The Unabomber was right

Great Debates
141

Don’t have time to re-read it now - gotta travel for the holidays soon.

But the day he finally got that published in a paper, was the day I had a long cross country flight. I can tell you, I was nervous taking that on the plane that day, and reading it with all the other passengers staring at me I felt.

Much as I would if I was to read the Koran today.

But I digress…

Let’s not forget that Kaczinski was a product of Berkeley in the 60s, same as many other radical groups he outlasted.

I recall finding much in his writing that derived from McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” and maybe his other works too. Lots of people talk about McLuhan’s work, few have ever really read it and tried to understand it.

He (McLuhan) talks about the nature of society as being based on what those in power can control with communications technology - you can’t control further than what you can manage communications with effectively. When there was open spaces between power centers, technology improved to fill in the vacuum.

Until more recently when there was no more open space, and there was global communication, then we started getting global wars and conflicts.

I think (and I was born when Kennedy was President so …) that a lot of the “back to nature” radical politics of the 60s and early 70s was about rolling back somehow to an earlier time where there was still space between societies that was large enough to supersede the existing communications technologies, and so power could not be extended across them.

It is easy to romanticize these times, they are the times when people could explore, technology in general was simple enough for a typical person to understand or even improve upon if they thought about it.

In hindsight, that is.

And it is true that the space between power centers meant men could escape or explore new lands subject to no or less control of the state. That is of course a romantic notion too, and it is what Kaczinski ultimately tried to do.

As a grade-schooler I remember hearing the intriguing phrase “living off the land”. In the regard of looking to do just that, I don’t think don’t think that TK and Christopher McCandless were all that different. TK did what he thought he could do to persuade us all it was a good idea, CM just went and did it for himself. But TK’s ideas come from a long and respected line, which, while it may not have started with Thoreau, certainly passed through it, and later through Berkeley and the “living off the land” movement.

142

That’s exactly true. The nature of our work is disconnected from the effects. We deal with reports and process flow diagrams, not people. Bossess send orders via their Blackberry with little regard for the fact that the person on the other end may have other things to do than wait there 24-7 for the posibility of being called on to perform some task. 90% of my conversations at work are via email or Sametime instant messenger.

Essentially, we are turning people into interchangeable widgets we can provide instructions to.

143

Maybe you are.

Me, I am busy taking advantage of the labor that gets freed up, and inventing new and hopefully satisfying and rewarding things for them to do, and new ways for them to do it.

If you don’t want to live where there are organizations that share and distribute labor, than just say so. Good luck “living off the land”.

If it is a matter of degree to you, then make the case better and more persuasively than the Unabomber or a zillion other people smarter than you or me have done instead of putting bumper-sticker level rhetoric on a message board of all things, given the topic.

144

As opposed to the good old days, where you were either a hunter or a walking womb, depending on your gender. Lots of freedom to choose there. :rolleyes:

145

Yeah, but you were, like, in touch with nature, man!

146

I think you are looking at it wrong.

You are saying: “they had two jobs in their society (hunter gatherer man and hunter gatherer woman) and we have thousands of jobs in ours. Look at how much freedom we have compared to them. Poor bastards. How dehumanizing it must have been for them.”

But it is not the quantity of jobs in a society that can dehumanize someone, it is the quality. In our society, there are a lot of jobs where one simply becomes a cog in the machine.

Here are two characteristics that make a job good (I am not saying these are the only two, but these are certainly very significant):

(1) The overall purpose of the job is clear. You understand why you are doing it and you feel it is something that should be/needs to be done.

(2) It is something that requires skill, that requires thinking and creativity, something that rewards ingenuity.

There are some jobs in our society like that. The people who get them tend to enjoy them. But there are an awful lot of jobs that do not require skill nor thinking, where creativity will only get you yelled at. Or jobs where you wonder at the end of the day if sacrificing your life for a slightly stickier brand of tape is really worth it. These are jobs that turn you into a cog, jobs that dehumanize you.

Now, lets look at the hunter gatherer jobs to see if they meet the criteria. First, it hardly seems accurate to label them as a single job since so many skills are required within them, but I’ll leave that aside for now. Clearly any hunter gatherer can see why they are doing what they do each day. I don’t think that requires an explanation.
As for criteria #2, I can think of few other jobs that require that combination of knowledge coupled with physical skills. You need to know an immense amount to survive the way they did, and the obstacles faced on a daily basis required as much creative thinking and problem solving as anything else.

So, while they had less freedom in terms of overall “job” choice, this was more than made for by the fact that their default roles had the crucial characteristics (see criteria) of the most sought after jobs in our society. There were simply no “cog in the machine” jobs available.

147

I would like to be able to live my own life, with my technology habit, and not have to worry about where my next meal is coming from. So there you go.

In our society, we have the freedom to choose. Those people did go out and live in conditions the rest of us wouldn’t want to. Great! If they want to stay out in the boonies living like pioneers, more power to them. But they don’t HAVE to do that to survive, and if they fail, society has a safety net for them. People living in such circumstances in the past didn’t have that - if there was a major crop failure, people starved, they didn’t say “well, experiment failed” and then head to 7-11.

If you want a job that is hands-on, you can get one. Go be a carpenter, or an organic farmer, or whatever. But I like having the choice. Especially as a female, I have so many more choices available to me today, and I’m very happy being a technician, rather than being expected to marry and procreate and run a household. I am more fulfilled doing what I do now, even if it isn’t the most earthshattering job, than to have been made to marry young and raise kids, do laundry, and cook and clean for hours… with no choices whatsoever.

If lots of people think that more primitive conditions are more satisfying, that’s lovely. I don’t see any reason to stop them. But there are those of us who are pretty happy working our meaningless jobs so that we can spend our time surfing the Internet, talking to people all over the globe, going to grocery stores with more selection of foods than ever, and playing with our gadgets. Technology doesn’t have to be just about distraction or driving people apart - technology can bring people together, too. I communicate with my family members more now than ever because I can reach them anytime. I even have a myriad of methods – if I don’t want to disturb them, I’ll send them a text; if I want to tell all of them at once something, I’ll send a mass email; if I want to chat, I’ll call. All of this is literally at my fingertips all of the time. I don’t want to go back to waiting for the Pony Express to send a letter to my mom who lives 40 miles away.

I know we’re all prone to romanticize earlier, simpler times. I’ve done it too, and as a history buff I think it’s frustrating to have lost things, and lost knowledge, as we’ve progressed. Realistically, though, I don’t want to have to live in such conditions. We idolize suffering and overcoming adversity as a culture, and prize achievements that are hard won. But, I think there’s plenty of opportunity to overcome adversity and become close with your family without mass reversion of significant technological advances. Sure, I love going out to work in my garden now and then, but I’ll take having a busy modern life over trench mouth and locusts.

148

So you don’t know how one goes about “self-actualizing their potential” but you are certain it could not take place in a hunter gatherer society?

149

Hunter-gatherers can’t do that; they don’t have the knowledge networking resources to graduate into a larger success-space. Only by technologically catalyzed paradigm changes can they synergistically transcend their own limitations, actualizing their own potential and reaching a new plane of achievement.

150

Ol’ pointy-haired Der Trihs

151

Actually yes. To a certain extent that’s what I do. I look at business processes, figure out how to simplify them, quantify them into reports and so on. People are basically just numbers on a spreadsheet or nodes on some workflow diagram.

Pointing out the irony of discussing the merits of the Unabomber’s philosophy on a message board doesn’t make you clever. It just shows a lack of understanding of the real issues. The choice isn’t between “throw away your Blackberry and live off the land Into The Wild style” and “embrace all technology because resistence is futile”. It’s how to embrace technology without being crushed by it (or crushing others).

For millions of people that actually is the choice - live off the land (really scavenge off of the throwaways living on the fringes of civilization) as a homeless person or work whatever mind-numbing minimum wage industrial job we need you to do.

Exactly. And I’m simply pointing out that one of the issues with technology is that while economies of scale and technical efficiency produce an economic benefit, they also turn many jobs into genericized, quantifyable sets of repeatable processes that can be performed by the sort of people who don’t care about being “self actualized”. It’s the difference between running your own electronics store and working in a local Best Buy.

152

You’ve brought up two issues here; the use of technology to pin us down and its role in isolating people from one another. With regard to the first, you have a point, but tech has an equal potential to liberate us. As just one example, twenty years ago access to foreign language media was very limited for most Americans. The only way to watch TV in German, for example, was to travel to a German speaking country. Now foreign TV can be found online. Small-town newspapers, too, which you would never have found at an “international” newsstand in the States.

With regard to the second issue, I’ll be the first to say that I detest conference calls, because I feel that I operate at barely 50% efficiency when trying to interact with someone in this manner. IMO to have a visual interface as well would be very helpful, and this is probably possible now. In other words, with improvements in the technology of remote communication, I think the problems can be addressed successfully.

153

If this is a direct response to what I wrote, you don’t seem to have finished reading it. I was simply pointing out that there is something essential to human satisfaction which is largely missing from much of our current mega-industrial society and employment culture, which we should try to regain because its absence is harming us. You may note that I also said that we should do that regardless of what level of technology we choose. Responding to my comment as if it were an anti-technology, primitive- or agrarian-living manifesto is misrepresenting it.

154

:eek:

That was… impressively horrible.

155

Yes exactly.

Plus, you’re lucky to find even those jobs going in the current US economy. My daughter’s class graduated this year, and they’re competing directly with their parents’ generation for those minimum wage jobs right now.

156

Speaking of mega-industrial, here is a shot of the rail yards between NYC and Newark, NJ. Here is the overhead sat view on Google Maps. If you ever driven down I-95, I-78 or the Pulaski Skywayand seen this part of NJ it’s actually quite impressive. All you can see to the horizon is this sea of railyards, seaports, thousands of shipping containers, warehouses, parking lots, refineries criss-crossing highways and rail lines and other infrastructure that feeds into New York, Newark, Jersey City and the surrounding area. It pretty much looks exactly like the surface of the Death Star. From the elevated view from any of those highways, IMHO you get the feeling of driving accross a sort of giant machine that just isn’t built to human scale. Which is basically what it is.

I don’t want to downplay the recent economic situation, but people have been managing to find decent-paying professional jobs, even in this market. But it is certainly tough and competetive.

157

As has been said before in this thread the problem is not with technology in and of itself, but rather with human implementation of and interaction with it. We, as a species, are too immature to handle the technology we possess and to use it apropriately.

It is analogous to handing a three year old a pistol - likely someone is going to get shot. The shooting wouldn’t be out of malice but ignorance. The toddler doesn’t get that supersonic bits of metal can kill. The toddler doesn’t, in any meaningful way, understand dead. They just know that the pistol is neat and shiny and makes noise.

Our uses of technology have resulted in a society (Western at least) where, outisde of family and friends, people have no real connection to each other. We have seperated ourselves from the idea of community in favour of networks. We no longer seem to be willing to suffer a little bit of individual privation for the betterment of the whole.

We don’t socialize now, we tweet, we facebook, we diggit. We no longer seek out real human contact and accept instead this simulcrum upon which I’m posting this. We have lost much of our sense of empathy and personal responsibility because in the self-centered and insular world we now live in there is no payoff for helping your fellows because they are distinct from you and thus their pain is not yours <— except in the case of recreational outrage (which I suspect was unheard of in HG societies).

Personaly I’d like to see a hundred year moratorium on most (if not all) scientific inquiry. I’m not anti-intellectual or anti-science. Nor am I a primitivist. I do think that, as Einstein said, “our technology has surpassed our humanity.” I’d like to see our humanity given a chance to catch up. Then maybe threrads such as this will become unecessary.

There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so

158

We have MORE than the connection we had in the “good old days”. The days where we either wouldn’t know those people existed, or casually enslave, kill and rape them.

Don’t confuse America with the rest of the planet.

RO would imply that people actually cared. In a society built on utter ruthlessness, where all the rewards go to whomever is the most brutal killer, people didn’t. You don’t see much show of empathy in a society where “husband” essentially means “a woman’s latest owner and rapist”.

Um, yes you are. That’s pretty much the definition of being one.

And what makes you think humanity will do anything but stagnate? Or collapse into barbarism, as we are no longer allowed to solve problems but must simply let them get worse and worse.

We are MORE empathetic and moral than our ancestors, not less. By far.

159

It is not irony.

What you suggest is a reductionist argument., and it reduces to “living off the land”. I gave the references and citations for a far more detailed explanation than I can offer here in my post. It is a well known and widely available book - “understanding Media” by McLuhan. Let me know specifically what part of my argument you don’t agree with, if any. But I am guessing you didn’t understand my point at all if you thought I was being ironic. I was dead serious.

“living off the land” apparently does not mean what you think it means. Think Unabomber living in a shack with no contact with civilization. (ideally to him). thin Chris McCandless doing the same in a bus in Alaska, hunting and gathering. Maybe a small collective practicing small agriculture to feed themselves and only themselves. But at that point you are starting to get at or beyond the fuzzy line that is “living off the land”. Being homeless in a society is not the same thing philosophically at all.

So what? That is just the nature of economics, where skills become subject to supply and demand, and specialization has value. Again, if you were to somehow do away with that (as has been tried on a large scale, I am sure you are old enough to remember), it doesn’t work well.

I say if people don’t want to become a “cog in the wheel”, then they should learn how to not be a “cog in the wheel”. We have plenty of room and in fact need for that in our society. We need more than we have IMHO.

But being a “cog in the wheel” or not is unrelated to ability to “self-actualize”. It is completely orthogonal.

160

That is non-sense. I grew up near there, so I have driven it (or been driven) a thousand times or more. There is nothing special about that place compared to others that would get you singing “Koyaanisqatsi”.

It is in fact what you get when you have humans, whose evolutionary advantages (among others of course) is the ability to organize and specialize and to innovate, and to think abstractly.

What is “human scale” anyway? In what way is the CPU in my computer or phone any more “human scaled” than the East Coast megalopolis? It is not. But there is no such thing as “human scale”, and if you use that as a measuring stick, you are reduced to an argument of reduction, reducing humans to slightly more sophisticated animals without the ability to capitalize on their unique brainpower. Which is silly.