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Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead, of which Kaczynski's wa

Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead, of which Kaczynski's was largely a popular reduction. The Technological Society is the clearest influence on Kaczynski's manifesto, but Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes is possibly more pertinent in this day and age. Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
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- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  unless you can show with substantive research that there are some ideas that cannot be held by violent terrorists I don't see why that would color these particular ideas.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    People are human and not logical, purely rational (whatever that would mean), data machines. We're emotional. I can certainly understand the perspective when the above commenter has seen the pain and suffering that those ideas, threaded amplified through either mental illness and/or pathological personality, led to. Okay, maybe Kaczynski had some points that resonate and concur with other more respected scholars and critics, but it is quite difficult to dissociate his ideas from his actions, especially when one can easily find others who did not violently kill and maim others with the same ideas. The substantive research is all of human psychology, biology, and sociology.
    - mdp2021 3y ago
      > human Those things endowed with the capability of effortful judgement, abstracting from more "primitive" (biologically ancestral) instances.
  - MollyRealized 3y ago
    I'd argue that these ideas cannot be held by violent terrorists: * Commitment to avoid causing physical or emotional harm to others. * Absolute respect and preservation of all human lives, without exceptions. * Unconditional rejection of violence under any circumstances. * Belief that every human has the right to live, and recognition of the dignity, worth, and autonomy of every individual. * Full acceptance of differing viewpoints, cultures, religions, and lifestyles. * Consistent practice of understanding and sharing the feelings of others, and alleviating their suffering. * Refraining from initiating force against others. * Resolution of differences and conflict through conversation and mutual understanding, rather than force or coercion.
    - gonehome 3y ago
      Most people hold wildly inconsistent views in their head all the time, despite obvious contradictions - it’s the default human behavior. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...
    - tbrownaw 3y ago
      How would someone with those beliefs handle the trolley problem?
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    It's not their ideas, exactly. It's their moral judgment. See, the unabomber manifesto was essentially a moral argument. "These things cause damage" is a moral observation. (Because how are you going to define "damage" without moral judgment?) "Therefore we should destroy technology" is a moral judgment (because you can't get there without the moral judgment of "humans should not be damaged"). So, the point is, I'm not going to trust the moral judgment of a murderer. Every fact he says in the manifesto may be correct. But his moral judgment is self-evidently terrible. And he reaches his conclusions through that moral judgment.
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    The other angle is future deterrence. If a society collectively shuns ideals from violent terrorists, they will have less incentive to be violent.
  - watwut 3y ago
    That still does not imply we should listen to people like Kaczynsky or take his ideas seriously. He sux and should not matter. If someone else with better decisions making recond expresses same ideas in another context, we can listen to him. The only thing that distinguishes Kaczynsky from, well, any random dude, are the bombs. Otherwise he is a no one. And random dude that did not send bombs makes more sense to listen to.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Shinma 3y ago
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- siftrics 3y ago
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  - AmpsterMan 3y ago
    If Ted's ideas lead to the destruction of human lives, I think invoking the victims' experience is a valid point in the discussion.
    - siftrics 3y ago
      Ted's claim is that these people must die because they are propagating suffering via technology. I don't see how "but proponents of technology died" is an argument against his claim that stopping technology will stop suffering caused by technology.
  - arp242 3y ago
    It's not really about intellectual honesty or validity, but about morality. The only reason any of us are discussing Kaczynski now is because he sent those bombs; he would almost certainly be an unknown if he had not. This gives us an moral quandary, because do we really want to make murderers famous, even when they have something interesting to say? Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism? And for what it's worth, I read his book and I thought it raised interesting points, but I am somewhat troubled by this, and I can 100% understand if someone would choose different, even more so if they personally know one of his victims.
    - siftrics 3y ago
      > Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism? Yes, that's what he was trying to do. Ted claims we must stop technology, even with violent means, because technology causes greater suffering than the violent means to stop it. You claim "but that's violent!" That's not an argument. If you did try to make an argument (against Ted's ideas), I would agree with you. I would try to make that argument myself. We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"
- Convolutional 3y ago
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- californiadreem 3y ago
  While this is totally understandable, it's also an example of the Identfiable Victim Effect. Kaczysnki's actions are humanly understandable with the ability to impute human motivations. He intentionally maimed and killed people. Yet, from a utilitarian perspective, I honestly don't know if intent matters when we're talking about third-party maiming and death. Our society disrupts and injures the bodies, minds, and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not billions, on a daily basis. And in that sense, Kaczynski, Ellul, or really any dissident of the status quo could, can, and do point out victims of society that outnumber Kaczynski's by several orders of magnitude. The victims are not directly and immediately visible, don't have power-holding advocates, and have little to no incentive to disrupt their own lives to discover, let alone undo, the causes of their problems. And if they do, they encounter a system most unwilling to listen or change. All of this contributes to these innocents being left unmourned and the causes of their tragedies, like minefields for future generations, left unresolved (Kaczynski mails mines and dies in prison; Kissinger sows fields of mines and lives to be a centenarian and the eldest diplomat). For an example directly related to maiming, consider the allegations of SawStop. A technology was invented to prevent serious maiming when operating table saws in 2002. The inventor attempted to license the technology to manufacturers only to (allegedly, their lawsuit was dismissed due to supposed tardiness in filing) encounter a cartel among tool manufacturers that colluded to prevent adoption of the technology because it would become obligate to all models to prevent legal liability, which would largely eliminate budget saw models. The number of finger or hand amputations in the US annually is in the thousands, for one type of tool. Or consider meat packing (excluding power-butchering injuries that typically include hand and finger amputation): "There are many serious safety and health hazards in the meat packing industry. These hazards include exposure to high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals (including ammonia that is used as a refrigerant). Musculoskeletal disorders comprise a large part of these serious injuries and continue to be common among meat packing workers. In addition, meat packing workers can be exposed to biological hazards associated with handling live animals or exposures to feces and blood which can increase their risk for many diseases." And this is an industry where undocumented workers are prioritized because they lack the language and advocacy to receive adequate compensation and legal protections. Even something as benign-seeming as a Nalgene bottle follows a similar kind of delayed statistical violence. BPA, shown to be independently unsafe, gets replaced with Triton, unshown to be anything. Triton is effectively an analog with likely xenoestrogenic and endocrine disrupting capabilities, yet can slip through a loophole with decades of profitability before the externalities start directly emerging. I lost my grandmother to ovarian cancer, likely caused by long-term use of asbestos-laced baby powder. A certain corporation gets a single $9 billion penalty for poisoning millions over decades; I and countless others lose their family members. This corporation's gross profit last year was something like $64 billion. Now I also understand the argument that if industrial society has caused these things, they have also enabled untold material prosperity globally and billions of additional lives to live. Maiming, industrial accidents, and toxicity are the price to pay for this and they all "happen" to be the aberration rather than the norm, with constant incremental improvements as circumstances allow. And yet, I think I'd rather have less sophisticated stuff and fewer unhappy people alive at any present moment if I could guarantee that those living on this planet now and those born in the future could live healthier, happier, and more meaningful lives as a result. Killing and maiming people in retaliation is a terrible way of getting there. As a final note, I'm currently in the process of my own exodus to leave the city (wish me luck!) to follow this path of voluntary simplicity and pacifism, lest anyone accuse me of trying to improve society somewhat.
- quetzthecoatl 3y ago
  who knows who Kaczynski would have ended up as a person if not for the horrible, abusive mind control experiments that he had to endure through in his early adulthood.
  - jxramos 3y ago
    why did he have to endure them anyways? Was he not a volunteer, what gives?
- cvalka 3y ago
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Convolutional 3y ago
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- canjobear 3y ago
  > The reason Kaczynski stopped He stopped because he was arrested. At that time they found two completed bombs in his cabin, so he was planning to renege on his deal not to plant any more bombs.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Deal?
    - vaccarium 3y ago
      He agreed to stop sending bombs in exchange for publication of his manifesto.
  - siftrics 3y ago
    Them finding two completed bombs is not evidence that he planned to plant them.
    - irq 3y ago
      Who wants to keep live bombs in their house? Obviously he was going to put them elsewhere. Which is what planting is.
      - siftrics 3y ago
        I'm not claiming to know the timeline, but he could have built them before "the deal", then made the deal and decided not to plant them. Innocent until proven guilty. There is more than enough evidence to put away Teddy K for life. Lean on real evidence. Don't stretch the truth and muddy the waters for the innocent. Your line of reasoning could be used to convict the innocent.
ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
Also Lewis Mumford [1], Günther Anders [2], or if you want to go truly underground, Gilbert Simondon [3] [4] or Friedrich Kittler [5]. If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one. Also radically of the future and forgotten is FM-2030 [6] [7]. All in all, blowing up people is easy, blowing up antiquated concepts, grasping for the grounds of a new metaphysics, painstakingly implementing and debugging is the hard part. Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive after following to conclusions systems such as the Grotthuss proton translocation mechanism driving motion in a F_0/F_1-ATP synthase rotation mechanism [8] [9]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Anders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Anders [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon [4] Gilbert Simondon - 'The Technical Object as Such', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXDtG74hCL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXDtG74hCL4 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kittler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kittler [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030 [7] Futurist FM-2030 Appears on CNN's Future Watch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT__dTtX2ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT__dTtX2ik [8] Prof Levin, Prof Frasch (2022) Mitochondria, bioenergetics, information, electric fields, https://youtu.be/MEhrMR-Jaw0?t=3429 https://youtu.be/MEhrMR-Jaw0?t=3429 [9] 2021, Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.650726/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.65072...
- golemotron 3y ago
  > Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive The same could be said about Capitalism.
  - dbspin 3y ago
    This is an ideological position, termed Capitalist Realism [1]. Given the failing of social reproduction, environmental protection, long term planning against existential and systemic risk, the mental health crisis and the collapse of civil and political life, under entrenched and victorious capitalism - an increasingly absurd one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
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tenpies 3y ago
His published works aside, it seems he was corresponding with people and answering letters until fairly recently. Many of these letters (or quite convincing forgeries) are archived in your favourite 4chan archive of choice. Also worth mentioning what was essentially a partial autobiography by Kaczynsky: Truth Versus Lies[1]. I'm not sure it was ever completed and there are a couple versions floating around. He was still working on it well into the mid 2010s. --- [1] One version: https://archive.org/details/TruthVersusLiesPart1 https://archive.org/details/TruthVersusLiesPart1
Kye 3y ago
You know how sometimes you'll see someone [dead] on here making salient points, then wonder why they're dead? Then you check them out, and every so often they go off on incoherent tirades. That's Ted Kaczynski. He may have had two good ideas for every bad one, but he was still a piece of shit who deserved to be isolated from society where he couldn't hurt anyone, and there are better advocates for whatever good came out of his head. Or to paraphrase the dril classic: you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them" edit: to be clear, I think the dude was little more than an ecofascist and not worth taking seriously. But if you're going to, you ought to know he was the worst advocate for any position he held. You can do better than propping up a dead asshole.
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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msla 3y ago
He sounds like an ecofascist to me, someone willing to use violence in pursuit of a "green" ideology.
- deleted 3y ago
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- cogman10 3y ago
  Funnily, Kaczynski was an ecofascist, he was also an anti-leftest. You have to remember that when he performed the bombing in the 70s environmental protections had bipartisan support (Nixon famously created the EPA [1]). It wasn't until much later that being green turned into a radical partisan issue. I mostly blame Rush Limbaugh [2] and the Koch brothers [3] for that shift. Turns out, a lot of big oil propaganda [4] can really sway public opinion. [1] https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa [2] https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-climate-change-misinformer-year https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-cli... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch... [4] https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-against-coal-and-nuclear-1513304200 https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga...
  - gota 3y ago
    Plugging in my (tongue-in-cheek, but maybe not a 100%) conspiracy theory that Big Oil was the financier and culprit behind the flat earth, anti-vax, moon landing conspiracies, and many others - As a way to discret the whole of the scientific and academic establishment in the minds of enough (voting) people, so as to delay the inevitable consensus that fossil fuel consumption is killing everyone slowly
    - gota 3y ago
      *discredit
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    One of his later letters he said was against Eco-fascisim. basically saying that a lot of it is driven by racism or some sort of political/social ideal. That these factors are not distributed equally globally means that it would never work as a long term strategy. If one half of the global turned to ecofascisim and they got a non-technical world they desired, the other half would immediately capitalize on this and take over. In a way I find Ted's idea fascinating in the same way I find a lot of smarter spiritual teacher fascinating. Here is this simple base idea, now here is 500 things you have to watch out for how the most simplistic path will cause more harm than good. To that, I don't think he had a complete picture on how to achieve what he wanted. Like Ram Dass saying, be here now, but take it too far and you will go insane!
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Agree, Kaczynski did make some good points. Maybe if he had learned to channel that energy better.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  That is the saddest thing. He had some great ideas and knew how to communicate them. He just didn't think he would be taken seriously unless he used the bomb cheat code on life to get notoriety. I suspect that if he had gone the path of writer with publishing, not only would his works be more popular, there would have actually been a realistic means of implementing some of his ideas. He had some great ideas and simultaneously pushed back any real change by decades for his own self gain interest.
  - bbor 3y ago
    Which ideas? Everyone keeps saying this but I’d love specifics.
    - Aerbil313 3y ago
      Read his manifesto, they’re detailed. I was shocked for a straight week when I read it, I couldn’t believe I have been lied to my entire life. Or better yet his book Technological Slavery: https://archive.org/details/tk-Technological-Slavery https://archive.org/details/tk-Technological-Slavery
      - bbor 3y ago
        Yeah... I appreciate you taking the time to respond but "read this 35,000 word manifesto by a schizophrenic idealogical serial killer whose conclusions you already know you find vapid and deplorable" is not a great pitch lol. Was just hoping to hear some highlights. I think I'll just have to wander along for the rest of my life without gaining any insight as to why Hacker News is so in love with that work, beyond some variety of SV-guilt!
        3y ago
happytoexplain 3y ago
People don't disagree with him because he was a convicted terrorist, they disagree with him because of the specific things he did to be convicted of terrorism. That's reasonable (correct, even). People might know or not know each opinion he expressed, and might reasonably agree or disagree with each one, but that's not the same thing.
- lm28469 3y ago
  > People might know or not know each opinion he expressed, and might reasonably agree or disagree with each one Isn't that the definition of agreeing (or not) with someone ? > but that's not the same thing. How so ?
  - emodendroket 3y ago
    He forced his way into the conversation through terrorism. It seems reasonable enough to reject his ideas out of hand rather than give them respectful hearing.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      This gets messy quick. If for example you lived under a dictator and that dictator didn't like your conversation then you wouldn't expect to have a venue unless you took extreme measures. Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all dead anyway and if this is the price to pay to stop it, it will have been worth it.
      - onethought 3y ago
        Yes, it should matter, because sane people admit there is a chance they could be wrong. You can walk back ideas, you can’t walk back deaths. Also unless you’re a government you probably shouldn’t be applying utilitarian ideas of ethics to your actions, you do not have a right to decide on behalf of anyone but yourself as an individual, so even by utilitarian standards you are likely being unethical.
bmitc 3y ago
Thank you for the reference to Jacques Ellul, as I hadn't heard of him before. From looking a few reviews, I'm liking what appears to be him having a critique of the worship of technique, which is an interesting thought.
JamesLeonis 3y ago
> Attacks the ideas, not the man. It's unfortunate that people stop at the Manifesto, as Kaczynski has other critiques, but also admits to limitations or failures in his thinking. In one correspondence he admits he has no criteria to decide if a given technology is benign (small scale) or harmful (organization-dependent), a critical distinction! He tries to shore it up with analyzing a primitive Steam Engine, but I would point to Bronze as a contradiction harboring both characteristics. My interpretation is that the distinction is political, not based on any aspect of the technology itself including production. Technology acts as a magnitude, and how we apply it is the essence of our social/political organization. This is, of course, one interpretation among many. Like professor Ellul, there are many other voices. There is Society of the Spectacle (a style ISAIF is imitating), or the works of Jean Baudrillard where he (early years) analyzes commodities under Consumerism or (later years) his work on Spectacle and Image. Even Karl Marx has a detailed understanding and critique of Machine Society in Chapter 15 of Capital [0]. Finally, Kaczynski is harmful to many anarchist spaces. His True Crime reputation attracts tons of media footage and mystique, which furthers misunderstandings. Crimethink has a great essay, "The Unabomber’s Unending 15 Minutes of Fame" [1], which details how this warps perceptions and action while ignoring who the victims are. > As individuals within a movement professing a desire to reconstitute the world on the basis of love, harmony, peace, and sharing, an ethical question arises when a means inconsistent with an end is presented. In this case, the tactic of non-self-defense violence. This is not a question of armed defense such as was the case during the 1930s Spanish revolution, for instance, but rather, the validity of aggressive violence against those who are designated as The Enemy. > The question of who is our enemy is a slippery one. Most of the dead and maimed from the Unabomber campaign were involved in this massive, almost entirely inclusive system of destruction and repression in a manner little different from most of us. Under the Unabomber rubric of complicity, almost all of us are potential targets. It should be remembered, his toll of three dead and 29 wounded was severely limited only when his bombs failed to go off in an airliner and outside a university classroom. Apparently, all of us were indiscriminately designated as The Enemy. > I don’t have a lot of interest in people who advocate “armed struggle.” In this country, it usually comes down to those enthusiasts for armed adventures constituting a rooting section without taking the leap into the fray themselves. This is often accompanied by an arrogance and set of judgmental politics that condemn anyone not in the claque as timid, or reformist, or worse, counter-revolutionary. The latter, by the way, has historically been a pre-execution category, so I watch my back when ever I hear that phrase being thrown my way even by someone claiming to be an anarchist. > My experience is that advocates of violence have a short shelf life. They break windows or plant a few bombs while furiously condemning everyone else for a lack of revolutionary ardor and then they are gone, usually with some wreckage that has to be cleaned up by those committed to long range organizing. [0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm [1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/walker-lane-pseudonym-of-peter-werbe-the-unabomber-s-unending-15-minutes-of-fame https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/walker-lane-pseudony...
ribs 3y ago
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cvalka 3y ago
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msla 3y ago
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msla 3y ago
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emodendroket 3y ago
> Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man. Who would care about Kaczynski's ravings without the murders?
bbor 3y ago
I'm curious to hear what in Ellul echoes Ted's manifesto? Ellul seems very like a very astute and interesting thinker, and Ted obviously referenced him, but to say that it's a "popular reduction" seems like a stretch to me. I say this based on this understanding of Ellul, pulled from his wikipedia page: > The solution is to simply view technique as objects that can be useful to us and recognize it for what it is, just another thing among many others, instead of believing in technique for its own sake or that of society. Which I would summarize as "we should examine technology as a means to an end, rather than a good unto itself". On the other hand, I would summarize Ted's thoughts (without having read the manifesto myself) as "technology of all kinds is inherently evil, and we have a moral imperative to dismantle and destroy basically all of it as quickly as possible." Those two ideas seem related in that they're talking about some of the same concepts, but it kinda ends there for me...
matkoniecz 3y ago
> Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead I refuse to read or become exposed to some ideas because one of their proponents murdered people. I want this strategy to be less effective, not more.
- boredhedgehog 3y ago
  But the very fact that Kaczynski's ideas were widely published and read directly led to his arrest. If the consideration is to be purely strategic, his case should be an argument in favor of dissemination.
  - matkoniecz 3y ago
    This stopped applying since they were become caught.
- vkou 3y ago
  It sounds like the easiest way for ideas to be killed, then, is for a few abhorrent people to champion them.
  - matkoniecz 3y ago
    If I would become aware of some idea and not as result of someone trying to promote them by murdering people then I have no problem with reading it.
  - golemotron 3y ago
    Not really. There's something called The Streisand Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect ). Invariably, people take the opportunity to publicly declare how opposed they are to various abhorrent people, indirectly making others aware of them and their ideas. This entire page of comments on HN is a good example. It's hilarious that people don't recognize that when they say "I will not read this" it is an advertisement.
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kevincrane 3y ago
“Do you like the unabomber’s ideas but get embarrassed when you talk about the unabomber in front of your friends? Try talking about Ellul instead, you might sound more worldly that way”
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  If you’re embarrassed to talk about anti-technological ideas in this current technological dystopia, you’re as oversocialized as Ted described you in his works.
yawboakye 3y ago
“hate the sin, love the sinner.” agreed!

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

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bryanrasmussen 3y ago
unless you can show with substantive research that there are some ideas that cannot be held by violent terrorists I don't see why that would color these particular ideas.
- bmitc 3y ago
  People are human and not logical, purely rational (whatever that would mean), data machines. We're emotional. I can certainly understand the perspective when the above commenter has seen the pain and suffering that those ideas, threaded amplified through either mental illness and/or pathological personality, led to. Okay, maybe Kaczynski had some points that resonate and concur with other more respected scholars and critics, but it is quite difficult to dissociate his ideas from his actions, especially when one can easily find others who did not violently kill and maim others with the same ideas. The substantive research is all of human psychology, biology, and sociology.
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    > human Those things endowed with the capability of effortful judgement, abstracting from more "primitive" (biologically ancestral) instances.
- MollyRealized 3y ago
  I'd argue that these ideas cannot be held by violent terrorists: * Commitment to avoid causing physical or emotional harm to others. * Absolute respect and preservation of all human lives, without exceptions. * Unconditional rejection of violence under any circumstances. * Belief that every human has the right to live, and recognition of the dignity, worth, and autonomy of every individual. * Full acceptance of differing viewpoints, cultures, religions, and lifestyles. * Consistent practice of understanding and sharing the feelings of others, and alleviating their suffering. * Refraining from initiating force against others. * Resolution of differences and conflict through conversation and mutual understanding, rather than force or coercion.
  - gonehome 3y ago
    Most people hold wildly inconsistent views in their head all the time, despite obvious contradictions - it’s the default human behavior. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...
  - tbrownaw 3y ago
    How would someone with those beliefs handle the trolley problem?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  It's not their ideas, exactly. It's their moral judgment. See, the unabomber manifesto was essentially a moral argument. "These things cause damage" is a moral observation. (Because how are you going to define "damage" without moral judgment?) "Therefore we should destroy technology" is a moral judgment (because you can't get there without the moral judgment of "humans should not be damaged"). So, the point is, I'm not going to trust the moral judgment of a murderer. Every fact he says in the manifesto may be correct. But his moral judgment is self-evidently terrible. And he reaches his conclusions through that moral judgment.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  The other angle is future deterrence. If a society collectively shuns ideals from violent terrorists, they will have less incentive to be violent.
- watwut 3y ago
  That still does not imply we should listen to people like Kaczynsky or take his ideas seriously. He sux and should not matter. If someone else with better decisions making recond expresses same ideas in another context, we can listen to him. The only thing that distinguishes Kaczynsky from, well, any random dude, are the bombs. Otherwise he is a no one. And random dude that did not send bombs makes more sense to listen to.
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Shinma 3y ago
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- AmpsterMan 3y ago
  If Ted's ideas lead to the destruction of human lives, I think invoking the victims' experience is a valid point in the discussion.
  - siftrics 3y ago
    Ted's claim is that these people must die because they are propagating suffering via technology. I don't see how "but proponents of technology died" is an argument against his claim that stopping technology will stop suffering caused by technology.
- arp242 3y ago
  It's not really about intellectual honesty or validity, but about morality. The only reason any of us are discussing Kaczynski now is because he sent those bombs; he would almost certainly be an unknown if he had not. This gives us an moral quandary, because do we really want to make murderers famous, even when they have something interesting to say? Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism? And for what it's worth, I read his book and I thought it raised interesting points, but I am somewhat troubled by this, and I can 100% understand if someone would choose different, even more so if they personally know one of his victims.
  - siftrics 3y ago
    > Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism? Yes, that's what he was trying to do. Ted claims we must stop technology, even with violent means, because technology causes greater suffering than the violent means to stop it. You claim "but that's violent!" That's not an argument. If you did try to make an argument (against Ted's ideas), I would agree with you. I would try to make that argument myself. We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"
Convolutional 3y ago
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californiadreem 3y ago
While this is totally understandable, it's also an example of the Identfiable Victim Effect. Kaczysnki's actions are humanly understandable with the ability to impute human motivations. He intentionally maimed and killed people. Yet, from a utilitarian perspective, I honestly don't know if intent matters when we're talking about third-party maiming and death. Our society disrupts and injures the bodies, minds, and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not billions, on a daily basis. And in that sense, Kaczynski, Ellul, or really any dissident of the status quo could, can, and do point out victims of society that outnumber Kaczynski's by several orders of magnitude. The victims are not directly and immediately visible, don't have power-holding advocates, and have little to no incentive to disrupt their own lives to discover, let alone undo, the causes of their problems. And if they do, they encounter a system most unwilling to listen or change. All of this contributes to these innocents being left unmourned and the causes of their tragedies, like minefields for future generations, left unresolved (Kaczynski mails mines and dies in prison; Kissinger sows fields of mines and lives to be a centenarian and the eldest diplomat). For an example directly related to maiming, consider the allegations of SawStop. A technology was invented to prevent serious maiming when operating table saws in 2002. The inventor attempted to license the technology to manufacturers only to (allegedly, their lawsuit was dismissed due to supposed tardiness in filing) encounter a cartel among tool manufacturers that colluded to prevent adoption of the technology because it would become obligate to all models to prevent legal liability, which would largely eliminate budget saw models. The number of finger or hand amputations in the US annually is in the thousands, for one type of tool. Or consider meat packing (excluding power-butchering injuries that typically include hand and finger amputation): "There are many serious safety and health hazards in the meat packing industry. These hazards include exposure to high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals (including ammonia that is used as a refrigerant). Musculoskeletal disorders comprise a large part of these serious injuries and continue to be common among meat packing workers. In addition, meat packing workers can be exposed to biological hazards associated with handling live animals or exposures to feces and blood which can increase their risk for many diseases." And this is an industry where undocumented workers are prioritized because they lack the language and advocacy to receive adequate compensation and legal protections. Even something as benign-seeming as a Nalgene bottle follows a similar kind of delayed statistical violence. BPA, shown to be independently unsafe, gets replaced with Triton, unshown to be anything. Triton is effectively an analog with likely xenoestrogenic and endocrine disrupting capabilities, yet can slip through a loophole with decades of profitability before the externalities start directly emerging. I lost my grandmother to ovarian cancer, likely caused by long-term use of asbestos-laced baby powder. A certain corporation gets a single $9 billion penalty for poisoning millions over decades; I and countless others lose their family members. This corporation's gross profit last year was something like $64 billion. Now I also understand the argument that if industrial society has caused these things, they have also enabled untold material prosperity globally and billions of additional lives to live. Maiming, industrial accidents, and toxicity are the price to pay for this and they all "happen" to be the aberration rather than the norm, with constant incremental improvements as circumstances allow. And yet, I think I'd rather have less sophisticated stuff and fewer unhappy people alive at any present moment if I could guarantee that those living on this planet now and those born in the future could live healthier, happier, and more meaningful lives as a result. Killing and maiming people in retaliation is a terrible way of getting there. As a final note, I'm currently in the process of my own exodus to leave the city (wish me luck!) to follow this path of voluntary simplicity and pacifism, lest anyone accuse me of trying to improve society somewhat.
quetzthecoatl 3y ago
who knows who Kaczynski would have ended up as a person if not for the horrible, abusive mind control experiments that he had to endure through in his early adulthood.
- jxramos 3y ago
  why did he have to endure them anyways? Was he not a volunteer, what gives?
cvalka 3y ago
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Convolutional 3y ago

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canjobear 3y ago
> The reason Kaczynski stopped He stopped because he was arrested. At that time they found two completed bombs in his cabin, so he was planning to renege on his deal not to plant any more bombs.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Deal?
  - vaccarium 3y ago
    He agreed to stop sending bombs in exchange for publication of his manifesto.
- siftrics 3y ago
  Them finding two completed bombs is not evidence that he planned to plant them.
  - irq 3y ago
    Who wants to keep live bombs in their house? Obviously he was going to put them elsewhere. Which is what planting is.
    - siftrics 3y ago
      I'm not claiming to know the timeline, but he could have built them before "the deal", then made the deal and decided not to plant them. Innocent until proven guilty. There is more than enough evidence to put away Teddy K for life. Lean on real evidence. Don't stretch the truth and muddy the waters for the innocent. Your line of reasoning could be used to convict the innocent.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago

Also Lewis Mumford [1], Günther Anders [2], or if you want to go truly underground, Gilbert Simondon [3] [4] or Friedrich Kittler [5]. If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one. Also radically of the future and forgotten is FM-2030 [6] [7]. All in all, blowing up people is easy, blowing up antiquated concepts, grasping for the grounds of a new metaphysics, painstakingly implementing and debugging is the hard part. Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive after following to conclusions systems such as the Grotthuss proton translocation mechanism driving motion in a F_0/F_1-ATP synthase rotation mechanism [8] [9]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Anders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Anders [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon [4] Gilbert Simondon - 'The Technical Object as Such', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXDtG74hCL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXDtG74hCL4 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kittler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kittler [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030 [7] Futurist FM-2030 Appears on CNN's Future Watch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT__dTtX2ik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT__dTtX2ik [8] Prof Levin, Prof Frasch (2022) Mitochondria, bioenergetics, information, electric fields, https://youtu.be/MEhrMR-Jaw0?t=3429 https://youtu.be/MEhrMR-Jaw0?t=3429 [9] 2021, Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.650726/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.65072...

golemotron 3y ago
> Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive The same could be said about Capitalism.
- dbspin 3y ago
  This is an ideological position, termed Capitalist Realism [1]. Given the failing of social reproduction, environmental protection, long term planning against existential and systemic risk, the mental health crisis and the collapse of civil and political life, under entrenched and victorious capitalism - an increasingly absurd one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism

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tenpies 3y ago

His published works aside, it seems he was corresponding with people and answering letters until fairly recently. Many of these letters (or quite convincing forgeries) are archived in your favourite 4chan archive of choice. Also worth mentioning what was essentially a partial autobiography by Kaczynsky: Truth Versus Lies[1]. I'm not sure it was ever completed and there are a couple versions floating around. He was still working on it well into the mid 2010s. --- [1] One version: https://archive.org/details/TruthVersusLiesPart1 https://archive.org/details/TruthVersusLiesPart1

Kye 3y ago

You know how sometimes you'll see someone [dead] on here making salient points, then wonder why they're dead? Then you check them out, and every so often they go off on incoherent tirades. That's Ted Kaczynski. He may have had two good ideas for every bad one, but he was still a piece of shit who deserved to be isolated from society where he couldn't hurt anyone, and there are better advocates for whatever good came out of his head. Or to paraphrase the dril classic: you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them" edit: to be clear, I think the dude was little more than an ecofascist and not worth taking seriously. But if you're going to, you ought to know he was the worst advocate for any position he held. You can do better than propping up a dead asshole.

Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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msla 3y ago

He sounds like an ecofascist to me, someone willing to use violence in pursuit of a "green" ideology.

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cogman10 3y ago
Funnily, Kaczynski was an ecofascist, he was also an anti-leftest. You have to remember that when he performed the bombing in the 70s environmental protections had bipartisan support (Nixon famously created the EPA [1]). It wasn't until much later that being green turned into a radical partisan issue. I mostly blame Rush Limbaugh [2] and the Koch brothers [3] for that shift. Turns out, a lot of big oil propaganda [4] can really sway public opinion. [1] https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa [2] https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-climate-change-misinformer-year https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-cli... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch-climate-change.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch... [4] https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-against-coal-and-nuclear-1513304200 https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga...
- gota 3y ago
  Plugging in my (tongue-in-cheek, but maybe not a 100%) conspiracy theory that Big Oil was the financier and culprit behind the flat earth, anti-vax, moon landing conspiracies, and many others - As a way to discret the whole of the scientific and academic establishment in the minds of enough (voting) people, so as to delay the inevitable consensus that fossil fuel consumption is killing everyone slowly
  - gota 3y ago
    *discredit
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  One of his later letters he said was against Eco-fascisim. basically saying that a lot of it is driven by racism or some sort of political/social ideal. That these factors are not distributed equally globally means that it would never work as a long term strategy. If one half of the global turned to ecofascisim and they got a non-technical world they desired, the other half would immediately capitalize on this and take over. In a way I find Ted's idea fascinating in the same way I find a lot of smarter spiritual teacher fascinating. Here is this simple base idea, now here is 500 things you have to watch out for how the most simplistic path will cause more harm than good. To that, I don't think he had a complete picture on how to achieve what he wanted. Like Ram Dass saying, be here now, but take it too far and you will go insane!

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Agree, Kaczynski did make some good points. Maybe if he had learned to channel that energy better.

NovaDudely 3y ago
That is the saddest thing. He had some great ideas and knew how to communicate them. He just didn't think he would be taken seriously unless he used the bomb cheat code on life to get notoriety. I suspect that if he had gone the path of writer with publishing, not only would his works be more popular, there would have actually been a realistic means of implementing some of his ideas. He had some great ideas and simultaneously pushed back any real change by decades for his own self gain interest.
- bbor 3y ago
  Which ideas? Everyone keeps saying this but I’d love specifics.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    Read his manifesto, they’re detailed. I was shocked for a straight week when I read it, I couldn’t believe I have been lied to my entire life. Or better yet his book Technological Slavery: https://archive.org/details/tk-Technological-Slavery https://archive.org/details/tk-Technological-Slavery
    - bbor 3y ago
      Yeah... I appreciate you taking the time to respond but "read this 35,000 word manifesto by a schizophrenic idealogical serial killer whose conclusions you already know you find vapid and deplorable" is not a great pitch lol. Was just hoping to hear some highlights. I think I'll just have to wander along for the rest of my life without gaining any insight as to why Hacker News is so in love with that work, beyond some variety of SV-guilt!
      - 3y ago

happytoexplain 3y ago

People don't disagree with him because he was a convicted terrorist, they disagree with him because of the specific things he did to be convicted of terrorism. That's reasonable (correct, even). People might know or not know each opinion he expressed, and might reasonably agree or disagree with each one, but that's not the same thing.

lm28469 3y ago
> People might know or not know each opinion he expressed, and might reasonably agree or disagree with each one Isn't that the definition of agreeing (or not) with someone ? > but that's not the same thing. How so ?
- emodendroket 3y ago
  He forced his way into the conversation through terrorism. It seems reasonable enough to reject his ideas out of hand rather than give them respectful hearing.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    This gets messy quick. If for example you lived under a dictator and that dictator didn't like your conversation then you wouldn't expect to have a venue unless you took extreme measures. Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all dead anyway and if this is the price to pay to stop it, it will have been worth it.
    - onethought 3y ago
      Yes, it should matter, because sane people admit there is a chance they could be wrong. You can walk back ideas, you can’t walk back deaths. Also unless you’re a government you probably shouldn’t be applying utilitarian ideas of ethics to your actions, you do not have a right to decide on behalf of anyone but yourself as an individual, so even by utilitarian standards you are likely being unethical.

bmitc 3y ago

Thank you for the reference to Jacques Ellul, as I hadn't heard of him before. From looking a few reviews, I'm liking what appears to be him having a critique of the worship of technique, which is an interesting thought.

JamesLeonis 3y ago

> Attacks the ideas, not the man. It's unfortunate that people stop at the Manifesto, as Kaczynski has other critiques, but also admits to limitations or failures in his thinking. In one correspondence he admits he has no criteria to decide if a given technology is benign (small scale) or harmful (organization-dependent), a critical distinction! He tries to shore it up with analyzing a primitive Steam Engine, but I would point to Bronze as a contradiction harboring both characteristics. My interpretation is that the distinction is political, not based on any aspect of the technology itself including production. Technology acts as a magnitude, and how we apply it is the essence of our social/political organization. This is, of course, one interpretation among many. Like professor Ellul, there are many other voices. There is Society of the Spectacle (a style ISAIF is imitating), or the works of Jean Baudrillard where he (early years) analyzes commodities under Consumerism or (later years) his work on Spectacle and Image. Even Karl Marx has a detailed understanding and critique of Machine Society in Chapter 15 of Capital [0]. Finally, Kaczynski is harmful to many anarchist spaces. His True Crime reputation attracts tons of media footage and mystique, which furthers misunderstandings. Crimethink has a great essay, "The Unabomber’s Unending 15 Minutes of Fame" [1], which details how this warps perceptions and action while ignoring who the victims are. > As individuals within a movement professing a desire to reconstitute the world on the basis of love, harmony, peace, and sharing, an ethical question arises when a means inconsistent with an end is presented. In this case, the tactic of non-self-defense violence. This is not a question of armed defense such as was the case during the 1930s Spanish revolution, for instance, but rather, the validity of aggressive violence against those who are designated as The Enemy. > The question of who is our enemy is a slippery one. Most of the dead and maimed from the Unabomber campaign were involved in this massive, almost entirely inclusive system of destruction and repression in a manner little different from most of us. Under the Unabomber rubric of complicity, almost all of us are potential targets. It should be remembered, his toll of three dead and 29 wounded was severely limited only when his bombs failed to go off in an airliner and outside a university classroom. Apparently, all of us were indiscriminately designated as The Enemy. > I don’t have a lot of interest in people who advocate “armed struggle.” In this country, it usually comes down to those enthusiasts for armed adventures constituting a rooting section without taking the leap into the fray themselves. This is often accompanied by an arrogance and set of judgmental politics that condemn anyone not in the claque as timid, or reformist, or worse, counter-revolutionary. The latter, by the way, has historically been a pre-execution category, so I watch my back when ever I hear that phrase being thrown my way even by someone claiming to be an anarchist. > My experience is that advocates of violence have a short shelf life. They break windows or plant a few bombs while furiously condemning everyone else for a lack of revolutionary ardor and then they are gone, usually with some wreckage that has to be cleaned up by those committed to long range organizing. [0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm [1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/walker-lane-pseudonym-of-peter-werbe-the-unabomber-s-unending-15-minutes-of-fame https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/walker-lane-pseudony...

ribs 3y ago

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cvalka 3y ago

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msla 3y ago

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msla 3y ago

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emodendroket 3y ago

> Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man. Who would care about Kaczynski's ravings without the murders?

bbor 3y ago

I'm curious to hear what in Ellul echoes Ted's manifesto? Ellul seems very like a very astute and interesting thinker, and Ted obviously referenced him, but to say that it's a "popular reduction" seems like a stretch to me. I say this based on this understanding of Ellul, pulled from his wikipedia page: > The solution is to simply view technique as objects that can be useful to us and recognize it for what it is, just another thing among many others, instead of believing in technique for its own sake or that of society. Which I would summarize as "we should examine technology as a means to an end, rather than a good unto itself". On the other hand, I would summarize Ted's thoughts (without having read the manifesto myself) as "technology of all kinds is inherently evil, and we have a moral imperative to dismantle and destroy basically all of it as quickly as possible." Those two ideas seem related in that they're talking about some of the same concepts, but it kinda ends there for me...

matkoniecz 3y ago

> Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead I refuse to read or become exposed to some ideas because one of their proponents murdered people. I want this strategy to be less effective, not more.

boredhedgehog 3y ago
But the very fact that Kaczynski's ideas were widely published and read directly led to his arrest. If the consideration is to be purely strategic, his case should be an argument in favor of dissemination.
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  This stopped applying since they were become caught.
vkou 3y ago
It sounds like the easiest way for ideas to be killed, then, is for a few abhorrent people to champion them.
- matkoniecz 3y ago
  If I would become aware of some idea and not as result of someone trying to promote them by murdering people then I have no problem with reading it.
- golemotron 3y ago
  Not really. There's something called The Streisand Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect ). Invariably, people take the opportunity to publicly declare how opposed they are to various abhorrent people, indirectly making others aware of them and their ideas. This entire page of comments on HN is a good example. It's hilarious that people don't recognize that when they say "I will not read this" it is an advertisement.
3y ago

kevincrane 3y ago

“Do you like the unabomber’s ideas but get embarrassed when you talk about the unabomber in front of your friends? Try talking about Ellul instead, you might sound more worldly that way”

Aerbil313 3y ago
If you’re embarrassed to talk about anti-technological ideas in this current technological dystopia, you’re as oversocialized as Ted described you in his works.

yawboakye 3y ago

“hate the sin, love the sinner.” agreed!