/lit/ - Literature

I read all his works to see if he offered any actual solutions but all he had to say basically amounted "dunno just destroy industrial civilisation irreversibly, somehow". What a joke.

>>19898584
I am not done reading his works but it does seem like he says that the only solution is to dismantle industrial society and there can be no middle of the road compromises
I can't wrap my head around this exactly but then I didn't get into harvard at 16
I'm not sure what his ideal state of technological advancement is (hunter-gatherer vs ancient greekish vs early medieval) but apparently one of his "students" David Skrbina seems to think going back to a level just before the renaissance would be sufficient

>>19898611
Technology would just arise again. It probably has risen to this level before and been destroyed in the past, even.

>>19898577
I think he chose to define freedom in a way that cannot be reconciled with scarcity, individuals/syndicates accumulating power, or even population growth, which is of course exacerbated by the industrial revolution and expansion of technology.

This isn’t so much a refutation, but by his own choice of terms, nothing can be done but to bring it all down.

>>19898645
That's my main problem with his "we cannot influence people in 500-1000 years' time" idea
which however is probably true, given how little influence even the most powerful people have over something as artificial as the stock market, which you will find out if you ever trade a free market btw (from /biz/)
prediction and influence simply cannot be done on a large enough scale to effect the system

>>19898651
I imagine his argument in these abstract terms kind of how we think of removing a chimpanzee from the wild
the chimpanzee can be taught to wear clothes and drink wine and take xanax, but eventually due to the fact that he is not having sex up to 50 times a day like they do in the wild (that's true btw) he will eat the face off of his captors
as in:
https://youtu.be/HriBqgx9ZPU?t=1255

so we are like animals who (albeit while a bit more sophisticated) have built this self-reinforcing system that deprives us of our ability to experience our true evolved nature and we begin to suffer for it

>verifiably smarter than Einstein
What are you talking about?

I'll admit I haven't read technological slavery yet, but from osmosis of hearing others talk about his thought he seems to have a limited view of technology as an entity which past a certain level of advancement must be created and weilded by massive powerful organizations which invariably controls people. I think I could make a pretty strong case for why that's only partially true and there is an alternative mode of technological development.

Yes, sending bombs to kill researchers is a fucking stupid act, puerile, jejune, meaningless. if he wants to stop modernity, he needs tons of nuclear weapons to create nuclear winter. Stupid fuck just can't understand this simple fact.

>>19898651
What if I don't want to go through the power process Ted? . The power process itself limits my ability to choose because it makes many otherwise satisfactory lifestyles unsatisfactory. Your idea of freedom is just slavery to a biological urge. You are a glorified coomer.

>>19898868
wrong
you need to think more broadly about it
he's in the camp of Deleuze and Nick Land
Technology/Capitalism/Materialism or whatever you call it has a self reinforcing tendency for its own growth that acts independent of human interests [like a cancer]

the only real argument that can be made is whether humans can actually slow it down and restrain it until we think critically about each outcome of the process (or just stop it)

>>19898830
Einstein never took an IQ test, but his IQ can reasonably be estimated to be a bit under 130
meme articles will tell you it might be 160ish, but that cannot reliably be assumed due to the fuzzy nature of IQ several standard deviations above the mean
Ted scored a 136 on a very thorough IQ test when he was in his 50s, in jail, and under harassment by the government, and a 167 on a less thorough one in his early years

>>19898949
what if your want is belied by you being happier if raised in a more primitive society?
of note, I think it's interesting that there are many anecdotes about european settlers 'going savage' or when their children were captured by indians if they were not returned after one year they did not want to go back whereas there are very few examples the other way around that I know of

>>19898645
He specifically noted that his "anti-technology" ideology would prevent it from happening. Basically he wanted it to become sort of a religion, with the founding myth being le evil technology.

>>19898980
It's possible that I would be happier. But I would just be a slave to my biology rather than technology. Ted claims to want freedom, but he actually just wants to satiate his desire to hunt his own food.

>>19898968
>Einstein had an IQ in the 120s
That is completely retarded. That would mean I have a fucking higher IQ than Einstein.

>>19899013
That’s even stupider than a technodystopia.
Dude wants to create Footloose iPhone edition.

>>19899133
you do not have a 120s IQ I guarantee

>>19899166
>people living freely and happily in autonomous communities is worse than zuck charging you to be able to decorate your metaverse house while your real body, atrophied and barely able to move is sustained in ze pod
you know that 90% of the Amish return from rumspringa on the low end right?

>>19898584
He literally outlines how to do so

>>19898611
>I can't wrap my head around this exactly but then I didn't get into harvard at 16
Imagine being intellectually intimidated by a schizo who lived in a shack in the woods, funded by his elderly parents, who used to ride a bike around and rage against his neighbor because he owned a sawmill. What a joke.

>>19898577
Can someone verify this?

>>19899889
The t's are wrong; that's not his handwriting.

>>19899889
Handwriting is completely off. Def not him.

>>19899904
"to" matches up though.

>>19899889
>>19899911
looks pretty similar to me, also I have heard this change in handwriting attributed to the fact that he has been transferred from ADX to a medical facility (in North Carolina?) and they have better pens there since it is not maximum security

where did you get the first image, anon?

>>19898868
He said there were two kinds of technology, small-scale and organization based. Small scale tech would be things like water wheels, and organization dependent technology would be things like refrigerators.

>>19898868
>but from osmosis of hearing others talk about his thought

I can't believe we're going to lose such a gentle soul.

>>19899889
>>19899904
>>19899911
Someone dumped these in another thread- I've got a few but I'm actually not going to re-publish them because I suspect they aren't genuine.

I know little about the man or his work- but there are a range of obvious grammatical aberrations here that do not seem organic.
It only caught my attention in the first place because of the strange way it was uploaded.

Knowing nothing about the man and commenting purely on the document it would appear that someone pretending to be an unreliable narrator wrote it.

>refute
This is like saying you must refute the diary and observations of some 15 year old idiot
It's existence refutes itself. Shallow as a puddle unoriginal cliche garbage

wasnt he diagnosed with cancer recently?

If technology bad then why is factorio so much fun

>>19898907
If ted would have never sent bombs to people, his work would be pretty much unknown

>>19900045
t. didn't read, wants to comment anyway

>>19900145
>"comment"
>incapable of fathoming the idea that the garbage he reveres is garbage
Keep going its funny

>>19898577
His collapse theory is retarded.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/01/kaczynskis-collapse-theory.html

>>19900202
This guy's argument is great and all, except for how Ted is primarily concerned with the survival and happiness of HUMANS, not just life in general
In the context of human thriving his argument is self refuting
while these evolutionary systems can plan for infrequent disasters in order to preserve themselves, once they are 'out of the bag' they cannot in almost any likelihood be stopped, and we will forever live in a world with real titans and gods whose interests are unknowable to us and probably do not care much about us,
and only look how many animals we have accidentally extincted

>>19898968
I can easily get 140 off a free brain puzzle app.

>>19900277
Ikr what a dumb bicth

I just listened to this podcast about him and Jacques Ellul pre refuted him by coming to christ who lives outside technology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgDMmZqqI6w

>>19900299
oh, also the guy on the podcast argued that ted would become the marx of the anti tech movement as tech and climate change increase.
also that his position is sort of a third pole that is neither left or right

>>19900299
Thanks for the link. All this channel seems very interesting.

>>19900299
christianity is probably one of the biggest contributors to this problem; egalitarian, universalist, dualist in the sense that you just go to heaven so nothing matters except muh accept muh yeshua

>>19898577
my main problem with his points is how for him the current system and restriction of freedom through technology just "sort of happened"
noone is appareantly behind this, noone did this, noone planned for this and noone is appareantly actually in control and it's all just being held up by people not realizing it

all of that despite the fact the current world order is obviously by design

Retroactively refuted by Derrida

>>19900356
you're not quite getting it
read chapter 1 of Anti-Tech Revolution Why and How

>>19900371
fair enough I only read the manifesto
I'll read up more

>>19898611
I can't refute him, no. But I do think he has the cause and effect jumbled up. Technology is a tool wielded by the elite. If it's not in control of the elite, then it's harmless in the grand scale of things. The chair isn't evil. The computer isn't evil when it's not under the control of the elite (a state, Bezos, whoever).
And I'm also failing to see why the pre-industrial revolution is an important marker. Personally I barely see the difference in its core between any sedentary grain states.
>can you move wherever, whenever
>can you disobey your betters
>can you be self reliant
None of those things were better "back then", the elites were just less efficient at upkeeping their rules without technology. Which is why they developed those technologies to help them.
Does he address any of those?

>>19898577
>verifiably smarter than both Einstein and Hawking?
Retardation he couldn't even make proper bombs like the basque or the irish. He a just a sad anti social little man

>>19899847
Not him but I have >140 and I'm a fucking loser
Not an internet test either, a real one

>>19900299
pffft

>>19898577
>verifiably smarter than Hawking and Einstein

You mean, he was better att seeing patterns of colours and shapesin premade tests than them.
How retarded do you have to be to believe that someone achieving a better result at a test is smarter than someone contributing to the explanation of the universe?

>>19899889
Lol it's hillarious how people try to dismiss this letter as if it wasn't rigorously in lign with his works, in fact he already wrote a highly similar letter to a german nationalist two years ago.

>>19900022
It was first uploaded on /lit/ about a year ago, then I'm the one who reposted them on 4chan, reddit etc.. What is strange about this? Is it strange because of your own ideological biases or something else entirely?

Is comparing IQ supposed to be a huge cope for not achieving anything in your life?

>>19898611
you're a joke

>>19901213
Yes.

>>19898907
He literally states the reason for bombing people is to get his work published. It's not meaningless; the rest, whatever.

>>19899947
And small-scale technology wouldn't become organization based technology in time because he hopes so.

>>19901213
it's called potential
the only cope here is from resentful genetically loaded mutants who scrape the barrel and are jealous of genetically fitter peoples

>>19899889
hell no, he wouldnt put his name on top

>>19901414
Wanna list personal achievements vs iq? You show me yours first.

>>19901453
q.e.d plus bonus ad hominem plus strawman, as if my personal situation would affect the truth of the statement
spiteful mutants are truly pitiful creatures

>>19901213
yes definitely. only if youre underage do you consider iq tests some sort of proof

>>19898645
He says that this is inevitable but it's still better than continuing on this line. You're buying time and if destruction is thorough, it will take a long time to get back to the level of today. Consider that most people aren't really aware of how our technology works or how it's built. If you destroyed data very systematically it would be very difficult to reverse-engineer everything until we get to the modern state of technology.

>>19900926
Not impossible but unlikely.

>>19901471
Not really. Stop putting IQ on a pedestal, it means jack shit

>>19901213
We've come to a point where people are justifying the retarded way our society works with genetic determinism, on the likes that if you are poor it's because of poor genetic material that makes you evil, ugly, stupid and basically you should die. People bring up IQ because it's obviously in contrast with the current model of thought by which people are evaluated.

>>19898706
>having sex up to 50 times a day like they do in the wild

How does the logistics of that work?

>>19901494
put banana in banana hole

>Is there any essential point of his that you can refute?
I can't refute his problem analysis concerning men. He is wrong about the industrial society and women though, they can coexist just fine.

Unlike his problem analysis his solution is unachievable though. Even if they'd succeed humanity would climb up again and again. It's pretty much a Dark Souls ideology in that regard. The Fire gets rekindled. Humanity blossoms. The Fire fades. Repeat.
Humans achieve technology of a certain level. Humans abolish technology. Repeat.

It should be obvious that nothing gets solved this way unless you repeat it often enough that earth can't support human life anymore.

The only alternative I have is Brave New World + Biotechnology though, which also solves nothing (but doesn't ignore the needs of one half of humanity). Maybe we just have to accept that suffering is always necessary and go back to Dostoevsky.

>>19898577
There is no huge flaw in his work. The loss of freedom is a huge problem and dismantling our current society in exchange for anarchy will fix that and will be guaranteed to lessen negative technological developments.


(Ex: mass surveillance, Facebook etc)

>>19901852
Rudolf Steiner says technology or the "technical cleverness" aspect of consciousness is currently dominating us, and trying to reduce us to cleverbots who create a machine avatar (AI=Ahriman) for it to embody itself in and transcend us. But he says instead of retreating back from it we have to develop the other aspects of our soul and psyche to the point that they can contain and sublate the technical side of our consciousness without being dwarfed by it.

Jung has a quote, "not around, but through."

Walther Darre had some interesting ideas about returning to a harmonious relationship with nature. I think Ted is too secular and materialist at heart to understand the hermetic principle of microcosm and macrocosm. Man has a role to play in nature too. We're just playing it terribly right now. It's normal to feel ashamed of this when you have a high degree of conscience and even to hate humanity when you realize we are the perpetrators of so much destruction. But simply to destroy humanity is stepping back. Something else would take our place. We have to transcend the principles causing destruction and exploitation altogether. Anyone who came after us would have to do the same, so retreating from the battle doesn't do anyone any good, nature included.

>>19898584
Reclaim your power process

>>19900094
it still is unkown to most, lets be honest. all he achieved was making it impossible to discuss him without people accusing you of being a terrorist sympathiser. His time would've been better spent promoting his work instead of being sat in prison.

>>19901899
>But he says instead of retreating back from it we have to develop the other aspects of our soul and psyche to the point that they can contain and sublate the technical side of our consciousness without being dwarfed by it.
Well, that is an interesting approach but from my experience with humans even those who could do that are rarely interested in it.
Martin Luther had a similar thought, every man should become his own priest with no need for a church when the majority of people didn't have to work 14 hours per day anymore. It didn't happen though and even now when we could abolish most work to become free nearly everyone chooses to keep working the same in exchange for more materialistic wealth.

I just don't see how a majority of people could get there.

But I'm a STEM guy like Ted, so maybe that isn't surprising but more importantly it's also not necessary for me to see it.

>>19900338
yeah, I don't see how anyone could see Christianity as anything other than part of the problem here. ultimately, what reason does a christian have to give a fuck about any of this if they just use their get out of jail free card when they die.

>>19902011
This is true for anyone who doesn't believe in reincarnation. When you die, you are no longer here. Pretending christians are somehow particularly lacking when it comes to caring about the future when they also generally have more kids is absurd.

>>19901465
>as if my personal situation would affect the truth of the statement

ooh, touching on a soft spot are we? IQ is measured by seeing how good a person can see patterns in premade tests. This CORRELATES with g, which is considered what people refer to as intelligence. g has also been described as the ability to adapt advantageously to the conditions you are in. How have you adapted to the environment you are in, you disgusting "high iq" shitposting fuck?
Yeah that's right, fuck off.

>>19902011
>>19900338
not saying christianity isnt a problem, but its not just "whatever bro", there are rules to the whole, get into heaven thing, its not THAT simple.

>>19902087
no, the problem is placing hope in a transcendental realm.

>>19902237
Ah yes because the growing number of atheists, who believe in their own annihilation, have so much to care about after they die.

>>19902272
where did I say that atheism is the answer? that being said it is probably better than christianity in the sense that they realize there isn't a better world waiting for them so anybody they care about is stuck with this one. instead of this world being just the menu screen for the real game you get to play if you enter the right button combination.

>>19902272
also, fwiw, I think the religion of the future is a blending of environmentally focused Religious Naturalism with traditional animistic beliefs found throughout the world, possibly via panpsychism, though I don't think that's an essential component.

What I think some of you guys are not getting is how he first establishes that we CANNOT steer, control or predict the trajectory of chaotic systems
it doesn't have to do with elites or whatever

if you're from /biz/ long enough you know this is true, many people try to forecast the price in a market but EVERYONE is wrong, no one ever predicts the price and when they happen to be right (which itself is even rare btw) they cannot do it again
this principle was proven in the 1970s and is why there are index funds
which, according to this metaphor is just to "trust the evolutionary process" and that systems will continue to increase in complexity with or without humans
Now if you are on the side of humans, then this is already a nonstarter, since it is more likely that humans will go extinct because of this or be subjugated by beings well beyond our control or understanding


Probably better to go the Dune route though and disallow the creation of any intelligent machines or genetic engineering which are the two things atm that have the highest potential of fucking everything up
to be optimistic, we seemingly have feared -blindly through our evolved instincts- the implications of nuclear bombs enough to not use them since WW2
but pessimistically, the last test was only in 1992

>>19900057
yes.

>>19898577
I'm a bit of a brainlet, but does his advocacy of quick and simultaneous deindustrialization also mean he is advocating for the death of approximately 7 billion people?

>>19902473
based biszraeli.

>>19898968
>Einstein never took an IQ test, but his IQ can reasonably be estimated to be a bit under 130
>meme articles will tell you it might be 160ish, but that cannot reliably be assumed due to the fuzzy nature of IQ several standard deviations above the mean
>Ted scored a 136 on a very thorough IQ test when he was in his 50s, in jail, and under harassment by the government, and a 167 on a less thorough one in his early years

>>19904217
Yes, his argument is that is collapse is going to happen eventually regardless, so doing a purposeful one as soon as possible would actually mean less death.

>>19902473
>is how he first establishes that we CANNOT steer, control or predict the trajectory of chaotic systems
but this is not true at all. all systems in reality are dynamic and chaotic but control is still possible. in fact, we don't even need nonlinear controllers most of the time, even for balancing robots which can be modelled as if they are in a non-chaotic environment. but regardless, Kalman filters (state predictors that help account for incomplete knowledge of the state of a given system) are integral for rockets and space ships to predict their future state, and make adjustments based on their measured location (you can hear neil armstrong reading values from the Kalman filter, which helped with real-time position estimates necessary to control position, during the moon landing).. but yes, you can't PERFECTLY steer, control, or predict the trajectory of chaotic systems (not because it's not theoretically impossible, in fact all chaotic systems are mathematically deterministic, but because "chaos" means that arbitrarily small errors in input can eventually result in arbitrarily larges changes in output without proper control, and it's not possible to have perfect knowledge of the state of any system, because in order to know the state you need to interact with the system, and so change the state, sort of like the uncertainty principle) so that, in the real world, if we're trying to for example control a vehicle's behavior in a turbulent fluid, or control oscillating chemical reactions, we use control methods such as Lyapunov stability/exponent to stabilize unstable periodic orbits (strange attractors), direct chaotic trajectories to desired spots, or achieve other requirements for the control problem

>>19902473
>many people try to forecast the price in a market but EVERYONE is wrong, no one ever predicts the price and when they happen to be right (which itself is even rare btw) they cannot do it again
markets are also chaotic and extremely complex, compounded by the fact that there is a speculative component based upon human psychology, but that does not mean that all chaotic systems are unsteerable/uncontrollable/unpredictable, and unlike bitcoin the stock market isn't complete speculation because stocks have sources of revenue other than the money provided by investors themselves (not necessarily zero or negative sum) and so not based entirely upon human psychology alone (i.e., speculation), although if you're just speculatively daytrading in Robinhood or whatever then of course it's unpredictable, you aren't bringing any information to the market, you are just guessing and so might as well be playing a slot machine, because to you the stock market is a completely black box

>>19898577
He's a hack writer. The only reason people are impressed by his writing is that they haven't read anything since pop-up books.

>>19898577
christopher langan is "verifiably smarter" than ted, einstein and hawking but he's just a meme and did jack shit besides his ctmu or whatever the fuck it is called
that being said I hope uncle ted lives long enough to see the world collapsing

>>19899880
Proofs?

>>19899880
ok but if my outline for something is "everyone in the world needs to finger their ass at the same time" well that's never going to happen, so who cares

>>19898577
It's pretty obvious that he just ignored anything that undermined his points

>>19898577
his theory seems very fatalist. that's basically all I can offer. as much as I see how awful modern society is, there's always things we can appreciate like the ability to connect with people on far away continents and modern medicine which if he had his way would bring back some dire consequences. considering a lot of people here (myself included) are pretty much shut ins, our collective acquired knowledge would make us unable to form bonds with average people, so it would make it easier to pick us off with no safety net.

>>19904645
Thank you for the insight into the prediction of chaotic systems, I am pretty new to Kaczynski and this is my main skepticism with his argument
I'm somewhat optimistic given things I admittedly don't understand about certain equations of initial conditions and ratios that determine things like how leaves grow and flowers form
if there are enough simple patterns governing much of complexity then we can use them to put limits on the possibilities of outcomes
intuitively when reading Uncle Ted, my mind is brought to the problem of Achilles and the turtle, which of course was solved with limits

however, the problem seems to be that no one at all is able to accurately predict the trajectory of bitcoin or the stock market, not just
and then there is, as Ted mentions, Russel's paradox wherein a set that includes itself then immediately becomes a bigger set and does not include itself, so it must include itself and so on and so forth
the analogy in trading is that if someone develops a model for the market, as soon as someone else discovers it they can use that model to countertrade it just a little bit and profit massively, and so on and so forth
there must be a way to formalize which systems approach a level of complexity that is unmodelable and unpredictable, probably something in information theory and if anyone knows of this please post

>>19904742
Probably not because the society we live in does not challenge us to overcome our problems and offers many escape routes of avoidance instead
in a society of people say in the early medeival period or of ancient times you would have been forced to go out of your comfort zone
this is the kind of thing I hear from army dudes all the time "you can be friends with anyone if you are all forced by circumstance to work toward something together with them"

Did he ever address the fact that all nations worldwide would have to agree upon using less or no technology ?
There would have to be some sort of world police that still has a military to enforce this new "law " or else all it would take is for one nation to keep their technology and then go blow everyone else away and always be total tech-pimps
>>19901386
Also out of self defense

>>19905154
yes he does address this
this is not as great a problem as you might think (or maybe it is) because this will HAVE to be done in order to solve many of the problems facing us today like global warming, and has already been done (kinda) with nuclear wepaons [at least in terms of abstinence]

>>19898577
Have you guys noticed that a lot of normies are becoming aware of Ted and his writings? Almost of them have very superficial thoughts about him, other than what he did was wrong but he was right about everything, but I just find it curious that Ted is being discussed in the greater society by people that have no idea of what the fuck he wrote and how their mere existence refutes everything that uncle Ted tried to accomplish.

>>19904882
>how leaves grow and flowers form
Also capillaries in your body are formed even though your DNA of course doesn’t code for particular capillaries, instead your DNA basically defines the chaotic fractal chemical processes that pattern capillaries throughout your body. Something like this would be basically impossible to control for (as you say, unmodellable and unpredictable), since your capillary layout ultimately depends on extremely sensitive things like diet temperature blood pressure, particular stresses during particular periods, and it’s not obvious in what way those would change anything But like, it depends on the process. The problem with the stock market is more of a robustness issue, how it responds to world catastrophes like covid and the causes of recessions, and the value of the dollar which seems to be controlled rather nicely with modern monetary policy so far, like nobody can predict in a meaningful way what will happen (because nobody can predict if a new virus will appear tomorrow, etc) but even among irrational humans there are principles that seem to hold and many trends that have held, and the value of a stock is at least justified by things other than “this is currently what it’s price is” unlike bitcoin, so that the problem isn’t so much speculation (people will always speculate on dumb shit like GME, and psychology may not ever be completely predictable) but one of robustness to uncertainties, which won’t be.

>if someone develops a model for the market it can always be exploited
That reminds me of how, if anyone ever develops a machine to tell the difference between real images and false ones, it can always be used to optimise the machine, ad infinitum. I don’t know, I don’t mind if the stock market is perfectly modellable or predictable, just as long as it allocates capital more or less efficiently and (unless ur a libertarian) proper regulation to solve certain ethical issues that pop up. ALSO I don’t know if you heard of “project cybersyn” but there it was an attempt to use Cybernetics (basically control theory) to apply a control system to an entire nation’s economy, it failed for unrelated reasons, but there were a few distribution catastrophes that it succeeded at efficiently solving

>there must be a way to formalise which systems are unmodelable and unpredictable
I don’t have any experience with this, nowadays you can use system identification methods or neural networks if a system is too complex to model from first principles (which is usually just trial and error with no real formal method), which I only took one short course in, because what control engineers control is usually way simpler than national economies or human brains, like quadrotors or process control in chemical plants which can be solved 99% of the time with PIDs (basically the simplest controller)

don’t care how smart he was nerd, even (especially?) smart people can and do get gripped by ideology

someone post the reading guide please

>>19905310
Houellebecq massively shilled Kaczynski in his last book, hope that will help.

>>19901170
Could you provide the letter to the German nationalist as a reference?
I know little of Kaczynski, it just struck me as a very strange format for a letter, full of strange features which could only be deliberate inclusions.

https://contraciv.noblogs.org/files/2019/10/Civilized-to-Death.pdf
Christopher talk a lot of how modern society is not made for humans that evolved in hunter gatherer societies,(you really need to read this book)
On other hand it´s not a flawless book https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Unabomber >Kaczynski's analysis of non-industrial and non-agricultural societies being superior to the modern world rests on a fundamental ignorance of human history. While he rightly criticized the idealized view of primitive hunter-gatherer societies as being communal utopias of equality, cooperation, and pacifism, he simultaneously indulged in the equally fallacious view that they were libertarian utopias where freedom and rugged individualism reigned. Even if one ignores questions over standards of living, child mortality, and disease, both viewpoints fly in the face of the actual history of ancient empires, which used brutal coercion to crush the nomadic hunter-gatherers and consolidate the power of their leaders. None of these early empires came out of nowhere; rather, they grew out of hunter-gatherer tribes who discovered some good land with food in enough abundance that it was worthwhile to settle down there permanently, start cultivating the land to maximize the food they were able to hunt and gather (inventing agriculture and animal husbandry in the process), and kick off any interlopers who tried to take "their" food and land (inventing armies and war in the process). A return to primitive society would soon entail a return to primitive, tyrannical forms of governance as a result, not a new age of liberty.

Likewise, his analysis glosses over the fact that a mass die-off would be the guaranteed end result of abandoning industrial civilization. Earth's population is supported almost entirely by agriculture, even before the Green Revolution of the 20th century and its resultant population explosion. If industrial civilization were to collapse, billions of people would starve to death, but not before turning against each other for food and resources, potentially killing billions more. All this comes before the prospect of nuclear weapons, be they controlled by governments or in the hands of terrorists, enters the mix, with the potential to finish the job of humanity's self-destruction. Of course, for those of a hard green and/or Malthusian persuasion who believe that Earth is already overpopulated, or social Darwinists who believe that modern society prevents natural selection from "doing its job", the death of most of humanity would not necessarily be seen as a bad thing.

>>19900022
It´s him https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/ted-kaczynski

If he bombed corporations, banks, scientists and college professors he could've changed more things, not just perception and awareness.

>>19901852
In his unabomber manifesto he says that he will talk about women in hunter gatherer but it´s emphasis on social power he did not discuss there. http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf

>>19902272
>growing atheists
Where?

>>19906957
>goes from a 3 to an 8
damn, women are just way more attractive, i'm beginning to understand the dynamics behind female sexual selection

>>19907394
>corporations and college professors

Why do you think they called him the unabomber?

Marx essentially refuted everything he says. Kaczynski is obviously a very intelligent person with schizoid personality disorder who felt so alienated working in a bourgeois academic setting that he revolted by becoming an eco-terrorist.

Of course, he sadly didn't understand that it is the specific organization of liberal capitalist society that made him feel this way, not the mere existence of industrial technology. He's honestly a very tragic figure, someone who has a revolutionary spirit but doesn't understand who the enemy really is.

>>19907662
>don’t like normgroids, simple as
>normgroid commie: ackshully the solution is to give normgroid psychopaths even more control over your day-to-day life and societal organization
Truly unhinged

>>19907696
Anon, how about you actually respond to what people are actually saying instead of responding with Reaganite boomer-tier headcanon about the Soviet Union from the 1980s.

>>19907662
>doesn't understand who the enemy really is
>Marx does
truly a retarded take
Marx's solution was a complete failure, at least Kaczynski's has demonstrable precedent in the form of the Amish
Marx thought the system of Materialism/Capitalism/Competitive Evolution could be used or planned for the good of humans, obviously it cannot
Kaczynski broadened the conception of a process Marx sorta identified
the real important political dichtomoy of our time is that between Liberalism/Materialism (of which Communism, Capitalism, Socialism are a part) and Reaction & Anti-Tech

(not that other anon btw, /lit/ needs IDs)

>>19907771
>You'll have a much more fulfilling and humane existence in the same technological hellscape if you just replace one master with another

>>19907801
Again, this isn't an argument, this is just braindead ideological talking points.

>>19907787
>at least Kaczynski's has demonstrable precedent in the form of the Amish

lol. The Amish are as reliant on the functioning of capitalist markets as anyone else on the planet.

>>19907662
Lol, you are an anglo with a minuscule understanding of Marx, probably from outdated thinkers or outright counter-revolutionaries. You also haven't read anti-tech rev.
You also fail to address the current critique of value, and why the revolutionary inheritors of Marx are anti-industrial.
You also post cartoon pictures LMAO

>>19907787
The Amish have nothing to do with Kaczynski's strategy. Read more.

>>19907662
>Marx essentially refuted everything he says
Thing is it is the other way around.

>>19907837
>You also fail to address the current critique of value

Which is what exactly?

>>19907815
no, not at all
some of them trade with outsiders, but some of them are completely walled off except for rumspringa
especially the Schwarzentruber Amish

>>19907837
>Amish have nothing to do with Kaczynski's strategy
your pic is irnoic since you don't grasp the nuances
a group of self sufficient farming people are indeed completely in line with Kaczynski's near-ideal end state

>>19907864
>no, not at all
>some of them trade with outsiders, but some of them are completely walled off except for rumspringa

That just isn't true. The Amish are fully integrated into the U.S economy(with the notable exception of being exempt from Social Security), they literally sell their goods to outsiders; the entire culture would literally implode within one generation if they only traded amongst themselves.

>>19898577
"surrogate activity" is metaphysical nonsense

>>19907837
Encyclopédie des Nuisances is a really good reference. Tbh I find their publications (especially Jaime Semprun's books) way more interesting than Kaczynski's work. But I don't know if it has been translated in English.

>>19898577

He is a good man. History will write him as a hero.

>>19907843
It really isn't. Kaczynski has never really critiqued Marxism, he's only ever critiqued "leftism", which is a painfully milquetoast thing to do that George Orwell already did better than when Kaczynski was just a toddler.

>>19900299
>I just listened to this podcast
Holy cringe. Also that's literally one of the main critiques of Ellul, that his "solutions" are solely spiritual.

>>19907873
Kaczynski's thought process ignores the metaphysical with the one exception that he arbitrarily holds up human freedom and nature as goods in and of themselves
this is not a bad thing, because you don't need to do a lot of mental gymnastics to say that "get in ze coom pod" is bad and that "we like humans and being alive"
you could say "well I don't mind living in the coompod" aka taking the blue pill in the matrix, but then it really becomes a practical argument about weighing the likelihoods of whether the coompod can actually be achieved or whether we're really just continually degrading our quality of life until we go extinct

Neo-luddites like Ted view culture not as a mode of emergent transformation that discloses deeper and wider worlds, but primarily a distorting force that conceals and contorts both a pure nature and their truly pristine selves. Culture is not a transformative emergence of greater differentiation/integration that can go too far into dissociation/alienation. No, culture is primarily an alienating force that necessarily and nastily separates humans from nature and them from themselves.

And so above all, they must get away from culture and get back to nature, back to a wilderness that expresses a pure nature and their own most authentic impulses. Culture is fundamentally a crime of distortion, and they must seek behind this distortion for the truth of pure nature and the truth of their pure selves.

That culture (and the rational-ego) can indeed repress and dissociate natural/libidinal impulses is true enough, and those alienated impulses need to be recontacted, freed from the cultural repressions, and reintegrated into the psyche (regression in service of the ego). But when culture is seen as only or primarily a repressive force, then the cure is regression, period, and this is the self-defeating and self-contradictory stance that many neo-luddites, then and now, embrace.

Thus, for our salvation, we are to retreat, not prior to the dissociation (everybody agreed that was necessary), but prior to the differentiation that had allowed the dissociation: not simply prior to the disease, but prior to the depth itself!—which amounts to: cure the disease by becoming more shallow.

In all of these particular eco camps, the result of the regressive slide—of the failure to understand the difference between differentiation and dissociation—results usually in a rather dualistic, Manichaean, almost Zoroastrian, worldview. There is the good spirit (pristine nature) and the bad spirit (human intervention interpreted as any deviation from “harmony with nature”).

The Ego-Enlightenment set out to free Eros from its heteronomy, its immersion in conformist and herd mentalities; and it sought this autonomy with such force that it went too far into alienation, and ended up with Eros degenerating into Phobos: seeking freedom, it found only fear and alienation, which bound it even more tightly to that which it wished to transcend.

And the Eco camp, so intensely desiring insertion into a Larger Life, an Agape that embraces the depth of the Kosmos with joyful Love and Care, ends up scraping layers and layers of depth off the universe in search of the primal ground where this insertion can occur: it reduces the deeper and higher to the lower and shallower, a reduction and regression and leveling that, by any other name, is Thanatos. In search of a larger life, it finds only a morbid death (i.e., a lesser depth), a rancid leveling of just those differentiations that allowed the search in the first place.

>>19907662
>Marx essentially refuted everything he says
>muh capitalism(as if the reason capitalism sucks isn't due to technology)
>le epic aesthetic pic

>>19907909
yeah it's like in Interstellar when they fuck up the planet before having enough energy and technology to unfuck it, and the only solution is for God to provide them with a wormhole to another planet they hopefully won't fuck up

>>19907922
yeah I'm not reading that

>>19907922
t. just took philosophy 101

>>19907922
>In all of these particular eco camps, the result of the regressive slide—of the failure to understand the difference between differentiation and dissociation—results usually in a rather dualistic, Manichaean, almost Zoroastrian, worldview. There is the good spirit (pristine nature) and the bad spirit (human intervention interpreted as any deviation from “harmony with nature”).
So fucking obvious you've never read Ted. Why do people think they should give their opinion on him when they've never even read him?

>>19907930
No, capitalism sucks because it uses technology to repress people and to exploit labor more and more in order to produce larger and larger profits, causing social unrest, psychological problems, crime and enormous economic inequality.

>>19907950
Right because the USSR was Heaven.

>>19907956
See >>19907771

>>19907922
your reddit spacing is painful to read

I agree a little bit.
Something in my God-given internal goodometer tells me that "art is good"
on the other hand you have to take into account that humans are really just apes, and as I said here:
>>19898706
>the chimpanzee can be taught to wear clothes and drink wine and take xanax, but eventually due to the fact that he is not having sex up to 50 times a day like they do in the wild he will eat the face off of his captors
humans really are running an operating system that does not suit them, which is made pretty clear when Ted destroys the Garden of Eden style idea that many anarchoprimitivists have of hunter-gatherer society in A Critique of Anarcho-Primitivism
where he outlines all the raping and fighting and strenuous work they do all the time in H-G societies, but that they presumably don't see as much of a problem


the problem is, Ted being a smart man ahead of his time, sees that this transcendence is not yet possible and is way way way more likely to just end up in a wimper of an ending to humanity by creating more problems than we solve more quickly than we can solve them

>>19907894
Ted has proven that focusing on class or capital is a waste of time and that Marx didn't understand the real problem.
I don't blame Marx for that though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockaigne this was once the idea of paradise for the majority of people in Europe but today? Today nobody sees the appeal anymore. The main difference is that there are still people like you who live in the past and are unable to overcome the dead ends of philosophy.
Probably because people can make a career out of talking nonsense about Marx.

>>19907965
>if you say the USSR sucked you're a boomer
Right...

>>19907985
If you respond to actual criticism of modern capitalism with "The USSR sucked!", you're a fucking dumb boomer Reaganite yes. Whataboutism makes you look liked a room temperature IQ'd bootlicking retard.

>>19907991
Yeah I'm not saying the USSR sucked to say capitalism is good like boomers do, I'm saying that the attempts to make non-capitalist technological societies have been just as bad as capitalist technological societies.

>>19907982
>Ted has proven that focusing on class or capital is a waste of time

Mhm, and I'm sure telling people to bomb the power grid, or delivering nail bombs to mechanical engineers at Harvard isn't a waste of time at all lol.

>>19907993
>I'm saying that the attempts to make non-capitalist technological societies have been just as bad as capitalist technological societies.

And yet you labor under the delusion that anything Ted proposes will be different.

>>19898584
Just because you're able to recognize a structural issue doesn't mean you must also propose a solution.

>>19908007
Uhh yeah, pretty sure it would be different? What even are you saying?

>>19907922
>CRISPR you into total, objective submission and neurastheny
You fail to grasp the appeal of Kaczynski's STRATEGY. You are still engaging with him on ideological grounds. I do not disagree with you, but what can I say? You fail to understand the cardinal point of anti-tech thought.

This goes for every single detractor, even a good portion of its adherents.

>>19908000
He never told anyone that. In fact, he told the opposite. Lol. Look up his letters to ITS or anything of the sort.

>>19908007
Kaczynski does not propose anything. The entire premise of anti-tech thought is that the development of society is not subject to rational control. Planification is rooted in enlightenment delusion; the ulterior developments of materialism dismantle these ideas.

>>19902473
EMT fags are total fucking retards and should be hung.

>>19908036
>He never told anyone that. In fact, he told the opposite.

Even if he didn't, those are the sorts of things he either did or wanted to do himself. And they do nothing to the political system at all lol, whereas class politics created nuclear superpowers like the USSR and China.

Saying class politics "is a waste of time" is a pretty funny and ironic thing to say when you're a fan of a person who literally did nothing to change society and did the *one thing* which pretty much is a waste of time if you want to change anything, which is to murder random innocent civilians.

Anons shill me on this. I’m pretty retarded on most accounts, so is there anything I can gain from reading Ted’s work?
I’ve been going through this thread trying to get the gist of what he talks about, but what I’m reading here seem to be a lot of
>there’s this really big problem and there’s nothing you can do to fix it

>>19908106
he's a mentally ill prison tranny, what do you think?

>>19908106
He is the latest iteration of materialist thought. He is not concerned with theory or ideology, he is concerned with strategy. Think Lenin but in the current year.

>>19908163
Worst post I've seen on this board in a long time.

>>19908088
holy shit stop your reddit spacing you mongoloid

>>19908106
better just read Anti-Tech Revolution Why and How

the problem is that technology, especially industrial technology that relies on social organization of people, behaves like any organism does in evolution
it behaves, tries to reproduce, defend itself, etc much like a virus
and the way it does this is through people, (it uses people to create propaganda or discredit its detractors so it can stay "alive", for instance)
and even more important than this, it has a tendency to subvert dissidents into becoming harmless to the system or even helpful
(this is where you get "controlled opposition" or "rebels" wearing Che Guevera tshirts they bought with money from their jobs)
Marxists and the like long saw this but attributed it merely to Capitalism
we now know, from many more sources than Kaczynski that Capitalism is really more of an expression of this process/principle/pattern than the source of it

so Kaczynski's is a practical argument:
when you see through the delusions of technophiles, and see the incoming plateau of technological S curves, you may realize that we are not heading for a voluntary utopia where our problems are solved,
but a state of slavery to a system
it gets even worse the more power and better intelligence these technological organisms are able to amass (think AI, or genetically altering human nature to be more malleable to the needs of technology)
this combines with the hedonic treadmill and the addictiveness in modern society to produce a kind of "Human zoo" where people are restless from having their needs "met" without having to work for them and without the choice to opt out
so, Ted sed, we aren't getting really getting the better deal choosing technology like we think we are

every technophile seems to think we will solve the rapidly increasing number of problems we face as we continue to rebuild the world according to the blind interests of these primitive technological organisms
but none of them seem to take into account the situation in which we pathetically are just not *quite* able to solve all these problems in time and are either killed off (with a high likelihood of mass extinction of nature as well) or subjugated forever by beings we can't understand or control which have no use for us

>>19908163
How is he concerned with strategy when he freely admits he has no idea how to irreversibly destroy the thing he's against?

Hoooohhh~
So you think you can eliminate humanity's progress?
No matter how many times you try... technological development will rise again.
That's thanks to... the power of SCIENCE.
Sosoruze, kore wa. (I'm getting excited!)

How are Matthew C. Harris threads not /lit/ but this guy's are? He actually killed random people and he has no literary merit.

>>19908288
mmmm, maybe not after you've depleted all the surface level oil to get it started again! hahaha

>>19908323
>uses the N-word more than 10,000 times among thousands of other racial slurs
wow pretty based

Does anyone happen to now what his current mailing address is?

>>19908426
*know

>>19907662
>Marx essentially refuted everything he says
>not a single example given
Every time
JUST READ MARX BRO
MARX EXPLAINS EVERYHING

I find it strange that Ted insists the anti-tech revolution must be simultaneous and universal.
This seems if I'm not mistaken based on the assertion that high tech societies invade low tech ones.
In a similar way Ted claims white supremacism is doomed because only white states can be white.

Why is killing everyone else not an option?
Can we not simply bomb our enemies back to the stone age then proceed to with them out with stones?
White supremacists are typically confident of their ability to win stone age meta.
A communist threw a stone at me last week so I picked it up, ran at him and batter him with it.
Can this not be the basis for an anti-tech revolution?

What am I missing here?

>>19910194
You're not missing a lot, except the sheer difficulty of trying to do so
Mutually assured destruction is still a thing you have to consider when trying to "bomb them back to the stone age"

He was right about the many large things and wrong about the small important ones

>>19910578
But this would seem equally to serve my point.
I am reading the romans and the phrase "make a desert and call it peace" comes to mind.
Why can we not just kill all our enemies and then just dump the weapons we used into the ocean?
Why does he write off ethnonationalism so quickly when it's been the defining force of society for all of human history?

I'm genuinely curious and I guess I'll just have to read his books

>>19910653
Yeah he does talk briefly about research showing hunter-gathers not considering the next tribe over "real people" and calling them "black devils" (in A Critique of Anarcho-Primitivism) so he's aware of the fact that the technological system mashes peoples together against their will for its own benefit

The thing is, in history people didn't consider "race" but clan, and after that the natio to be more important
Race is a construction of mashing different ethnicities together which previously didn't want to be together, precisely by an early version of the technological system
Now the system is beyond even race, which you and me is distressing
I remember my own grandfather, a Norwegian saying it was weird for him to marry a German
Now my cousins in Norway have Mexican and Spanish girlfriends
It's all fucked up

>>19910614
Thank you o wise centrist

>>19898577
He’s not wrong with a lot of his points.
However, I think he ruminated way too much on his thoughts.

>>19898577
I have trouble reconciling his anti-technology stance with a Darwinistic outlook on nature. It seems destined to be out-competed and fail, unless you can get every advanced society to agree on it, which presents its own host of issues.

>>19910867
well that's a pathetic answer to it
if everyone can see it is bad for them, they will stop it
just like global warming accords and the use of nuclear warheads
the more robust answer is that through ego death we, as consciousnesses, do not need to identify with humans and only need to make sure the next consciousnesses we create are broad enough to be able to survive on their own and not kill themselves, so consciousness itself can live on and will diversify into even greater forms than we have today
but even that is a pretty weak argument practically speaking; it's the better and surer solution to tear everything down

sidenote: people think industrial society will be built again but they neglect the fact that all the easily available cheap energy sources within 100 feet of the earth's surface are basically depleted at this point
it might well be a long time before they can get to those again

>>19898706
>but eventually due to the fact that he is not having sex up to 50 times a day like they do in the wild
Just have sex

>>19898949
>What if I don't want to go through the power process Ted?
That makes you Nietzsche’s last man. A nothing pseudo-person devoid of will to power. A dead end.

>>19899889
Ancient Egypt had a planned economy.

>>19900241
Fuck life in general.

>>19898577
Technology makes me and us more powerful. Therefore it is good. QED

>>19898584
Everything he has written after the manifesto is so incredibly vague and imprecise that it made me wonder wether its possible that there are secret messages steganographically hidden in the books he released from prison or any of the thousands of letters he has probably send by now, containing a more detailed plan to action that people just haven't found out about yet. Dude is a genious after all. I find it odd that he seems to be well informed about the world "outside" but has never even adressed his ideas in a more realistical geopolitical context. Yeah, of course that is because he knows what he wants has 0% chance of ever happening. But at the same time this also seems like lame cope.

>>19898968
>Ted scored a 136 on a very thorough IQ test when he was in his 50s
I'm hearing this for the first time. Source That's enough to turn a normal person a literal retard.

>>19899889
Lmao. We need to establish solid ted-isnads or the essence of tedism will be lost. I'd start with classifying everything that can't be tracked down to Skrbina and his henchmen or isn't already in the anarchist libary inauthentic at this point.

>>19900310
He has definitely laid a good foundation for a personality cult. His martyrdom, the betrayal by his own brother, it's almost Christian. The question is, why isn't it happening, where are the tediites, why are there no real life "Freedom Clubs"?

>>19901899
>instead of retreating back from it we have to develop the other aspects of our soul and psyche to the point that they can contain and sublate the technical side of our consciousness without being dwarfed by it.
Elaborate. How?

bump