8 ms·

The Unabomber's Pen Pal

74 points by gruseom 14y ago

moldbug 14y ago
Oh, that's lovely. I'm sure Professor Skrbina is also pen pals with Eric Rudolph, the abortion bomber: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph Every other week, he teaches his adoring young undergrads to understand Rudolph's subtle, nuanced position on the sanctity of human life... not. FWIW, both Kaczynski's and Rudolph's philosophical opinions are worthy of debate. Their persons, however, are icky. Icky rubs off - even if you're a professor.
- gruseom 14y ago
  You seem to be saying something, but I can never figure out just what it is.
  - moldbug 14y ago
    What I'm saying is that it's immoral to play kissy-face, even intellectual kissy-face, with murderers. Somehow this is controversial. But you can see it easily if you flip the political polarities. Hence, Eric Rudolph. Something obvious you can't see is called a "blind spot." Is there anything else in your blind spot?
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      I'm assuming you refer to the teacher's ongoing correspondence with Kaczynski which one imagines means a lot to the prisoner, and could be seen as some form of 'comfort'. Do you see the need to examine the arguments at all? Would it be ok for the teacher to discuss the manifesto as a text without the dialogue with Kaczynski?
    - knieveltech 14y ago
      Define "murderers". Depending on how widely you spread that blanket you could cover every government employee in the world. Include "or through inaction" as a modifier to your definition and you and I are just as guilty.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - NoPiece 14y ago
        Murder almost always is defined to include premeditation (malice aforethought). So you're in the clear, along with most every government employee in the world.
    - philwelch 14y ago
      I disagree with both their motives and actions but I still don't "see it easily". OK, it's the right thing to do to lock these people away for the rest of their lives. But if there's some intellectual profit to be gained in corresponding with them, I see no harm in doing so. Your conception of "icky" is reminiscent of that of a five-year-old, and has all the intellectual and moral sophistication of the same.
      - moldbug 14y ago
        You don't think you're proving the point of my Eric Rudolph analogy? Ie: you don't feel perfectly fair, rational, and justified in applying the "icky," simplistic, five-year-old algorithm to Eric Rudolph? If not: you don't agree that this remarkable tolerance for violent right-wing extremism is unusual among your social and intellectual peers? This applies to everyone who responded below. Good luck in composing an answer that evades the questionnaire...
        philwelch 14y ago
        > If not: you don't agree that this remarkable tolerance for violent right-wing extremism is unusual among your social and intellectual peers? I don't worry about being unusual, I worry about being right. Lots of people are intellectual and emotional five-year-olds. That's not my problem, but whether I'm one of them is my problem.
        defen 14y ago
        > If not: you don't agree that this remarkable tolerance for violent right-wing extremism is unusual among your social and intellectual peers? That's an interesting point - could you expound on it? I have a few theories myself, and I'm curious what you think the reason is.
        moldbug 14y ago
        It's pretty simple - Anglophone North America is a left-wing polity and always has been, its deviant and extinct Confederate branch aside. You won't find a single leftist trope that isn't repeated over and over again in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As Earl Browder put it, "Communism is 20th-century Americanism." This is why we're all supposed to be all nuanced and shit when it comes to Communist atrocities, but when it's time for the Fascist atrocities everyone has to stand up and yell HITLER HITLER HITLER. Precisely like a five-year-old. It's just a sort of national lookin' after #1. We naturally ignore the sins closest to us and focus on those of others. Left is "self" and right is "other." Otherwise, we would need to express genuine collective guilt rather than dime-a-dozen collective contempt.
- asciilifeform 14y ago
  As far as I can tell, there is a simple and elegant explanation for the discrepancy: Rudolph (and Breivik, and most of the present crop of right-wing terrorists) is an intellectual zero while Kaczynski is not. If Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer had left behind something like Kaczynski's manifesto (and later prison essays), some respectable intellectuals would pinch their noses and study them.
Alex3917 14y ago
"Is it even morally or ethically right," he asks, "to be studying the works of a societal criminal." Clearly this student didn't learn anything from their earlier reading of Phaedrus.
- jackfoxy 14y ago
  So reading Phaedrus is supposed to automatically turn you into a complete Platonist? I and many others give broad credence to Platonism in the realm of mathematics, but the students question is in the realm of ethics, and Dr. Skrbina (as summarized in the article) brushes this question off all too easily.
  - Alex3917 14y ago
    I was referring to the fact that the mean character in the book is Socrates, who was put to death for being a 'societal criminal.' This doesn't really have anything to do with Platonic ethics. edit: Especially since Socrates was put to death for 'corrupting the youth' and 'teaching new gods', which is more or less the usual argument against teaching Kaczynski. "And there's the chance that a serious consideration of the Unabomber's ideas could encourage others to send bombs to get attention." --> corrupting the youth "The primary concern of Kaczynski's writings is freedom, and he argues that the complex systems required by modern technology necessarily force individuals to give up too much liberty in the bargain" --> teaching new gods (In this case 'the bargain' is literally straight out of the Adam and Eve story in the bible, and a direct challenge to western religion/civilization.)
    - jackfoxy 14y ago
      That was actually the first thing that came into my mind upon your reference to Phaedrus, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were referring to something deeper. Socrates crime in his time was defying the state's moral code. For which he was put to death. He was a soldier in Athens' army, and possibly killed other men in that role (for which most societies forgive to this day), but he never murdered. Kaczynski murdered in cold blood. Comparing him to Socrates in any way is vacuous. This is called ethics.
koeselitz 14y ago
It's really too bad that Kaczynski was trying to publish his work back in the 1970s and 1980s. These days, he could have just published it on the internet, and that way plenty of people would have been able to read it.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  I can see where you are going; an email address, a dropbox account, post onto hostile forums with public links to the latest essay, resulting hullabaloo gives mentally ill but very clever person the feeling of involvement, being the centre of something, action. Perhaps saving some injury and lives. Perhaps the valuable arguments get separated from the odd and obsessive context and get taken up more widely, or at least not associated with destructive acts. The teacher in the article has certainly got his students interested, they meet before the session to work out the arguments to use. Excellent! The journalist Gitta Sereny writes about evil people to try to understand where the evil comes from, this struck me as similar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitta_Sereny http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitta_Sereny
- J3L2404 14y ago
  His last two bombs were in '94 and '95 and both were fatal. So he could have published on the net, but he chose violence. He chose wrong.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Yes, but perhaps he did not see the 'net/Web as natural? Perhaps a new unabomber now would? Technology gets naturalised over time, as the teacher in the original article was saying about Plato and writing. A modern maths textbook is a pretty sophisticated piece of technology.
    - zbuc 14y ago
      Which is a very good reason that his argument doesn't make sense. Naturalism is silly, as is separating things as "human-created" or "man-made" versus "natural". It all comes out of the same matter of the universe. I really don't understand the allure this professor feels for his luddite ideals. > "It's always around the same theme of, This system is irreconcilable, it has to be ended," Skrbina says. "How can we make this clear? How can we convince people that technology is the root cause of the problem? It's not bad government. It's not the capitalists. It's not minorities. It's not illegal immigrants. He really wants to get away from blaming anything else or anybody else." Maybe he has difficulty convincing anyone of that because it's not a particularly compelling argument?
WiseWeasel 14y ago
No, his ideas are not worthy of much debate, since they are so deeply flawed. What constitutes "technology", and who gets to decide at which level of progress we say "This far and no further"? The answers to these will necessarily be completely arbitrary, since the scope of the actual problems being solved is so poorly understood. If a convincing case can be made that particular technologies are causing specific harm, they should be addressed on a case-by-case basis as best we can. Instead, Ted is a modern day Don Quixote who couldn't cope with society and chose to tilt at windmills, at the unfortunate expense of innocent blood and suffering. His intellectual value is largely cautionary.
- sageikosa 14y ago
  Without having read anything, his course of action to address his "felt unease" (if I may borrow from von Mises) was to attack individual innovators whose only crime in his mind was pushing technology forward. He didn't try to convince his fellow man of the rightness of his ideas, he wanted to force it upon us all in his own crusadering way, even going so far as to use the threat of force to gain access to a forum. The FBI only allowed publication because they believed someone would recognize his particular flavor of sociopathy...and they were right. Criminologists may be interested in him as a case study (like a psychological autopsy), but I wouldn't want to read him for fun.
- philwelch 14y ago
  Have you actually read "Industrial Society and Its Future" without going out of your way to be dismissive about it? If so, why haven't you asked the man himself to answer those criticisms? OK, I don't expect you to do all the legwork, of course, but it's not completely terrible that one out of the thousands of philosophers in this country actually has done that legwork.
  - WiseWeasel 14y ago
    I tried and eventually had to stop, as the leaps in logic were too great for me to follow. After that, I had no desire to have any further contact with him whatsoever. Life is too short for bad logic.
rubashov 14y ago
The overall tone of the Unabomber Manifesto is pretty crazy, but substantial parts are rather profound, or at least concise and effective restatements of important ideas. In particular, Kaczynski's discussion of the Power Process, Autonomy, and Surrogate Activities rings true and explains a lot. I get the impression a lot of this stuff has only been further confirmed in recent years: people without autonomous, difficult, and meaningful tasks are unhappy. http://xahlee.org/p/um/um.html http://xahlee.org/p/um/um.html I also thought his discussion of the psychological character of the Left has some value.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- balsam 14y ago
  It reads like Nietzsche (all that Will to Power & slave morality stuff) updated for century XXI. (I skimmed the text by highlighting the word "goal".) Frustratingly, the Unabomber doesn't give any examples of "real goals". Does helping startups succeed count?
  - philwelch 14y ago
    That's not a very helpful comment; if you're going to discuss the text, you'd better read it, and carefully. If you did, you'd know the answer to your questions. It's extremely straightforward.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - defen 14y ago
    Nietzsche's "will to power" is Darwin's theory of "natural selection" writ large, applied to the whole universe instead of just life forms, presented in Nietzsche's traditional non-scientific metaphorical format. Kaczynski's "power process" has to do with the satisfaction of drives, not the achievement of goals. It's only similar in the sense that you could possibly make the argument that the "power process" is a very small part of the more general "will to power". But this would be about as meaningful as arguing that anger is an emotion. Furthermore, the achievement of most (societally sanctioned) goals is part of the problem, because they are merely surrogate goals! So it sounds like by attempting to skim the text you got precisely the wrong meaning out of it!
ChuckMcM 14y ago
"The primary concern of Kaczynski's writings is freedom, and he argues that the complex systems required by modern technology necessarily force individuals to give up too much liberty in the bargain." Wow, where have I heard that before? There is a common theme, in a number of these rants, whether its Kaczynski, Stallman, or Joy. The theme is that complexity begats obscurity and our inability to predict the behavior of mostly obscured, highly interconnected systems exposes us to an 'unnecessary' risk. I am not persuaded by the 'enslaving', 'grey goo', or 'police state' scenarios, but I do recognize the potential harm here. Generally however we've been adapting as these challenges have come up and I expect to continue adapting. I have yet to hear a credible argument for going back to living in caves (other than its demonstrable that with population management and technological restrictions one could create a stable non-growing human population).
- rubashov 14y ago
  > highly interconnected systems exposes us to an 'unnecessary' risk Kaczynski's arguments are not mostly about the risk of technology, they are mostly about how technology forces us into ever narrowing conformist behavior. He makes the point about how it now impractical to function in North America without a car. You are largely denied your freedom to walk. Try to walk through most counties and see how that works out. Similarly, see how it's becoming almost impossible to legally live without owning a computer. You increasingly need one to remain in compliance with the IRS and so forth. Your freedom to forgo computer ownership, or even usage, is being taken.
  - eurleif 14y ago
    >You increasingly need one to remain in compliance with the IRS and so forth Paper tax forms are still available, and tax payments can still be made with checks. How do you need a computer to stay in compliance with the IRS?
    - scarmig 14y ago
      The external costs of staying in compliance with the IRS without those forms are increasing. In both a relative and an absolute sense: they become more inconvenient and hard to even do, and on top of that there's an expectation you can get taxes done in the same amount of time as someone using a computer. Have this happen a thousand different little ways, and not having a computer becomes effectively impossible.
tnash 14y ago
I think this is telling: "In his personal life, Skrbina says he generally tries not to use technology if he can avoid it—he refuses to carry a cellphone, has never owned a microwave oven, and does not have a laptop (though he does use computers for his work)." So he advocates understanding Kaczynski's point of view, but he doesn't attempt to understand technology? That seems rather one-sided.
- eurleif 14y ago
  If he uses a computer for work, it sounds like he understands technology, but makes the choice not to use it.
  - tnash 14y ago
    I think that's a broad leap from "uses a computer for work" to "understands technology". My grandparents use computers for work, but they do not know much about technology.
defen 14y ago
A lot of people on here are arguing in favor of technology, which leads me to believe that they haven't actually read the manifesto and are just going by Kaczynski's reputation or bombing targets or the title. It's not about technology! It's about human psychology and the form of society - technology is just an enabler for that. His arguments would be just as valid in ancient Egypt as they would be in the 21st century.
firefoxman1 14y ago
> "Humanity, the author writes, is at a crossroads, and we can either turn the clock back to a happier, more primitive time or face destruction." Has anyone else read a book called Ishmael? That's basically the premise except instead of being an opinionated rant, the points are made through dialog (a talking gorilla) and instead of forcing opinions on the reader, it's much more philosophical and nudges you logically toward the conclusion. Pretty enjoyable book.
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  I actually accidentally discovered Daniel Quinn's work through the Unabomber's Manifesto. I agree with a lot of what the Unabomber and Quinn says - the Unabomber just chose a more violent way to spread this message.

74 points by gruseom 14y ago

Oh, that's lovely. I'm sure Professor Skrbina is also pen pals with Eric Rudolph, the abortion bomber: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph Every other week, he teaches his adoring young undergrads to understand Rudolph's subtle, nuanced position on the sanctity of human life... not. FWIW, both Kaczynski's and Rudolph's philosophical opinions are worthy of debate. Their persons, however, are icky. Icky rubs off - even if you're a professor.

gruseom 14y ago
You seem to be saying something, but I can never figure out just what it is.
- moldbug 14y ago
  What I'm saying is that it's immoral to play kissy-face, even intellectual kissy-face, with murderers. Somehow this is controversial. But you can see it easily if you flip the political polarities. Hence, Eric Rudolph. Something obvious you can't see is called a "blind spot." Is there anything else in your blind spot?
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    I'm assuming you refer to the teacher's ongoing correspondence with Kaczynski which one imagines means a lot to the prisoner, and could be seen as some form of 'comfort'. Do you see the need to examine the arguments at all? Would it be ok for the teacher to discuss the manifesto as a text without the dialogue with Kaczynski?
  - knieveltech 14y ago
    Define "murderers". Depending on how widely you spread that blanket you could cover every government employee in the world. Include "or through inaction" as a modifier to your definition and you and I are just as guilty.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - NoPiece 14y ago
      Murder almost always is defined to include premeditation (malice aforethought). So you're in the clear, along with most every government employee in the world.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    I disagree with both their motives and actions but I still don't "see it easily". OK, it's the right thing to do to lock these people away for the rest of their lives. But if there's some intellectual profit to be gained in corresponding with them, I see no harm in doing so. Your conception of "icky" is reminiscent of that of a five-year-old, and has all the intellectual and moral sophistication of the same.
    - moldbug 14y ago
      You don't think you're proving the point of my Eric Rudolph analogy? Ie: you don't feel perfectly fair, rational, and justified in applying the "icky," simplistic, five-year-old algorithm to Eric Rudolph? If not: you don't agree that this remarkable tolerance for violent right-wing extremism is unusual among your social and intellectual peers? This applies to everyone who responded below. Good luck in composing an answer that evades the questionnaire...
      - philwelch 14y ago
        > If not: you don't agree that this remarkable tolerance for violent right-wing extremism is unusual among your social and intellectual peers? I don't worry about being unusual, I worry about being right. Lots of people are intellectual and emotional five-year-olds. That's not my problem, but whether I'm one of them is my problem.
      - defen 14y ago
        > If not: you don't agree that this remarkable tolerance for violent right-wing extremism is unusual among your social and intellectual peers? That's an interesting point - could you expound on it? I have a few theories myself, and I'm curious what you think the reason is.
        moldbug 14y ago
        It's pretty simple - Anglophone North America is a left-wing polity and always has been, its deviant and extinct Confederate branch aside. You won't find a single leftist trope that isn't repeated over and over again in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As Earl Browder put it, "Communism is 20th-century Americanism." This is why we're all supposed to be all nuanced and shit when it comes to Communist atrocities, but when it's time for the Fascist atrocities everyone has to stand up and yell HITLER HITLER HITLER. Precisely like a five-year-old. It's just a sort of national lookin' after #1. We naturally ignore the sins closest to us and focus on those of others. Left is "self" and right is "other." Otherwise, we would need to express genuine collective guilt rather than dime-a-dozen collective contempt.
asciilifeform 14y ago
As far as I can tell, there is a simple and elegant explanation for the discrepancy: Rudolph (and Breivik, and most of the present crop of right-wing terrorists) is an intellectual zero while Kaczynski is not. If Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer had left behind something like Kaczynski's manifesto (and later prison essays), some respectable intellectuals would pinch their noses and study them.

Alex3917 14y ago

"Is it even morally or ethically right," he asks, "to be studying the works of a societal criminal." Clearly this student didn't learn anything from their earlier reading of Phaedrus.

jackfoxy 14y ago
So reading Phaedrus is supposed to automatically turn you into a complete Platonist? I and many others give broad credence to Platonism in the realm of mathematics, but the students question is in the realm of ethics, and Dr. Skrbina (as summarized in the article) brushes this question off all too easily.
- Alex3917 14y ago
  I was referring to the fact that the mean character in the book is Socrates, who was put to death for being a 'societal criminal.' This doesn't really have anything to do with Platonic ethics. edit: Especially since Socrates was put to death for 'corrupting the youth' and 'teaching new gods', which is more or less the usual argument against teaching Kaczynski. "And there's the chance that a serious consideration of the Unabomber's ideas could encourage others to send bombs to get attention." --> corrupting the youth "The primary concern of Kaczynski's writings is freedom, and he argues that the complex systems required by modern technology necessarily force individuals to give up too much liberty in the bargain" --> teaching new gods (In this case 'the bargain' is literally straight out of the Adam and Eve story in the bible, and a direct challenge to western religion/civilization.)
  - jackfoxy 14y ago
    That was actually the first thing that came into my mind upon your reference to Phaedrus, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were referring to something deeper. Socrates crime in his time was defying the state's moral code. For which he was put to death. He was a soldier in Athens' army, and possibly killed other men in that role (for which most societies forgive to this day), but he never murdered. Kaczynski murdered in cold blood. Comparing him to Socrates in any way is vacuous. This is called ethics.

koeselitz 14y ago

It's really too bad that Kaczynski was trying to publish his work back in the 1970s and 1980s. These days, he could have just published it on the internet, and that way plenty of people would have been able to read it.

keithpeter 14y ago
I can see where you are going; an email address, a dropbox account, post onto hostile forums with public links to the latest essay, resulting hullabaloo gives mentally ill but very clever person the feeling of involvement, being the centre of something, action. Perhaps saving some injury and lives. Perhaps the valuable arguments get separated from the odd and obsessive context and get taken up more widely, or at least not associated with destructive acts. The teacher in the article has certainly got his students interested, they meet before the session to work out the arguments to use. Excellent! The journalist Gitta Sereny writes about evil people to try to understand where the evil comes from, this struck me as similar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitta_Sereny http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitta_Sereny
J3L2404 14y ago
His last two bombs were in '94 and '95 and both were fatal. So he could have published on the net, but he chose violence. He chose wrong.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Yes, but perhaps he did not see the 'net/Web as natural? Perhaps a new unabomber now would? Technology gets naturalised over time, as the teacher in the original article was saying about Plato and writing. A modern maths textbook is a pretty sophisticated piece of technology.
  - zbuc 14y ago
    Which is a very good reason that his argument doesn't make sense. Naturalism is silly, as is separating things as "human-created" or "man-made" versus "natural". It all comes out of the same matter of the universe. I really don't understand the allure this professor feels for his luddite ideals. > "It's always around the same theme of, This system is irreconcilable, it has to be ended," Skrbina says. "How can we make this clear? How can we convince people that technology is the root cause of the problem? It's not bad government. It's not the capitalists. It's not minorities. It's not illegal immigrants. He really wants to get away from blaming anything else or anybody else." Maybe he has difficulty convincing anyone of that because it's not a particularly compelling argument?

WiseWeasel 14y ago

No, his ideas are not worthy of much debate, since they are so deeply flawed. What constitutes "technology", and who gets to decide at which level of progress we say "This far and no further"? The answers to these will necessarily be completely arbitrary, since the scope of the actual problems being solved is so poorly understood. If a convincing case can be made that particular technologies are causing specific harm, they should be addressed on a case-by-case basis as best we can. Instead, Ted is a modern day Don Quixote who couldn't cope with society and chose to tilt at windmills, at the unfortunate expense of innocent blood and suffering. His intellectual value is largely cautionary.

sageikosa 14y ago
Without having read anything, his course of action to address his "felt unease" (if I may borrow from von Mises) was to attack individual innovators whose only crime in his mind was pushing technology forward. He didn't try to convince his fellow man of the rightness of his ideas, he wanted to force it upon us all in his own crusadering way, even going so far as to use the threat of force to gain access to a forum. The FBI only allowed publication because they believed someone would recognize his particular flavor of sociopathy...and they were right. Criminologists may be interested in him as a case study (like a psychological autopsy), but I wouldn't want to read him for fun.
philwelch 14y ago
Have you actually read "Industrial Society and Its Future" without going out of your way to be dismissive about it? If so, why haven't you asked the man himself to answer those criticisms? OK, I don't expect you to do all the legwork, of course, but it's not completely terrible that one out of the thousands of philosophers in this country actually has done that legwork.
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  I tried and eventually had to stop, as the leaps in logic were too great for me to follow. After that, I had no desire to have any further contact with him whatsoever. Life is too short for bad logic.

rubashov 14y ago

The overall tone of the Unabomber Manifesto is pretty crazy, but substantial parts are rather profound, or at least concise and effective restatements of important ideas. In particular, Kaczynski's discussion of the Power Process, Autonomy, and Surrogate Activities rings true and explains a lot. I get the impression a lot of this stuff has only been further confirmed in recent years: people without autonomous, difficult, and meaningful tasks are unhappy. http://xahlee.org/p/um/um.html http://xahlee.org/p/um/um.html I also thought his discussion of the psychological character of the Left has some value.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
balsam 14y ago
It reads like Nietzsche (all that Will to Power & slave morality stuff) updated for century XXI. (I skimmed the text by highlighting the word "goal".) Frustratingly, the Unabomber doesn't give any examples of "real goals". Does helping startups succeed count?
- philwelch 14y ago
  That's not a very helpful comment; if you're going to discuss the text, you'd better read it, and carefully. If you did, you'd know the answer to your questions. It's extremely straightforward.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- defen 14y ago
  Nietzsche's "will to power" is Darwin's theory of "natural selection" writ large, applied to the whole universe instead of just life forms, presented in Nietzsche's traditional non-scientific metaphorical format. Kaczynski's "power process" has to do with the satisfaction of drives, not the achievement of goals. It's only similar in the sense that you could possibly make the argument that the "power process" is a very small part of the more general "will to power". But this would be about as meaningful as arguing that anger is an emotion. Furthermore, the achievement of most (societally sanctioned) goals is part of the problem, because they are merely surrogate goals! So it sounds like by attempting to skim the text you got precisely the wrong meaning out of it!

ChuckMcM 14y ago

"The primary concern of Kaczynski's writings is freedom, and he argues that the complex systems required by modern technology necessarily force individuals to give up too much liberty in the bargain." Wow, where have I heard that before? There is a common theme, in a number of these rants, whether its Kaczynski, Stallman, or Joy. The theme is that complexity begats obscurity and our inability to predict the behavior of mostly obscured, highly interconnected systems exposes us to an 'unnecessary' risk. I am not persuaded by the 'enslaving', 'grey goo', or 'police state' scenarios, but I do recognize the potential harm here. Generally however we've been adapting as these challenges have come up and I expect to continue adapting. I have yet to hear a credible argument for going back to living in caves (other than its demonstrable that with population management and technological restrictions one could create a stable non-growing human population).

rubashov 14y ago
> highly interconnected systems exposes us to an 'unnecessary' risk Kaczynski's arguments are not mostly about the risk of technology, they are mostly about how technology forces us into ever narrowing conformist behavior. He makes the point about how it now impractical to function in North America without a car. You are largely denied your freedom to walk. Try to walk through most counties and see how that works out. Similarly, see how it's becoming almost impossible to legally live without owning a computer. You increasingly need one to remain in compliance with the IRS and so forth. Your freedom to forgo computer ownership, or even usage, is being taken.
- eurleif 14y ago
  >You increasingly need one to remain in compliance with the IRS and so forth Paper tax forms are still available, and tax payments can still be made with checks. How do you need a computer to stay in compliance with the IRS?
  - scarmig 14y ago
    The external costs of staying in compliance with the IRS without those forms are increasing. In both a relative and an absolute sense: they become more inconvenient and hard to even do, and on top of that there's an expectation you can get taxes done in the same amount of time as someone using a computer. Have this happen a thousand different little ways, and not having a computer becomes effectively impossible.

tnash 14y ago

I think this is telling: "In his personal life, Skrbina says he generally tries not to use technology if he can avoid it—he refuses to carry a cellphone, has never owned a microwave oven, and does not have a laptop (though he does use computers for his work)." So he advocates understanding Kaczynski's point of view, but he doesn't attempt to understand technology? That seems rather one-sided.

eurleif 14y ago
If he uses a computer for work, it sounds like he understands technology, but makes the choice not to use it.
- tnash 14y ago
  I think that's a broad leap from "uses a computer for work" to "understands technology". My grandparents use computers for work, but they do not know much about technology.

defen 14y ago

A lot of people on here are arguing in favor of technology, which leads me to believe that they haven't actually read the manifesto and are just going by Kaczynski's reputation or bombing targets or the title. It's not about technology! It's about human psychology and the form of society - technology is just an enabler for that. His arguments would be just as valid in ancient Egypt as they would be in the 21st century.

firefoxman1 14y ago

> "Humanity, the author writes, is at a crossroads, and we can either turn the clock back to a happier, more primitive time or face destruction." Has anyone else read a book called Ishmael? That's basically the premise except instead of being an opinionated rant, the points are made through dialog (a talking gorilla) and instead of forcing opinions on the reader, it's much more philosophical and nudges you logically toward the conclusion. Pretty enjoyable book.

AznHisoka 14y ago
I actually accidentally discovered Daniel Quinn's work through the Unabomber's Manifesto. I agree with a lot of what the Unabomber and Quinn says - the Unabomber just chose a more violent way to spread this message.