would say the next step would be to hand power over to "the machine." I get the sense, from his writing, that when he's talking about "the machine," he's not strictly referring to something as narrow as artificial intelligence, but rather, modern society as a whole. Like a machine, Kaczynski views modern society as a nonhuman and dehumanizing construct of human origin.
posted by Edgewise at 11:52 PM on February 26

For some of us, Kaczynski's argument about freedom is moot. Even if you posit a magic wand that will allow his green-anarchist friends to collapse civilization around us while feeding the masses (side-stepping the 95% die-off that'd be necessitated by a return to a hunter-gatherer subsistence lifestyle), many of us rely on the technosphere for our very survival. Ask any diabetic how they fancy returning to primitivism. Ask any sane parent how they feel about life without the vaccination programs that keep childhood diseases under control -- the diseases that used to kill 50% of us before the age of 6.

The primitivists who want to collapse civilization are asking for a genocidal event to be executed on a global scale, with a death rate that outstrips the activities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s by the same margin as Pol Pot's genocide outstripped the Nazi Holocaust. It's an almost inconceivable evil.
posted by cstross at 12:14 AM on February 27 [5 favorites has favorites]

Kaczynski's essay also influenced erstwhile roboticist-philosopher Dylan Evans.

One of the more interesting/bizarre parts of Kacynski's essay is when he talks about the 'left-wing' psyche constantly seeking to constrain us in the name of reducing mutual harm, where what is considered harmful gets more strict all the time. It reminds of the smoking bans in particular. I also don't see in the discussion above, any mention of his (empirically true) point that technologies (like cars, mobile phones, email, and probably social networking sites in the future) stop being voluntary and start becoming obligatory. This seems to be driven by our economic system which demands constant growth or bust. As a result the collectivist drive triumphs over the reactionary 'right-wing' drive towards greater freedom. When new vistas open up, our drive for freedom and exploration can flourish again (the development of cyber space, or if space colonisation ever occured), but the collectivist demand for social standards will not lag far behind. It is the symptom of our success.

We are inexorably (if in zig-zags) moving towards greater socialisation, not unreasonably viewed as greater constraint. I have come to accept this development as a natural evolutionary process towards the ultimate replacement of human individuals by group minds augmented by machines/or machine consciousness (i.e. the sort of claim attributed to John Lilly above). But I'm pretty sure that most people would not welcome this development, and would fight to prevent it if they really believed that it was coming.
posted by leibniz at 12:30 AM on February 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

Technology pre-dates Homo sapiens. Heck, it predates the genus Homo. You want to get rid of technology? Well, then you better get rid of humans. Hominins have been modifying and being modified by technology and the environment since before anatomically modern humans existed. Our lack of hairy pelts is an adaptation to the use of clothing. Our brains are set up to make, use and modify tools quickly and efficiently. We've been evolving as tool users since before a 'we' existed.

There is no pre-tech or pre-civ 'golden' age to go back to. We've evolved as tool-users and the forces of natural selection are what started that in motion. So sure, I'll grant that the development of more extensive, extractive and complex industries is a process independent of human free will, as it is an integral part of our makeup. However, there is no extracting that quality from ourselves, not without changing what we are at such a fundamental level that humanity would essentially cease to exist.
posted by ursus_comiter at 12:39 AM on February 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

Maybe Ted wasn't as complex as he's made out to be. I bet he was just pissed off because he was underwater on his shack due to falling shack prices.
posted by jamstigator at 1:23 AM on February 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

Some tangentially related pedantry:

Where do collapsatarians --- or even collapsitarians --- get their extra t?
posted by ghost of a past number at 6:22 AM on February 27

The primitivists who want to collapse civilization are asking for a genocidal event to be executed on a global scale, with a death rate that outstrips the activities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s by the same margin as Pol Pot's genocide outstripped the Nazi Holocaust.

Not necessarily. One could imagine a weaponized sterility virus released worldwide that would ultimately have the same effect on population without killing anyone.

In that regard, we all may have dodged a bullet: Who knows what might have been if Ted were as gifted at biological science as he was at math?
posted by Missiles K. Monster at 6:25 AM on February 27

Huh? Without technology, humans wouldn't have enough to eat, most of them would die, and there would no longer be an overpopulation problem. That happens in animal populations all the time. It isn't 'personal freedoms' that create the 'population bomb', but rather the technology itself we need to feed those people. Traditional, poor, and third world societies are much more fertile then those in the first world. One of the personal freedom people are most interested in is birth control.

Technology isn't telling us to have kids or not, as you just roundly asserted. It's the freedom technology affords, especially when it meets the developing world which didn't invent it, nor is accustomed to making their own choices. This developing world is the same world which is culturally accustomed to breeding within a manual labor environment with a high mortality rate, hence overpopulation when cures for such mortality is brought to them. So Ted would be arguing in favor of going back in time one era at a time, if we are to avoid a mass die off, and this reversal includes increasing manual labor to replace the tractors. And finally reverse to what? Near non-existence in the animal kingdom? This is the thinking of a self-loathing crackpot who thinks they figured out that technology is the driving force when it clearly is not among the class of people who democratize it or invent it in the democratic environment, which is, historically , where it came from.
posted by Brian B. at 7:09 AM on February 27

In that regard, we all may have dodged a bullet: Who knows what might have been if Ted were as gifted at biological science as he was at math?

Read Frank Herbert's The White Plague for that scenario.

Let's start with the practically Godwinesque example of 9/11. Observe how the hijackers were able to turn the tools of modern society back on itself. Also note how many people were willing to turn their freedom over to a centralized authority to stop this from happening again.

It's a fair point in favor of the primitivist view, and I'm not sure how one could count freedoms and see if our net freedom is still better in our day and age.

A Rawlesian thought experiment might illuminate it a bit: imagine a rational observer standing outside of human society through time, and choosing the period (in this case) into which he'd be born. In Rawl's original experiment, the observer chooses the society into which he's born, and Rawl's argument is that the rational observer would tend to choose liberal democracy because it offers the best balance of safety at the bottom with potential for growth. In our case, we're choosing the time period along the spectrum from primitive existence to a crowded but technologically sophisticated society in which there are many constraints on human behaviour, but also tremendous safety from survival concerns, and a tremendous range of options that are inconceivable to the primitivist (such as arguing with people around the world over a network).

Ted would obviously choose a primitivist existence. What would the majority of people today choose? How many feeling sympathy for Ted's argument at this point would willingly choose to surrender all of today's "freedom from"s to have more "freedom to"s?
posted by fatbird at 8:58 AM on February 27

Contraception. It works, bitches.
posted by kldickson at 9:18 AM on February 27

So in order to preserve our freedoms,we reject technology, and after the 95% die-off, we return to the free primitive lifestyle. Now here's the question: how do we maintain it? There's always going to be curious or lazy people who develop tools to make things easier for themselves. How will we stop some woman from inventing the loom again, or some man from inventing the bow?

Obviously to prevent a rebirth of technology people would have to be continuously and closely monitored. A combination of inquisition and police force would have to draw the lion's share of power and resources of humanity, in order to prevent anyone from inventing something. Not only devices, but certain modes of thought would be banned, punishable by death, because how else do you stop someone from pointing out that "X" can equal a number? Likewise, the movement and communication among people would have to be restricted, because the combination of ideas leads to technology.

So rather than freedom-loving pastoralism, what you would get would be a highly intrusive, brutal and rigid theocracy. All notions of privacy and freedom would be suspect, new thoughts strongly discouraged, and anything that smacks of innovation or change punishable by death. It would be most likely a caste system, based on a water-empire model.

In other words, if you want a vision of the freedoms of the technology-free future, imagine a bare foot stomping on a human face, forever.
posted by happyroach at 9:38 AM on February 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

Technology pre-dates Homo sapiens. Heck, it predates the genus Homo. You want to get rid of technology?

Kaczynski (I am always cutting and pasting that damn name) doesn't make such a strong claim. I get the feeling you haven't read what you are criticizing. There seems to be a lot of that going around.

Ask any diabetic how they fancy returning to primitivism. Ask any sane parent how they feel about life without the vaccination programs that keep childhood diseases under control -- the diseases that used to kill 50% of us before the age of 6.

These are good points, but Teddy would just say that's proof of how you can't put the genie back in the bottle. As time goes on, technology will allow us to save more and more people, until we're up to our necks in folks who can't survive without literal life support. I may be exaggerating, but you get the point. And in the end, we all still die eventually.

I know that sounds like a harsh view, but Kaczynski's obviously not a "soft-hearted liberal." As for myself, I wonder where you draw the line. He would argue, quite convincingly, that it's a slippery slope to cyborg.
posted by Edgewise at 12:52 PM on February 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

In Rawl's original experiment, the observer chooses the society into which he's born, and Rawl's argument is that the rational observer would tend to choose liberal democracy because it offers the best balance of safety at the bottom with potential for growth.

I'd say the same thing, but suggest that safety is a group of freedoms. There is freedom to...[do things you want] and there is freedom from...[things that destroy you and your freedoms].

Eg. being free from hunger can be seen as an enabling freedom in its own right, and a freedom so fundamental that having the freedom-to do things is meaningless without it.

(Hence many people on both sides of the cold war believing their side's ideology was the One True Way of freedom - having each been taught a different weighting of freedom-to vs freedom-from)
posted by -harlequin- at 1:08 PM on February 27

He would argue, quite convincingly, that it's a slippery slope to cyborg

But the natural "so what? cyborgs would be people too!" response to that undermines his assertion that technology acts for itself instead of us, by rendering them the same thing.

The cyborgs can't act in their own interests at the expense of ours if we are the cyborgs. There isn't a seperate "ours" and "theirs" to conflict. :)
posted by -harlequin- at 1:14 PM on February 27

He would argue, quite convincingly, that it's a slippery slope to cyborg.

He also needs to argue why that's a bad thing. Certainly anyone who would have been dead in 10,000 BC who's alive because of technology today would probably prefer the situation now, and the even more restrictive (in Ted's eyes) situation in the future. Personally, I look at my life today and what it would have been a thousand years ago, and I think that I have vastly more "freedom to" today than I would have, including the freedom to attack the community that supports me constrictively.

In a way, it's like a self-perceived ubermensch complaining that the untermenschen are getting out of control, and something needs to be done.

Really, the part I have trouble grasping is exactly what "freedom" Ted and other primitivists are arguing for when they write long manifestos about how it's being stripped away by the march of progress. Aside from a laundry list of very specific freedoms, like the freedom to shoot up, the only large scale freedom I can see being gone is that I don't have the freedom not to be encroached upon by society. Fair point, and there's something of a loss there. But on balance, I'm pretty sure I'm happier and freer now than I would be if I had my own isolated plateau on which to sit.
posted by fatbird at 1:25 PM on February 27

We have always been cyborgs.
posted by ursus_comiter at 2:23 AM on March 2