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His manifesto is worth reading. Although he was obviously a twisted man many of his predictions for the future were eerily prescient. http://editions-hache.com

• rvz 3y ago
  > many of his predictions for the future were eerily prescient Especially as his predictions were also true in technology in the past decades and is now more relevant with AI.
• Eumenes 3y ago
  It should be required reading in public schools
  • Shinma 3y ago
    [flagged]
• moffkalast 3y ago
  I don't suppose anyone has a short summary?
  • brvsft 3y ago
    reject humanity, return to monke Edit: In all seriousness, it's been a while since I read it. His general ideas are that technology has been a disaster for humankind because, among other reasons, it's freed up time for us to be preoccupied with unimportant bullshit, to the point that it causes mental problems with people. People start to act out in various ways in resistance of our current state because we 'know' somewhere in our bodies that this existence is meaningless. People without the luxury of free time do not have to preoccupy themselves with this struggle for meaning. He also goes on at length about how leftists are self-hating people and worship victimhood, and their mentality is partly a product of this existential dilemma. But these are just a couple of points I took away. It's much more well-written than I could personally attempt to summarize in an internet comment.
  • murderberry 3y ago
    "Technology bad." It's really that. He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed, when men lived meaningful lives in peaceful harmony with nature... juxtaposed with all the purported moral, societal, and environmental decay of today. Many people find it alluring today, but the themes are evergreen. They crop up in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages, and throughout history. Misplaced nostalgia aside, another problem with most such ideologies is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right. Whether that's blowing things up or taking away your rights is just an implementation detail.
    • coldtea 3y ago
      >He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed There's the opposite problem most have: the inability to understand that there are people who have actually experienced the past (within their lives) and might prefer it for reasons other than the cliche "they were young then, that's why they like it" compared to the present. And that, depending on your inclinations and ideas about how to live, it's not true that nothing better "ever existed". >is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right Well, the future comes at people with force too. People thrown out of employment into poverty because of technology and being told "just learn to code" for example. Or things getting integrated with the state and business world, and becoming increasingly necessary to have, even if you don't want them.
      • jonhohle 3y ago
        I’ve mentioned before and there was a thread yesterday about a modern Usenet which I think falls into this line of thinking. In the early 90s there was an egalitarian messaging system that wasn’t actively and continuously abused. I would love to be able to be in a world like that, however, that world can’t exist again (at least not in the way it did). As the saying goes, the only constant is change.
      • 3y ago
  • hackermailman 3y ago
    The real summary isn't just technology bad. He claims mankind as evolved is not compatible with the industrial world we have created therefore humanity will never be able to adapt to it. In order to force adaptation he then lists all the ways those in power will attempt to do so from psych drugs to pleasure bribes to gene editing in order to remove this trait of mankind of needing personal power over one's own destiny so we can better adapt to being serfs in the industrial world (his claims, not mine). He lists numerous scenarios where we will be an unrecognizable species in the future serving the machines too, many of them familiar like how medicine will become too complex to understand so reliance on machines to cure us of problems which in turn becomes irresistible to those in power to make us even more dependent on them for survival. He also is definitely not any kind of primitive man utopia shill, that's why he rants in the beginning against 'green anarchy' type ideology. He is more of an evolutionist saying even if we returned to primitive life before the industrial revolution we would at least still be human and would have to accept all kinds of terrible things that come with primitive life as the alternative is being a spiritless organism serving machines (again his ideology not mine).
  • knbknb 3y ago
    There is a section "The Future" which talks about Artificial Intelligence (AI): The author postulates that if computer scientists develop intelligent machines that can do all things better than humans, all work will be done by machines and no human effort will be necessary. There are two possibilities: either the machines make all their own decisions without human oversight or human control over the machines is retained. 173. If machines _are_ allowed to make all their own decisions, it is impossible to predict the outcome and the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. The author suggests that society may become so dependent on machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of their decisions, eventually leading to a stage where machines are in effective control and turning them off would amount to suicide. 174. If human control over machines is _retained_, the average person may have control over certain private machines, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite. The elite will have greater control over the masses and because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous. If computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence and human work remains necessary, machines will still take care of simpler tasks resulting in an increasing surplus of human workers at lower levels of ability. Employed workers will face ever-increasing demands and will need more training, ability and conformity. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized and out of touch with the real world. The author envisions scenarios where machines take over most important work while humans are kept busy with relatively unimportant work in the service industries, which the author finds contemptible. The author acknowledges that the outlined scenarios do not exhaust all possibilities but indicates that if the industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, individuals will be more dependent on large organizations and their physical and mental qualities will be engineered into them. Technology is creating a new physical and social environment for humans that is radically different from the environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race and humans will either be adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered or through natural selection. 179. The author concludes that it would be better to dump the whole system and take the consequences. (That was all summarized by ChatGPT. I have removed concluding sentences from some paragraphs containing deeply pessimistic motives of insubordination, enslavement, and extermination)
• sph 3y ago
  Yes. Someone linked the manifesto in an HN thread ages ago, and I found more level-headed and thought-provoking than I would have imagined from someone able to commit such evil acts. I do not agree with everything he wrote in the manifesto, and certainly not with his violent methods, but it's stuck with me in this era of naive techno-optimism which I find myself more disillusioned with by the day. If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs. As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism and alienation we see today; he's not arguing as a 21st century conservative, but as a third position that is not represented by any mainstream camp. I had to read the manifesto of a killer to remind myself that there is more social critique to explore than the binary Liberal vs Conservative that's all the rage in our politicised world.
  • anon291 3y ago
    > As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism we see today, and he's arguing not as a conservative, but as a third position that is not represented by any mainstream camp. Realistically his opinions are held by a substantial amount of people that most would label conservative, although it's not mainstream conservatism for sure. And certainly not mainstream republicanism.
    • sph 3y ago
      As a non American, the dichotomy that is all the rage nowadays is two camps whose position is literally just "we hate everything the other side loves". The point of Kaczynski is that both camps are mostly composed of middle-class Western academics living a sheltered life that are deciding who is socially accepted and who need to be cancelled. Our culture wars are not minorities shouting for a better life, our culture war is made of middle-class white people getting offended on behalf of minorities. They are no Martin Luther King, no Malcolm X, they just are posers that are making the racial (and gender and sexual) divide even worse than it is, by polarising or alienating the silent neutral majority. This is a longer argument that's put more eloquently in the manifesto than I could ever write on a comment box.
• sebmellen 3y ago
  For a person who exhibited such deranged behavior, his writing and arguments are remarkably clear and cool-headed.
  • anon291 3y ago
    He was an extremely intelligent subject of mkultra so we should bear that in mind when talking about his violent tendencies.
  • ripourhero 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, have you ever heard of operation condor? project mkultra? As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to win (= survive as a culture against encroachment from different cultures) without violence. Today's mantra of pacifism and non-violence is just propaganda from current governments (all of which were originally installed through bloodshed, and kept in power through never-ending bloodshed) to keep the masses impotent and avoid being toppled like their predecessors
    • Supermancho 3y ago
      Violence one of the most effective means of motivation, known to man; second only to shame. Nonviolent change (toward peace)is somewhere down the imaginary page, but it can be effective. It is both less timely and long lasting.
    • kneebonian 3y ago
      Interesting you mention MKUltra as one of the reasons claimed for Teds "extreme" personality is because he was unwillingly drafted into and forced to participate in MkUltra.
      • jonhohle 3y ago
        I had no idea that he may have been part of MKUltra. Thanks for that rabbit hole! As I’m reading through The Devil’s Chessboard (recommend a few weeks ago in another thread) I’m increasingly despondent about the “people”’s role in the US (i.e. we are now just chattel for the ruling class), and I haven’t even gotten to MKUltra yet!
• Aunche 3y ago
  Even if Ted Kaczynski is in the top .1% of people worth listening to, which I don't think he is, that means that there are millions of people with equally profound ideas. You should prioritze learning from those people first rather than one who resorted to violence as a means to spread his message.
  • least 3y ago
    It hardly matters if millions of people have equally profound ideas if there's no way to reasonably seek those ideas out. I'm quite certain a lot of knowledge is lost to the ether as very few people have the ability to think about things very deeply, and of those that can, even fewer are able to articulate them, and from that small group, an even smaller group of people are able to actually turn those articulations into something accessible to everyone else. Then it's a matter of how anyone else can find those things. A lot of the times it can't be found. Frankly, I don't see any reason to gate keep my own curiosity. Moral filtering just breeds ignorance.
• jmull 3y ago
  He’s really not coherent. His premises aren’t grounded in reality, and his conclusions don’t follow logically from his premises. It’s also lacks humanity or empathy. It’s an interesting read, because you can really see a broken mind at work, but there’s really not anything to learn from the ideas themselves. E.g., his mental model of “leftists” is truly bizarre. It would be funny except I know what it lead to.
  • karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    He can't even define who the leftists are and even admits it. > Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far from clear what we mean by the word “leftist.” There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about this. To- day leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist movements ... > To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judg- ment in deciding who is a leftist. So yeah, just pick whoever you want as leftist. Some characteristics of the leftists: > He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically “en- lightened” educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims. Wow, sounds like those leftists are pretty cool, actually intelligent people! Seriously, I could make fun of this shit all day, but perhaps I'll do something more productive.
    • edgyquant 3y ago
      Sounds like he gives a prettier clear cut definition of the demographic. You even admit to being apart of it at the end of your comment.
  • dilap 3y ago
    Really? I would completely disagree. Reading his manifesto at 14 after seeing endless newspaper descriptions of it as incoherent, rambling, crazy, etc. was an eye-opening moment for me: I found the manifesto to be lucid and well-argued. In a moment of shock I realized you can't trust the newspapers, at all -- a judgement I hold even more strongly today, with a few decades more of experience. I'd encourage anyone who hasn't to read it themselves and form their own opinion!
• wellthisisgreat 3y ago
  Wow Pocket browser extension refuses to save this link. Never seen that happen
• ren_engineer 3y ago
  not sure why people are so surprised he got some things right or was at least able to create compelling arguments for this ideas, the guy was a legit genius. Got into Harvard at 16, youngest math professor ever at Cal Berkley at the time he was hired
  • JKCalhoun 3y ago
    I know I am stereotyping, but you're describing for me exactly why he was probably emotionally immature. Maybe related to something like Piaget's theory of cognitive development, I believe that if you advance too fast intellectually, there are other things, developmentally, that are trodden on, or left completely behind.
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• codetrotter 3y ago
  Ironically his manifesto is apparently what led to FBI arresting him. > The big break in the case came in 1995. The Unabomber sent us a 35,000 word essay claiming to explain his motives and views of the ills of modern society. After much debate about the wisdom of “giving in to terrorists,” FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno approved the task force’s recommendation to publish the essay in hopes that a reader could identify the author. > After the manifesto appeared in The Washington Post, thousands of people suggested possible suspects. One stood out: David Kaczynski described his troubled brother Ted, who had grown up in Chicago, taught at the University of California at Berkeley (where two of the bombs had been placed), then lived for a time in Salt Lake City before settling permanently into the primitive 10’ x 14’ cabin that the brothers had constructed near Lincoln, Montana. > Most importantly, David provided letters and documents written by his brother. Our linguistic analysis determined that the author of those papers and the manifesto were almost certainly the same. When combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski’s life, that analysis provided the basis for a search warrant. https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/unabomber https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/unabomber
• WheelsAtLarge 3y ago
  I'm one that believes that advances in technology aren't necessarily a plus for society. We have a brain that was tuned for survival over millions of years. Our ancestors survived therefore those surviving traits were passed on to us. Technology is changing our environment in an evolutionary blink of the eyes. Our brain cannot adapt fast enough so we will use those survival traits as our technology gets more powerful. Survival in the past has mostly meant force. We literally fight to stay alive and that means we create ever and ever stronger weapons. Technology has already shown that we can and have created weapons that can destroy earth as we know it. New technology will only make that worse since we have never invented any new tech without ultimately using it for war. No, tech is not necessarily a plus for society and our world. My issue with reading Kaczynski, which I have not but have an idea of his manifesto, is that he was trying to bring about change through force and destruction. Through out the history of men, force has always been a temporary fix. It may seem like a relatively easy fix but once force is removed, we all return to whatever the force was trying to change. The only way change can thrive is through consensus. The majority needs to agree that a change should happen. That type of change is very time consuming, messy and long. But it's the only way to bring about long term change. There are better more deserving thought-leaders that people should read. Kaczynski is not one of them. His actions should really erase him from history rather than praise him. User californiadreem posted a few authors on a comment here that can get people started.
• jongjong 3y ago
  It's weird reading the first page and realizing that this was written in 1995. I didn't get a sense that any of these would have been relevant at that time in the country I was living though it seems highly relevant today everywhere. The problem seems to have spread like a contagion.
• dennis_jeeves1 3y ago
  Hey, thanks for the link, read a few paragraphs, it's an excellent read.
• testacct22 3y ago
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• xwdv 3y ago
  I don’t agree with what he did, but as time goes on I understand more why he did it.
• Lammy 3y ago
  I find “The System’s Neatest Trick” to be a much more enjoyable and applicable read: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-system-s-neatest-trick https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-sy...
• deleted 3y ago
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