Ted Kaczynski has died

(nytimes.com)

648 points | by mfiguiere 292 days ago

101 comments

  • dang 292 days ago
    All: please either post thoughtful, substantive comments or don't post. We want curious conversation here.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

  • neonate 292 days ago
  • bkohlmann 292 days ago
    One of my good friend’s dad was brutally murdered by Kaczynski when she was a young teenager.

    A small bomb in a package that used razor blazes, nails, and other bits of metal to nearly tear his head off while his young family was in the house with him.

    And it turns out the victim was the “wrong” man, as he didn’t even work on the project Kaczynski wanted to bring “retribution” for.

    Kaczynski May have said some interesting things, but he physically tore apart the lives of many, leaving a wake of destruction during his crusade.

    Actions speak louder than words. Even eloquent ones.

    • tptacek 292 days ago
      When threads about Kaczynski come up, I try to remind people that the guy attempted to take down an American Airlines jetliner. He got a bomb on board in the cargo bay designed to explode at altitude --- and it did indeed explode, caused the plane to lose pressure, and filled the cabin with smoke. There were 78 people on board that flight, and but for the skill of the pilots, Kaczynski would have murdered all of them.
      • blagie 291 days ago
        I don't think anyone disputes that.

        However, I think there's a difference between sympathy, empathy, and understanding.

        I apologize in advance; the rest of this comment will be a bit long-winded (rambly?), but it's hard to make cultural points concisely:

        One of the reactions after World War II was "Never Forget," and we built a whole infrastructure to understand how what happened came to pass. People study many of the most murderous madmen of history, because it's important to understand.

        Any serious study will be complex. Germany went from being basically a ruined nation to an economic, military, and industrial superpower in a short amount of time. Hitler did many things to come to power which were effective. The old saying "Mussolini made the trains run on time" isn't quite true, but if he had, any study would show how he did it.

        Those are important problems to study. I'll take the Mussolini example, since it's not quite true. Compare two universes:

        1) Only Mussolini could make the trains run on time

        2) Anyone could make the trains run on time

        Which one is more likely to lead to another Mussolini?

        This may sound crass in American culture -- there is a tendency to equate any discussion of Hitler with hate -- but I come from a culture which took a different (and I think more effective) stance. We look at what happened, and try to understand, without glorification or downplaying of the problems. The most difficult lies are those which mix fact with fiction, and it's actually important to tease the two apart. If we all acknowledge the facts, the next madman can't use them to support a fiction.

      • 11235813213455 291 days ago
        [flagged]
        • shantnutiwari 291 days ago
          > Violence is certainly not the best way, but aviation is responsible directly and indirectly of so much irreversible damage to the environment.

          Violence is bad, unless it is supporting my political goals, in which case it is sometimes justified?

        • catchnear4321 291 days ago
          > Violence is certainly not the best way

          “Not the best” is minimizing in a way that suggests that it is merely less acceptable.

          unless of course you are in fact saying that violence, though not necessarily the preferred solution, is acceptable.

          are you?

          • mbmjertan 291 days ago
            It's difficult to reply to this without implying I'm defending Kaczynski or advocating for violence. I'm not - and I wouldn't like to be misconstrued here, as I'm replying about violence in general.

            I would say that violence should never be the preferred solution, but that at times it's the only solution that has any chance of success. This is not to say that it's a "good" approach, or something you should enjoy doing. However, if you (or your people) don't have any other way to facilitate changes that are non-negotiable for you (such as your fundamental right to live being threatened), should you turn the other cheek? Is resorting to civil violence unacceptable in such situations?

            We've had examples of civil violence bringing drastic changes when people's lives are being threatened by governments, hunger or societal structures. Notably, the French Revolution. Is it unacceptable for people to kill their king if they don't have anything to eat, and the queen tells them to eat cake if they can't eat bread? Depends on your moral stance. Would the issues that the revolution focused on change if people weren't violent? Highly doubt it.

            Of course, I am not equating the French Revolution to the Unabomber: it's drastically different to kill innocent civilians with mailed bombs because of "principles" than it is to behead your king because you don't have anything to eat. Violence is the only reasonable choice in some (albeit rare) situations. The acceptability of it very much depends at what's at stake.

            • catchnear4321 291 days ago
              with more dialogue like this, even if the instigator is less willing to come to the table as diplomatically, less willing to talk openly, at least initially, so long as true discourse can occur, the need for violence will hopefully decrease over time.

              thank you.

          • Tabular-Iceberg 291 days ago
            A hypothetical scenario where one country is persistently dumping harmful chemical or radiological waste in a waterway on which another country relies on for drinking water seems like a pretty solid casus belli to me.

            I think we can all agree that Kaczynski's bombing campaign is completely and unambiguously unjustified, but I don't see the need for pearl clutching over the quoted statement.

            • catchnear4321 291 days ago
              so just to clarify, are you endorsing violence? you made clear that you personally don’t endorse teddy k (RIP) but you’re dealing in hypotheticals.

              hypothetically if Donald Trump poured crude oil on your mom, you might find it just to hit him. you might say you would do just that. if that’s not likely to happen to you, you’re blowing smoke. which is bad for the environment.

              • Tabular-Iceberg 291 days ago
                > so just to clarify, are you endorsing violence?

                Yes, but I don't see how that's some kind of a "gotcha". I think most people endorse violence when all other options have been exhausted. If the police catches someone in the act of doing what you describe and they resist arrest, violence is likely to occur and is probably justified.

          • 11235813213455 291 days ago
            Not trying to minimize it, but it's difficult to measure violence, what's the level of violence of a rapist? of someone with a polluting lifestyle of 100TCO2eq/year (violence to the environment, so distributed to people)?
      • fsckboy 292 days ago
        We're talking about someone who suffered from very serious mental illness. And we're talking about stochastic processes.

        We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but I'd stress the mental illness part so perhaps society will get serious about treating mental illness with seriousness. Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczynski?

        • Roark66 292 days ago
          Seriously, why do we so often see mental illness as an excuse for simple evil? As far as I know in most non-authoritarian countries if a mentally ill person commits a crime the factor that decides if they get punishment, treatment, or both is not if they are mentally ill, but if they knew what they were doing at the time was wrong. The burden of proving that is on the defense and it's not easy to do so as it should be.

          Someone could say, but his mental illness made him believe he has to kill those people for the good of humankind. Firstly, how do we truly know this as true? Perhaps he just loved the feeling of power it gave him so he came up with the justification. Being an intelligent man he came up with a convincing story.

          • PartiallyTyped 292 days ago
            I don’t think it’s an excuse or justification, but rather an explanation or motive.

            Unfortunately the brain is rather complex and can break in surprisingly many ways. One such example is the shooter who had cancer that pressed against his [iirc] amygdala.

            For Ted, we know that he was a subject of mkultra experiments, and that he was tortured. We know that he was deeply troubled and had communication issues. Perhaps he felt that the bombings were the only way he could garner focus on the problems he saw; but that is likely rationalisation on my end. It should also be noted that Ted lived very isolated, and that can cause severe damage to the brain. If you find yourself alone in a foreign country that you work in and no social support system or many interactions, you might experience this and see yourself changing.

            In Greek αιτιολογώ and δικαιολογώ exist, where the former identifies causality and uses that to reason on the events and the latter is the same as justifying. To my knowledge the former doesn’t have a translation in English.

            • SllX 291 days ago
              > In Greek αιτιολογώ and δικαιολογώ exist, where the former identifies causality and uses that to reason on the events and the latter is the same as justifying. To my knowledge the former doesn’t have a translation in English.

              In an effort to understand your post, I ran those through the English Wiktionary which some may not know, also has foreign words.

              αιτιολογώ: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B1%CE%B9%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%B...

              δικαιολογία: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B4%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B...

              My personal interpretation is that this like the difference between an explanation and an excuse, but perhaps someone here has a better interpretation.

              • stavros 291 days ago
                No, you (and PartiallyTyped) are right, αιτιολογώ is more or less "to explain" (but in a sense of trying to find the causes for), δικαιολογώ is basically exactly "to excuse".
              • PartiallyTyped 291 days ago
                Αιτιολογία and Αιτιολογώ are a noun and a verb derived from αίτιo (αίτια for plural) and λογος, which roughly speaking mean a [set] of identified cause(s) and “reason” respectively.

                So this is purely causal without imposing the person’s subjective judgement onto the action or event; simply expressing that given the circumstances, it makes sense that the events occurred, whether the person was right or justified in acting as they did is a different story. So given the events I can reason why the action occurred.

                For δικαιολογία / δικαιολογώ, the words are derived from δίκαιο and λόγος again; the former meaning the person is in the right, or is morally correct from the perspective of the person expressing it. Thus, justifying is closer to δικαιολογώ.

                For an example; chores are boring, so I didn’t do them even though I promised I would. You can reason why I didn’t do them but you can’t claim I was justified in not doing them. I promised I would and breaking promises is generally immoral without s good justification or a reason.

              • spiralx 290 days ago
                Are you talking about the difference between proximal and ultimate causes? As in the proximal cause of these people dying was an explosion from a bomb set by Kaczynski, while the ultimate cause was that the things that caused Kaczynski's poor mental health that led him to those actions.

                Separately I like the phrase "a reason is not an excuse" quite a lot. I can empathise with people who make terrible decisions and understand their reasoning, but that doesn't make me excuse the choices that they made.

          • ramblerman 291 days ago
            It's not an excuse, but at some point there is little else to be done. The benefit of society as a whole must be considered.

            Take as an example pedophiles. There is a movement in the netherlands which tries to implore them to speak up about their "dark" desires and seek help. In which case they should be helped. But once they have acted on their inner demons I don't see how we should just say well they weren't themselves.

          • egorfine 291 days ago
            > mental illness as an excuse for simple evil

            It's not an excuse, it's an explanation for simple evil. At times I feel like people confuse these two.

          • denton-scratch 291 days ago
            > an excuse for simple evil

            What sort of thing does this word "evil" refer to? Is it simply the wish to do harm? Is it evil to want to harm someone that is harming you?

            I think the word only makes sense in the context of religious (or pseudo-religious) beliefs about metaphysical forces that drive events. I don't believe in such forces. Believing in evil is like believing in God.

            One problem I have with the word is that once you define a person as evil, you've placed them beyond the reach of reason or persuasion. The only reasonable response becomes to remove them completely.

          • dudeinjapan 291 days ago
            Surely Ted believed what he was doing was a great good, a service to rouse the masses to revolt against modern society (or something like that.)
            • inferiorhuman 291 days ago

                Surely Ted believed what he was doing was a great good
              
              Hardly.

              https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65867291

                In his own journals he wrote that he didn't claim to be "altruist or to
                be acting for the 'good' (whatever that is) of the human race", instead
                insisting that he acted "merely from a desire for revenge".
              • 11235813213455 291 days ago
                When you target a plane, it's quite symbolic for the pollution and destruction of the environment
            • JKCalhoun 291 days ago
              I'm not so sure. It's hard to take a murderer at their word — especially one who is trying to justify their crimes.
          • 11235813213455 291 days ago
            Aren't many aspect of this society, like overconsumerism, overpollution, waste, disrespect for the environement, air flights and other kind of avoidable impactful leisures pure evil too?
          • saberience 291 days ago
            You say "evil" as though it's something separate or different from basic chemical brain processes, i.e. something inherent to the person or something mystical like it came from the devil. There is no such thing as "evil", all our behavior stems from chemical/biological processes in the brain, and if you have a brain defect or chemically imbalances then yes, you too could end up murdering people. Get hit in the head enough times and you can end up murdering your wife and children, evil doesn't come into it.
        • yawboakye 291 days ago
          i really don’t know what to count as mental illness now. is it when people make decisions that aren’t consonant with expectations of a reasonable person? are stupid people mentally ill? what about religious believers who believe, for example, that muhammad ascended to heaven on horseback?

          coherence of thought may be a yardstick, and if so ted is as coherent and articulate as it can be. was he wrongly inspired? did he hate so much the current political organization that emasculates any single individual from achieving much? or causing a consequential national debate? did he take his anger too far? thinking about these, and having read all his material, i think we shouldn’t consign him to mental illness. it’s too convenient, it’s a worthless external judgement, and one that he vehemently rejected.

          ted was a sane man acting on his belief. no different than me praying every morning and going to church every sunday to thank god for how far he has brought me.

        • inferiorhuman 291 days ago

            Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are
            they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczynski?
          
          https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65867291

            His crimes seemed to begin shortly after he was fired from the family
            business by his brother for posting abusive limericks to a female colleague
            who had dumped him after two dates.
          
            From there he retreated to the Montana wildness and to the cabin he
            had built by hand, without heating, plumbing or electricity. 
          
          Perhaps we should watch out for socially inept STEM graduates.
        • Broken_Hippo 291 days ago
          Many, many people have severe mental illnesses and don't murder others. Mental illness is not an excuse.

          Most folks with mental illness simply suffer. This is the real reason we should "get serious" about treating mental illness.

          • 11235813213455 291 days ago
            and treating the whole society and its extreme impact on environment. Someone who's overpolluting looks absolutely crazy and irresponsible to me
        • jdkoeck 292 days ago
          He was not a terrorist because of his mental health issues, he was a terrorist because of his convictions. No excuses.
          • 9991 292 days ago
            Can you cite a reference for that?
            • rgrs 292 days ago
              The sprectrum for mental illness is too broad that anyone can fit into it one way or another.

              Not all mentally ill person are movitvated as these evil few.

            • valval 291 days ago
              Can you cite a reference for the morality between good and evil?
              • 9991 291 days ago
                No. Good and evil are labels people attach to the emotions people feel about others' actions. They have surprisingly little predictive power on the hows and whys of behavior.
        • kevincrane 292 days ago
          > We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but

          That last word in this quote should’ve been a red flag.

        • sieabahlpark 291 days ago
          [dead]
        • ars 292 days ago
          > And we're talking about stochastic processes.

          No we aren't, because that's not a real thing.

          That's just something people make up when they want to demonize someone for their words, but don't have any actual evidence that their words are causing harm.

          People aren't random agents of evil, that may or may not trigger. That's simply not a description of reality.

          • PartiallyTyped 292 days ago
            > People aren't random agents of evil, that may or may not trigger. That's simply not a description of reality

            That is not what stochastic terrorism means.

            Stochastic terrorism is the observation that while you can not express specifically, where and how terror will occur, you know that with prob 1, it will occur and is a consequence of people rallying and exploiting crazy people.

            Of course, anyone can deny that they explicitly told people to commit acts of terror, because they didn’t, and therefore they can not be held responsible for what the mentally ill did; that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cause and effect.

            A constant barrage of people expressing “think of the children”, or blaming minorities for the perils of society is going to slowly but surely deteriorate and rally people into supporting murder and other heinous acts by distorting their reality and allowing them to justify atrocities.

            Expressing that some [hero] needs to do something, nudge nudge wink wink doesn’t mean you did not cause an event, people don’t exist in vacuums, and all of our interactions provably matter.

            • PartiallyTyped 291 days ago
              I really fail to see why my response is deemed inappropriate by HN standards. Apparently I have also been flagged and I can't even comment. I really don't understand what I am doing wrong and would appreciate some feedback.
    • JshWright 292 days ago
      Your friend’s dad’s death is also my (very trivial) connection to Kaczynski. That morning our family had gone Christmas tree shopping, and the tree was scheduled to be delivered later that day. As it turned out, the delivery driver was also a Verona volunteer firefighter and ended up responding to the explosion, delaying our tree to the next day. It’s a super trivial connection, but it has always stuck with me.
      • MavisBacon 292 days ago
        This surely would stick with me. Wild story.
      • rlt 292 days ago
        “My good friend’s dad was brutally murdered”

        “My delivery was delayed”

        Maybe not the place for it.

        • 31337Logic 292 days ago
          He said the connection was super trivial.

          I think you're mistaken - I think it's precisely the right place for such a comment.

          • firecall 292 days ago
            I liked it - it shows how we are all connected.
        • xorbax 292 days ago
          It's not that big a transgression

          It also makes a map of human affect. We can all pretend such a thing matters, but most horrors never touch our life and would never be known without the news.

          The fact that a random guy gave his spare time to help others is notable. The key point is the Christmas tree deliverer being a first responder. It's a hell of a thing.

          • ryanisnan 291 days ago
            Be careful, the virtue cops are out in full force these days. Heaven forbid you share an anecdote on the internet and someone disagrees with you.
        • bbor 292 days ago
          Not great reading comprehension, friend - they’re not complaining, but reminiscing.
    • asveikau 292 days ago
      > Kaczynski May have said some interesting things

      That take is strange to me.

      He reminds me a lot of people I've been close to who suffered mental illness. He didn't want to be considered mentally ill, and his apologists don't like it either, and further, many who focus on his victims and crimes don't like it. But for me, that's the major story about him. It was clear to me the first time i tried to read the manifesto many years ago.

      From that, his story is sad. He didn't need to go insane and start bombing people. He had potential to do other, better things.

      I watched the Netflix documentary, and the commentary from his brother and sister in law was very moving. The brother, because he still loved him, but had to come to terms with what he did and do the right thing. The brother's wife, who it seemed flagged him as mentally ill from nearly the beginning.

      • csydas 291 days ago
        I think this is an unkind assessment to Kaczynski. What he did was wrong, there isn't denying that, but I think people forget he really was a very good mathematician and that he very likely was a subject in the MK-Ultra experiments without realizing it.

        This is not to excuse all his actions as we cannot know really the full extent of the experiment he participated in without a proper understanding of what was going to happen to him and the potential outcomes.

        His positions in his manifesto aren't exactly bad positions to take, his actions in bringing attention to it were bad and hurt many innocents.

        I think it's possible to condemn his actions while also recognizing his non-violent contributions and the elements in his life that may have contributed to the creation of the Unabomber. After reading about the experiments he attended, it's very hard for me to remove those as a contributor to the Unabomber; they weren't the sole contributor, but I can't imagine having such derision and psychological abuse for 200+ hours without walking out of it maladjusted.

        The purpose of such statements I think isn't to excuse Kaczynski's actions, but instead to ensure that we aren't just imagining some video game or movie villain that appeared and the FBI heroically stopped; he was a human being who lived a pretty normal life, and then he changed and became the Unabomber. The latter is extremely sad and appalling given the damage, and I think the latter is made even worse by remembering the former; he used to be a pretty smart guy and contributed well to society.

        It's a sad story no matter how you view Kaczynski, but I think that we are worse off if we don't recognize that he was at some point a fairly normal human being, teaching maths and studying maths, who went through a lot of psychological issues, and came out as the Unabomber.

        • asveikau 291 days ago
          > I think this is an unkind assessment to Kaczynski.

          Only if you have a stigmatizing view of mental illness.

          > but I think people forget he really was a very good mathematician

          Famously, so was John Nash, who was schizophrenic. To say nothing about the large number of very accomplished people in many fields. Mentally ill people can be very smart and talented.

          > and that he very likely was a subject in the MK-Ultra experiments without realizing it.

          The onset of schizophrenia tends to happen in late adolescence. This lines up with his time at Harvard. I think it's wrong to blame the psychological experiment thing for this. It's like people who blame drugs for making people schizophrenic, without understanding that they may have had the condition before.

          I would recommend the Netflix doc.

      • dudeinjapan 291 days ago
        I'm sure someone else has posted this but... rather than a mentally ill screed I'd say it's a pretty lucid diagnosis of the last 30 years: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-ship-o...
        • LouisSayers 291 days ago
          I never read anything he wrote and just started reading his manifesto https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...

          It's actually a pretty interesting read so far. His thoughts on "leftism" and general society conformance seem to me to be quite well thought out.

          I guess mental illness, and logical, rational thoughts aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

        • asveikau 291 days ago
          So this allegory tells us that humanity faces existential threats and that the answer is violence towards anybody who want to focus on another problem beyond his pet project. I read it as pretty deranged and unjustly angry. Along with the other articles on that site by Kaczynski.
        • goldenkey 291 days ago
          That was a better analogy to reality than the drivel I've read in the last 30 years.
    • basisword 292 days ago
      Thanks for posting. Far too much support and excusing of a deranged murderer in these comments.
      • spurgu 292 days ago
        The positive comments are mostly in response to his view/ideas/philosophy, as in Industrial Society and Its Future and his subsequent books - I don't think there's a single person here condoning the bombings.

        If you were to read his works you might find that he wasn't so deranged after all, quite the opposite.

        Edit: In terms of the philosophy/view I mean. The bombings were made out of bitterness and anger and are inexusable.

        • notjulianjaynes 292 days ago
          Had Kaczynski not conducted his campaign of bombings he would have had no leverage to get the Washington Post to publish his manifesto.

          I re-skimmed the manifesto earlier today. It's not uninteresting, but I don't think it's the sort of thing which can be considered or appreciated outside the context of his violent acts. For one, no one would have read it if Kacynzski had been a nonviolent academic.

          As for bitterness and anger, well, here's a quote I pulled somewhat randomly from the text.

          "We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society. Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society."

          • jxramos 292 days ago
            very interesting, essentially riding the coattails of the notoriety in derangement, what a concept.
        • bbor 292 days ago
          >He justifies the trade-offs that come with losing industrial society as being worth the cost.

          That is fucking deranged. Describing it as deranged is an understatement, and it blows my mind that you’re defending it _on an internet forum_. Only someone who’s never seen someone die of violence or disease could ever say some shit like that.

          Today is reminding me that I need to take hacker news commenters much less seriously…

          • resolutebat 292 days ago
            His argument is basically that industrial society increases net suffering from violence and disease, because large populations are unsustainable and rely on the exploitation of the third world's poor. So instead of having one person die from a curable infection because nobody has antibiotics, you have five dying of infections because the population has exploded and antibiotics exist but they can't afford them.
            • inpdx 292 days ago
              Someone who claims to care about humans while murdering them really has zero credibility.
              • ersatzz 292 days ago
                Kaczynski would've probably said the same thing honestly.
            • bbor 292 days ago
              The proof for that being vibes? Your specific example is quite obviously false in my eyes, but maybe I’m missing something obvious. How is some antibiotics worse than no antibiotics?

              I mean unless his stance was that a higher population is inherently bad because there’s more people to experience suffering? But surely all these people in this thread don’t support something THAT dumb.

              I’m so lost and his wiki page isn’t helping

              • resolutebat 292 days ago
                As far as I can tell, yes, that is exactly his stance: each suffering person is a net negative, regardless of others who are not. So five people suffering is always worse than one person suffering.

                And please don't mistake people explaining his theories with supporting them.

                • bbor 292 days ago
                  Ah wow ok. Was not getting that from the wiki and didn't want to read 35K words just to figure out why people think he "has some interesting ideas".

                  Thanks for the explanation, I really appreciate you taking the time!

              • nehal3m 291 days ago
                I think the Unabomber would posit that a society that is complex enough to produce something as advanced as anti-biotics inherently causes human beings to lose their local autonomy and freedom (and by extension their dignity and happiness) due to the rigid organization such a system requires. To me it sounds like a trolley problem and reading his manifesto it seems he erred on the side of flipping the switch to the track with one person on it.
          • spurgu 292 days ago
            Wait, whom are you quoting (and responding to) here?

            In any case it sounds like you're describing a trolley problem (where people die whatever option you choose and you might pick the one killing less).

            • bbor 292 days ago
              I think the parent comment was deleted? And I’m quoting the wiki on his manifesto.

              I don’t see “no action or choice is perfectly good” as an excuse to take bs like “what if disease and famine and ignorance are good for us” seriously.

              And that’s not really what the trolley problem is about, AFAIU it’s about agency and culpability - I think you’re more discussing basic utilitarianism?

        • dendriti 292 days ago
          There are PLENTY, certainly thousands and probably tens of thousands, of works which represent this monster's "view/ideas/philosphy" and weren't written by a deranged murderer. So you can understand the concern.
        • mistermann 292 days ago
          Considering the context (planet Earth) and the history of "righteous" actions of the department of "defense" of the nation he hails from, I believe it to be at least debatable.

          Now, one can say "No, that's wrong!", but that doesn't make it wrong, though it can certainly cause it to appear that way.

          If Ted is bad for his body count of innocent people, then what of us?

        • msla 290 days ago
          His views were White Supremacy and Fascism.
      • tonetheman 292 days ago
        [dead]
    • DyslexicAtheist 292 days ago
      thanks for posting and sorry for your loss.

      I've heard the name TK first when reading Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us".

      15 years later I was burnt out and increasingly aware that Tech was not a force of good. I went on a 3 year journey trying to understand what made TK chose violence. It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly, however hard that is. I started by studying his manifest. I dissected it like a surgeon, then read every book/reference that he gave. What would happen if I read every book he read. How does a bright young man go from reading philosophy and science conclude that men can't be saved.

      How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse. TK was an accelerationist who believed the means justifies the end. TK felt that it was a necessary evil to collaborate with those he disagrees with (fascists, neo-nazis etc) as long as they can help bring down the current world order.

      One dominat figure that kept popping up repeatedly when going through TK ramblings was Jaques Ellul, a French philosopher, not too well known outside France[1][2]. Ellul must have left quite the impact because even his manifesto is a homage on Ellul's biggest work: The Technological Society (La Technique)[1].

      Ellul doesn't just talk about Technology but the whole domain of what we today call Systems Thinking. And he opens your eyes about edge cases and the victims of this thinking in ways even heavyweights like Nassim Taleb will seem like a rookies in comparison.

      Ca 2018 I've read everything Ellul wrote and also read multiple times what TK wrote. I was depressed, like really really bad. There is no way out. I still wasn't criminally insane though. There had to be more than just "self-radicalization by information". Something was missing. It was isolation!

      So I went on to teach myself bushcraft living off grid for a year in a similar way as TK. "Living off the land" as we call it in infosec (only it's the literal land :)). And this made me understand why TK had so much hate for civilization. It's the same hate the Sentinelese people must have for those visiting their shores[3].

      Although I had no guns to feed myself with game meat as TK did. And I did not spend the same time out there. But after a few months without human contact I did understand what humanity has lost and how our connection to mother Earth has been severed.

      While I never turned criminally insane and always disagreed with violence, I managed to understand what radicalized TK. It was being isolated. It happens in less severe ways to all of humanity via algorithm and screen time.

      If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?

      Jacques Ellul is not an easy read when you're vulnerable and searching for answers. Ellul will push you off the cliff of society and do something that today is unthinkable: to question technology and technological progress itself.

      TK is not comprehensible to anyone functioning and depending within society because he hated society and he believed it needed to be destroyed. It's pretty hard to have any empathy with this. Because he caused a lot of pain and suffering he robbed himself of leaving a legacy or a lesson.

      [1] The technological society https://archive.org/details/TheBetrayalByTechnologyAPortrait...

      [2] https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Ellul%2C+Jacqu...

      [3] https://www.npr.org/2019/08/01/747368557/the-story-behind-jo...

      Edit: yes heavily edited, lots of typos, lots of context cleared up. It still has potential to be misunderstood ofc

      • sam2426679 292 days ago
        > How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse

        Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system.

        'In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment" led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition. Electrodes monitored the subject's physiological reactions. These encounters were filmed, and subjects' expressions of anger and rage were later played back to them repeatedly. The experiment lasted three years, with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Kaczynski each week. Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.'

        ^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_st...

        (He was 17 years old during his second year at Harvard).

        • themaninthedark 292 days ago
          I find it very interesting that the news covering his life neglects to mention the MKULTRA part...
          • sbuk 292 days ago
            It boggles the mind how a psychologist could have thought that the experiments were even remotely ethical. TK was an evil man, no doubt, but Henry Murray is equally as evil IMHO, and somewhat culpable for the outcome.
        • lelanthran 292 days ago
          >> How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse

          > Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system.

          "Because Mkultra" is not a valid mitigation or explanation of TK's mental health or lack of it. After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

          Sometimes a sausage is just a sausage, and sometimes an evil murderer is just an evil murderer.

          There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil.

          • hutzlibu 291 days ago
            "There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil. "

            You mean it is easier to just jail or execute them?

            Short term, sure, but if we want to solve murder in the long term, or just enjoy a stable society, held together by free choice and not fear or domination - then there is really no other choice in trying to understand what makes people go boom, so we can prevent that.

            The alternative would be living in fortresses and going out only heavily armed.

            Also, do you have a clear definition of "evil" at all?

            I don't and I think it is kind of complicated. Starting with the old paradoxon: murder many people while you are in a army and you are a hero. Murder them on the street and you are a villain. So some say, all soldiers are evil murderers (and leave open the question on how to deal with the situation when they come for them or their children). Some say states are the evil. Others say stateless is the root of evil, etc.

            And the Unabomber believed he did god, as he tried to end suffering. From a pure philosophical point of view, I can accept that there is a hypothetical chance, that he might be right. But in all practical matters he was a crazy, dangerous fanatic (something I translate to "evil").

            But the thing is, many people think actually like him, even though most don't act on it. But they might soon. So now is a time, when one can still reach them. But that only works, when you try to understand their motivations.

            And understand why they got there.

            • lelanthran 291 days ago
              >> "There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil. "

              > You mean it is easier to just jail or execute them?

              No, I did not. That's you reading something that was never said.

              My point is that you cannot say, as you are saying right now, that there is always an environmental reason for why someone is the way they are.

              That certainly isn't true. What I've found is that people who go looking for an environmental reason always find one!

              What these people don't explain is why all those other people with a virtually identical environment didn't become mass murderers!

              • hutzlibu 291 days ago
                "What these people don't explain is why all those other people with a virtually identical environment didn't become mass murderers!"

                I am curious how you conclude that their environment is "virtually identical". I seriously doubt that. What is a paradise for someone can be hell for someone else and to the observer it looks the same.

                So this would rather be an indication that the modelling is flawed.

                And in the Unabombers case we have among ideological things the actual MKUltra experiment(I think no participant enjoyed it). A experiment designed to break someones mind. But to me it sounds you just concluded that he is evil and this wasn't a factor because other participants did not became mass murderers?

                Side question, do you consider the designers of MKUltra as evil?

          • kergonath 291 days ago
            > “Because Mkultra" is not a valid mitigation or explanation of TK's mental health or lack of it. After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

            Cigarettes cause cancer, and someone’s cancer can be directly linked to smoking even if not everyone who smokes gets cancer. There is no point diagnosing a dead person we don’t know personally, but dismissing the effect of an organised and long period of psychological torture just because not every participant ended up a terrorist sounds a bit myopic. For example, we don’t know about the raving lunatics that don’t make headlines.

            • lelanthran 291 days ago
              > but dismissing the effect of an organised and long period of psychological torture just because not every participant ended up a terrorist sounds a bit myopic.

              And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic?

              There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment". All the participants in that environment had the same agency, but it was only TK that went down this particular path.

              TBH, if the sample size was small (a dozen or two mkultra subjects), then there's not enough data to tell if it was the environment or the individual.

              If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.

              Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.

              • kergonath 291 days ago
                > And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic?

                That’s just his statistics work… Making a rare event more common does not make it a certainty. Again, we don’t know about any possible other people who might have been seriously disturbed in other, less attention-grabbing ways.

                Nobody said that it was the only reason, but let’s be honest: if you take unstable people and condition them that way, such outcomes are not inconceivable. Saying that the experiment (weekly hours of psychological torture) did not affect this is not really believable.

                > There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment".

                It’s a good thing nobody said that, then…

                > If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.

                Regardless of sample size, people who go full rogue that way are exceedingly rare in the first place. You’d need thousands upon thousands of subjects to detect increases over a baseline chance of 1:10000000.

                > Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.

                Again, nobody said that. In any case, I certainly did not. I think we can have a rational discourse between “he was inhuman and absolutely evil” (he was not) and “he was actually right” (he was not either). In the end, he was just a human. His nature, upbringing, and environment all played roles.

          • bondarchuk 290 days ago
            >After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

            I've seen this argument a few times in this thread, and I hope I can explain my disagreement here. Even if not everyone subjected to this experiment becomes a terrorist, and even if there is something specific to Ted K.'s psychological makeup that made him become a terrorist after undergoing the experiment, that does not mean we can totally shift the blame away from the experimenters. Suppose that in the parallel world where he did not get experimented on, he would not have become a terrorist, we can still blame Murray (and/or the CIA) for taking (abnormal and extreme) actions that turned him into a terrorist.

      • nine_k 292 days ago
        Thank you; this elucidates a lot.

        So it boils down to a question: would you exchange the life of a lone top predator (in a forest with a firearm) to any other kind of life?

        For some people the answer would be in favor of the top predator life. To choose the life of a tiger, one just should stop loving anyone. After this, killing becomes mere killing (predators do not "murder"), and the whole idea of destroying everyone else, or at least reducing them to a comparable state of a worthy adversary, becomes pretty natural. Of course technology becomes an enemy, because it gives the rest of humans an unfair advantage; first of all, the key human technology, the society. Certainly a city is an uninhabitable place for a lone tiger, and of course it limits the tiger's freedom in uncomfortable ways.

        Some people just really want to see the world burn.

        • jaredhallen 292 days ago
          I think characterizing the contempt for technology only in terms of the advantage it conveys to the "adversary" is kind of an incomplete analysis. There are true and valid reasons outside that. I'm in the camp that it (technology) is a double edged sword. It's hard to argue with the improvements in medicine, reduction in basic suffering, etc. But it wreaks a lot of havoc in its own right. The question is whether the good outweighs the bad. At one point that was a resounding yes. Currently? Harder to say. And if the answer to that question is no longer yes, then is there any meaningful way for a group of billions to coordinate conscious decisions and limitations about how technology should be approached, developed, and applied? Heavy stuff. Especially for a bunch of tech geeks.
          • goatlover 291 days ago
            Are there any human groups in history which were not technological? Where do you draw the line? Where the Amish did? Earlier? Was writing bad? Architecture, math, running water, clothing, fire?
            • jaredhallen 291 days ago
              I suppose ideally you don't draw a hard line, but look at each specific technology separately. Get out your crystal ball and do your best to anticipate downstream impacts. Or at least be willing to backpedal or adjust when something doesn't work out like we thought.
          • nine_k 292 days ago
            Is there anything in the world which is not a double-edged sword, something completely devoid of downsides? AFAIK only certain transcendent entities are declared to have this property.
            • Eisenstein 292 days ago
              Do you mean personal downside or societal downside? It could be argued that a well developed persona covering up innate sociopathy would be highly beneficial to a person and have no personal downsides, as long they as truly didn't care about others.
            • pyrale 291 days ago
              Just because anything has drawbacks if you look hard enough doesn't mean that it's impossible to differentiate innovations on that criterion. Surely you can see how aspirin is not as concerning as leaded gasoline.
            • natmaka 292 days ago
              Each and every parameter (even "population size") has an interval of 'adequate' values. Too few of anything, or too much of it, leads to major downsides.
        • natmaka 292 days ago
          > To choose the life of a tiger, one just should stop loving anyone

          Tigers live lonely and avoid fighting other tigers to death (even the extreme case of males both courting the same female rarely leads to such an issue), probably in order to preserve their genus.

          Lions live in 'societies' (well-structured prides) and routinely kill other lions (even cubs).

          The average lion, albeit way less physically formidable than a tiger, is a very dangerous contender against a tiger: he hits to kill.

          • nine_k 291 days ago
            This is correct. I only chose the tiger as a metaphor because tigers are top predators and are solitary. They rarely meet other tigers.

            If we need an example of a highly social predator species that rarely kill each other in conflicts, that'd be wolves.

        • pixl97 292 days ago
          I expect we'll see more people take up TK's manifesto if generational AI starts taking over jobs and causing displacement in the next few years. Technology won't even give other people the power to become the enemy, it will be the direct enemy.
          • nine_k 292 days ago
            I'd take a Butlerian Jihad over Unabomber's activity any day.
      • Thorrez 292 days ago
        >If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?

        There's a name for people who go into the woods and live all alone: hermits. They don't tend to lose all empathy for others.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermit

      • tsimionescu 291 days ago
        > If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?

        It's important to remember that living alone for any significant period of time is not natural for human beings. It's not something that brings you closer to yourself, it is a stress on your mind that distorts your real, social self into something else.

        Some people will be able to stay healthy after such an experience, some will not - just like any other stressor on our bodies. But losing empathy is a mental illness in itself, not some rediscovery of a bond with nature.

      • MisterTea 292 days ago
        > Ellul will push you off the cliff of society and do something that today is unthinkable: to question technology and technological progress itself.

        I don't think this is as radical of an idea as you think as I think about this quite often. Basically the grim realizations of the harm I bring upon the earth in pursuit of my career, hobbies, and other lifestyle choices. It honestly bothers me regularly enough to make me question myself and my identity.

        As for trying to understand TK - Did at any point you acknowledge - "I neither have his unique psyche and the lifetime of unique input that shaped it?" You didn't turn to criminality because you aren't TK. No amount of cosplaying will make you think like TK.

      • ZeroGravitas 291 days ago
        I think the detail that he was financially supported by his family while "escaping society" is relevant.

        Don't want to be that meme guy who criticizes the person complaining about modern society via an iPhone, but it feel a touch hypocritical to be a genius planning to actively destroy modern society while living on handouts from that society while cosplaying at being an independent self-made man.

      • always2slow 292 days ago
        How did you do all that research into TK and not realize his mind was broken by MKUltra? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_st...
        • armitron 291 days ago
          His manifesto is anything but the product of a broken mind. Go ahead and read it, maybe you'll reconsider the MKUltra superficialities that in all likelihood had no connection whatsoever to TK's philosophy and later actions.
      • sizzle 292 days ago
        This is incredible, do you have a blog documenting this journey? You must be one of the few people on earth, if not only person, to have done this.

        What are you up to nowadays after this profound experience? Ever tried psilocybin?

        • xorbax 292 days ago
          > This is incredible, do you have a blog documenting

          This feels like a joke. Even more than "I lived in the woods for years so I could figure out a mailbomber"

          TK was mentally ill. Cutting himself off from society was a symptom, not the cause. Being a mimic doesn't give insight into the original aside from the act.

        • DyslexicAtheist 292 days ago
          thanks. I try not to spend too much time online anymore and no longer have a blog.

          As TK complained himself (paraphrasing) "you can not learn from academic papers or books about how to thrive in the wilderness. it's something you need to pick up out there.", and I too think it is pointless to put this in a blog.

          Never tried psilocybin but once ate some shit mushrooms by accident that gave me the runs and resulted in some pretty bad dehydration. No fun when you need to go every 15 minutes and it's 3 AM and all you have for a toilet is a shovel to dig a ditch and leaves from a tree to wipe :D

          never tied psilocybin and generally don't experiment with drugs when in nature. always wanted to try it though. but I'm too old for such things now

      • natmaka 292 days ago
        Too much or too few of anything isn't (by definition) adequate.

        By craving for material comfort we want: to possess more => better yield => economies of scale.

        This leads us to live in conditions which aren't appropriate to our current 'nature': large urban areas (where we often interact with people we don't know: this is stress-inducing esp. for males), specialization (we aren't ants), centralization and bureaucracy (we aren't cogs)...

        Pertinent views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#The_Breakdown_of_...

      • tymekpavel 292 days ago
        I’m sure you didn’t mean it, but in the English language “Pollak” and its variations are derogatory terms for people of Polish descent. The preferred term is “Pole.”
        • xorvoid 292 days ago
          I also came here to say this. Thank you! It’s a slur and not everyone seems to realize that…
          • eptcyka 292 days ago
            Because it isn't a slur in all English speaking cultures.
      • ETH_start 292 days ago
        I suspect the isolation misleads the subject. The subject loses their modes of interaction with civilization, that make civilization so far superior to the low-population density existence of prehistoric hunter gatherers.

        Without those modes, the subject returns to civilization seeing only what civilization deprives one of: the great expanses of unspoiled wilderness.

        And that produces the existential crisis and criminal insanity of TK.

      • JackFr 292 days ago
        > And he opens your eyes about edge cases and the victims of this thinking in ways even heavyweights like Nassim Taleb will seem like a rookies in comparison.

        Nassim Taleb is not a heavyweight by any stretch.

        • inglor_cz 291 days ago
          Well, he lifts a lot ...
      • fsckboy 292 days ago
        > It still has potential to be misunderstood ofc

        > It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly

        I just happened to research this recently, rabbit hole a propos nothing: (1) in English, "Polack" is an ethnic slur for a Polish person; (2) in a handful of unrelated European languages, Polak is just the word for a Pole; just so y'all know.

        • inglor_cz 292 days ago
          It is interesting that the native word (because in the Polish language, "Polak" is a neutral standard word for a male Pole; a female would be Polka, just like the dance) mutated to a slur an ocean away.
      • Thorrez 292 days ago
        >TK was an accelerationist who believed the means justifies the end.

        Is this a typo? Do you mean instead that the ends justify the means?

      • gverrilla 292 days ago
        what a stupid endeavor.
      • bondarchuk 290 days ago
        If you don't mind, what would you say is the most worthwile of Ellul's books after The Technological Society and Propaganda?
      • roeles 291 days ago
        Anyone interested in this material might also enjoy the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
      • perfmode 292 days ago
        thank you
    • getmeinrn 292 days ago
      I don't know much about the Unabomber's victims. Where can I read about your friend's dad?
      • searealist 292 days ago
        There are only 3 victims to narrow down.

        edit: Only one of 3 victims was killed in his home:

        > In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed after opening a mail bomb sent to his home in New Jersey. In a letter to The New York Times, Kaczynski wrote he had sent the bomb because of Mosser's work repairing the public image of Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

        • 4gotunameagain 292 days ago
          [flagged]
          • californiadreem 292 days ago
            They did PR for Union Carbide following Bhopal, so not hypothetical:

            "Considered the world's worst industrial disaster, over 500,000 people in the small towns around the plant were exposed to the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate (MIC). Estimates vary on the death toll, with the official number of immediate deaths being 2,259.

            In 2008, the Government of Madhya Pradesh paid compensation to the family members of 3,787 victims killed in the gas release, and to 574,366 injured victims. A government affidavit in 2006 stated that the leak caused 558,125 injuries, including 38,478 temporary partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries. Others estimate that 8,000 died within two weeks, and another 8,000 or more have since died from gas-related diseases."

          • paulryanrogers 292 days ago
            Vigilantism isn't justice. There was no trial or finding of guilt or responsibility before the 'accused' were attacked. While I'd like executives to be more personally liable, the answer to stopping the corruption is judicial, legislative, and/or executive reform.
          • williamcotton 292 days ago
            Hey, what about all of the people driving cars that buy the products from those oil giants? Why not just go open season on all of humanity?
            • Dylan16807 292 days ago
              Is that a real question? The answer is very obvious. Those people are a million times less culpable.

              (Yes, I know it's sarcastic. But sarcasm still needs to make sense to be effective. You can't say the equivalent of "that logic leads to X very bad thing" if you get the logic wrong.)

              • williamcotton 292 days ago
                The logic is really simple: someone can come up with almost any reason to justify murder if they believe themselves solely capable of such judgment.

                If someone recognizes the failings of every human then they are less prone to pass judgment.

                Did Ted K not feel justified in his actions? Did he not find his own murderous actions acceptable? Why would he do these things if he didn’t think he was devoid of the sin he saw in his targets?

                • Dylan16807 292 days ago
                  > The logic is really simple: someone can come up with almost any reason to justify murder if they believe themselves solely capable of such judgment.

                  I think if you do a survey you'll find lots of people agreeing that major oil executives and PR should be judged harshly. Not murder, but definitely being judged as bad in a way that everyday people pass.

                  I don't think your argument works at all. Harshly judging some people is not even close to harshly judging almost everyone. The former does not beget the latter.

                  > If someone recognizes the failings of every human then they are less prone to pass judgment.

                  Less, sure, but these are pretty egregious cases.

                  > Did Ted K not feel justified in his actions? Did he not find his own murderous actions acceptable? Why would he do these things if he didn’t think he was devoid of the sin he saw in his targets?

                  You definitely don't have to think you're free of sin to target sinners.

                  • williamcotton 292 days ago
                    There’s a deep level of misunderstanding and argumentativeness that makes me think you’re trolling me… so we’re done here!
                    • Dylan16807 292 days ago
                      I'm not trolling you. I think you're making very broad claims about psychology that aren't supported by evidence, and I'm doing my best to understand and engage.
                      • williamcotton 292 days ago
                        Ted K murdered a PR executive. That was psychopathic. He could easily have deemed a person who drives a car as worthy of death based on the same flimsy reasoning.

                        It doesn’t matter if we took a poll to see who a large sample of the population thought was a better person, the PR executive or a random person driving a gas guzzler, because cold blooded murder is an absolute evil.

                        An attempt to understand his actions based on a position of moral superiority over the PR executive is to follow the same psychopathic trajectory as Ted K.

                        Calmly calculating by oneself who is most worthy of death in a manner that selects a PR executive and then executing on such a plan, as a categorical imperative, is akin to open season on humanity itself.

                        However, the value judgement that any of us could be seen unfairly in a negative manner and therefore worthy of compassion and understanding, as a categorical imperative, is in comparison universally better and by quite a large margin.

                        I am engaging in moral absolutes. You and the person I originally responded to are engaging in moral relativism.

                        Agree to disagree?

                        • Dylan16807 291 days ago
                          > He could easily have deemed a person who drives a car as worthy of death based on the same flimsy reasoning.

                          > I am engaging in moral absolutes. You and the person I originally responded to are engaging in moral relativism.

                          I'm not trying to engage in moral relativism.

                          How do I word this...

                          When we want to judge how evil his actions are, that's a moral question.

                          When we want to consider who he would have targeted, that's not a moral question.

                          When you say he has flimsy reasoning, the flimsy part was deciding to murder people.

                          He had specific motives for how he picked targets that weren't nearly as flimsy. A moral equivalence to "going open season" doesn't mean that "going open season" is actually how he operated.

                          Hopefully that makes my main point clear in a satisfactory way?

                          (And I had an explanation for the survey talk here but it's wordy and awkward so I'm going to cut it unless you want to see it.)

                          • williamcotton 291 days ago
                            When we want to consider who he would have targeted, that's not a moral question.

                            What you’re missing here is empathy.

                            When he considered his targets for murder that is indeed a moral question for him.

                            He could have considered anyone driving an automobile. Why do I say this? Because for me the relationship between someone who buys gasoline and someone who sells gasoline is mutual and a PR executive is even farther removed. Perhaps it isn’t for you. Perhaps someone else would consider all people of a certain ethnicity a target for murder and based on statistical evidence.

                            The point is that when you allow for individuals to come up with their own personal reasons for murdering a member of a certain group that you allow for an infinity of reasons and targets.

                            At least a few people picked up on this thread based on my original pithy comment.

                            • Dylan16807 291 days ago
                              > When he considered his targets for murder that is indeed a moral question for him.

                              But it's using his moral system, which was relative when it comes to murder.

                              It's not how you and I think about murder that matters.

                              > The point is that when you allow for individuals to come up with their own personal reasons for murdering a member of a certain group that you allow for an infinity of reasons and targets.

                              If you allow anyone to do so, then across all of them you'll see an infinity of reasons, yes.

                              But this isn't about allowing, and this is about a specific murderer. A specific murderer won't use an infinity of reasons.

                              > for me the relationship between someone who buys gasoline and someone who sells gasoline is mutual

                              Let's just assess harm here and not talk about murder or anything. I don't think Ted K had much reason to disagree with this statement. But you're missing a crucial factor. The consumer buys one lifetime supply of gas. The producer sells a million. If we split the blame equally for each transaction, then each consumer has .5 blame units and the producer has 500 thousand blame units.

            • salawat 292 days ago
              There is a consolidation of culpability in the industrial of corporate actor because it is they and they alone who make the decisions they do.

              People will buy whatever is made. "The customers made me do it" has always been a misdirection, and arguably a straight up fallacy.

              Executives lay the road for what gets made. Not once has the public said "Hey, poison our air/water/lungs".

          • searealist 292 days ago
            [flagged]
      • dpflan 292 days ago
        This Netflix documentary on the Unabomber was pretty interesting; there are other sources I'm sure, but this seemed good. His participation in a multi-year Harvard psychology study was a fascinating facet to the story and his development.

        Unabomber: In His Own Words

        https://www.netflix.com/title/81002216

        • FooBarBizBazz 292 days ago
          > His participation in a multi-year Harvard psychology study was a fascinating facet to the story and his development.

          There's an angle where this whole tragedy is just blowback from MK ULTRA.

          • frankfrankfrank 292 days ago
            There’s an interesting book called Poisoner in Chief. I’m just not sure if it’s not an attempt to control/smoke and mirror the narrative.
      • HL33tibCe7 292 days ago
        Wikipedia?
    • joemazerino 292 days ago
      Chilling to read your post. I hope they have recovered, forgiven and moved on.
    • alphanullmeric 292 days ago
      [flagged]
    • californiadreem 292 days ago
      [flagged]
      • HL33tibCe7 292 days ago
        And that makes it acceptable to execute a random executive from the firm?
        • williamcotton 292 days ago
          [flagged]
          • medellin 292 days ago
            Yes… its the bible quote not justifying the execution of a person.

            It’s beyond amazing to me how dense some people are.

            • williamcotton 292 days ago
              See my other comment in this thread as you’ve misinterpreted what I’ve said. I’m still trying to figure out how, but perhaps I’ve internalized Christian ethics to a point where my stance seems obvious to me but not to you!
          • onethought 292 days ago
            They could be for the pro extra-judicial killing position you are presenting.

            There is sorrow in the world in almost every walk/product/political position. If you can’t recognise your culpability, then we are all doomed to be righteously murdered according to you. No one can sanely support that position. It’s irrational and borderline crazy.

            • williamcotton 292 days ago
              > > And that makes it acceptable to execute a random executive from the firm?

              > When one is incapable of recognizing their own culpability in the sorrows of the world, yes.

              I am assuming that we all know this is unacceptable and I am explaining the reasoning behind why someone might find this acceptable, namely, and let's quote Outkast this time:

                I know you'd like to think your shit don't stank, but 
                Lean a little bit closer, see 
                Roses really smell like poo-poo-ooh 
                Yeah, roses really smell like poo-poo-ooh
              
              So if you happen to be someone who thinks your own shit don't stank you're probably apt to exhibit any number of moral failings.

              One could argue that if Ted K recognized that he was as much of a sinner as his victims that he would not have justified his murderous actions.

          • EdSharkey 292 days ago
            𝑇ℎ𝑜𝑢 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑡 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑚𝑢𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟

            -- Practically everyone, starting with God

            Coveting your neighbor's stuff is pretty bad too since it precedes most other sins.

      • Stratoscope 292 days ago
        Not every Unabomer victim was killed.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter

        • californiadreem 292 days ago
          The original comment speaks of knowing someone killed by Kaczynski. I never said anything concerning the number of his maiming victims or potential victims.
      • cma 292 days ago
        Was the Tylenol thing really corporate negligence? It was some unhinged murderer, and them or someone else was actually closer to a Kaczynski, sending out demand letters with murder threats.
  • californiadreem 292 days ago
    Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead, of which Kaczynski's was largely a popular reduction. The Technological Society is the clearest influence on Kaczynski's manifesto, but Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes is possibly more pertinent in this day and age.

    Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.

    • ly3xqhl8g9 292 days ago
      Also Lewis Mumford [1], Günther Anders [2], or if you want to go truly underground, Gilbert Simondon [3] [4] or Friedrich Kittler [5].

      If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one. Also radically of the future and forgotten is FM-2030 [6] [7].

      All in all, blowing up people is easy, blowing up antiquated concepts, grasping for the grounds of a new metaphysics, painstakingly implementing and debugging is the hard part.

      Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive after following to conclusions systems such as the Grotthuss proton translocation mechanism driving motion in a F_0/F_1-ATP synthase rotation mechanism [8] [9].

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford

      [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Anders

      [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon

      [4] Gilbert Simondon - 'The Technical Object as Such', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXDtG74hCL4

      [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kittler

      [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030

      [7] Futurist FM-2030 Appears on CNN's Future Watch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT__dTtX2ik

      [8] Prof Levin, Prof Frasch (2022) Mitochondria, bioenergetics, information, electric fields, https://youtu.be/MEhrMR-Jaw0?t=3429

      [9] 2021, Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.65072...

      • jlkanowski 292 days ago
        This is the correct list everyone, I wrote a thesis about the parallels between those thinkers and Ted K
        • sizzle 292 days ago
          Got a copy we can read? Sounds interesting
      • golemotron 292 days ago
        > Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive

        The same could be said about Capitalism.

        • dbspin 292 days ago
          This is an ideological position, termed Capitalist Realism [1]. Given the failing of social reproduction, environmental protection, long term planning against existential and systemic risk, the mental health crisis and the collapse of civil and political life, under entrenched and victorious capitalism - an increasingly absurd one.

          [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism

          • dylkil 292 days ago
            >collapse of civil and political life

            civil and political life is terrible and still better than it has ever been

            • wizzwizz4 292 days ago
              Depends who you are, and depends how long a timeframe you're averaging over.
          • cscurmudgeon 292 days ago
            All of those happen in non-capitalist societies too and some times to a more larger extent.
            • dbspin 292 days ago
              Both of us seem to agree that there is such a thing called capitalism.
              • goblin89 291 days ago
                One can say “non-capitalist society” yet mean that capitalism is the only thing that there ever is. Capitalism is a way to look at things, and it doesn’t require a modern society—social capital and economics of prestige is a thing since forever[0].

                Indeed, in all large-scale supposed “non-capitalist” societies today there is capital—it doesn’t stop being so if a few people use unlimited power and oppression to install arbitrary rules and restrictions on capital for others without having being subject to any checks or balances themselves; it just becomes more contrived and perhaps perverted.

                Some would probably say that it’s the infectious external influence of other capitalist countries that precludes full abolition of capital, but another way to look at it is that said external influence is in fact what gives such a regime life in the first place—i.e., if you remove the agitating antagonistic existence of “capitalism”, the pretend “non-capitalism capitalism” would not suddenly turn into a perfectly “non-capitalism non-capitalism” but rather revert to capitalism, regardless of whether it would be called so or not or whether it would happen violently or peacefully.

                [0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/03/03/inequalities/

              • cscurmudgeon 292 days ago
                Yes, and I can even bet that unless a species is a hive mind, any intelligent species will have something like capitalism. The inverse is that to enforce a non-capitalist system, you have to brutally shape a society into something that is like a hive mind.
                • noduerme 292 days ago
                  This seems true from our experiences attempting to implement non-capitalist systems in large societies. I think there could be a caveat for very small societies, especially those voluntarily joined, in which sharing goods and labor is possible with democratic modes of conflict management. There are also non-democratic capitalist systems that resort to extreme repression in order to resolve or suppress internal conflict. At scale, I agree no other economic system seems as compatible with democracy and individual choice, but as recent history has shown in Russia and China, capitalism itself doesn't seem sufficient to give rise to liberty.
          • sgregnt 292 days ago
            I personally don't see these failing that you mention, far from it. Whatever you believe, this kind of propoganda claims stating your opinion as a fact, is very transparent, and just discredits your argument.
          • msla 292 days ago
            Don't make this political.
            • FrustratedMonky 292 days ago
              Don't make it political?

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

              The use of "green" ideology is pretty sarcastic remark from the political right, or climate deniers.

            • DonHopkins 291 days ago
              That's exactly what people with indefensible politics say during political discussions, when somebody raises a point they don't like and can't counter.

              If your politics are too vile to discuss and defend, then don't participate in political discussions. And stop trying to inject your own politics while telling others not to mention their, like you've been hypocritically doing repeatedly.

      • moffkalast 291 days ago
        > Friedrich Kittler

        Whoever decided to not name him Adolf did the guy a huge favor.

      • msla 292 days ago
        > If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one.

        The 23rd Century shouldn't belong to ecofascists.

    • tenpies 292 days ago
      His published works aside, it seems he was corresponding with people and answering letters until fairly recently. Many of these letters (or quite convincing forgeries) are archived in your favourite 4chan archive of choice.

      Also worth mentioning what was essentially a partial autobiography by Kaczynsky: Truth Versus Lies[1]. I'm not sure it was ever completed and there are a couple versions floating around. He was still working on it well into the mid 2010s.

      ---

      [1] One version: https://archive.org/details/TruthVersusLiesPart1

    • happytoexplain 292 days ago
      People don't disagree with him because he was a convicted terrorist, they disagree with him because of the specific things he did to be convicted of terrorism. That's reasonable (correct, even). People might know or not know each opinion he expressed, and might reasonably agree or disagree with each one, but that's not the same thing.
      • lm28469 292 days ago
        > People might know or not know each opinion he expressed, and might reasonably agree or disagree with each one

        Isn't that the definition of agreeing (or not) with someone ?

        > but that's not the same thing.

        How so ?

        • emodendroket 292 days ago
          He forced his way into the conversation through terrorism. It seems reasonable enough to reject his ideas out of hand rather than give them respectful hearing.
          • forgetfreeman 292 days ago
            With respect this is not correct. What you are describing is Ad Hominem driven by some kind of moralist knee-jerk reaction. The absurd extreme of this line of reasoning would be to refuse to acknowledge the existence of snow because Hitler mentioned in passing in a letter or a speech at some point.
            • happytoexplain 292 days ago
              Not correct? Ad hominem? Moralist knee-jerk reaction? Absurd? Extreme? There is probably a more reasonable version of this disagreement, to put it lightly.

              Unlike Hitler's opinions on snow, Ted Kaczynski's murders are inextricably linked to his ideology.

              • forgetfreeman 292 days ago
                And how would you know what, exactly? Have you actually taken the time to read any of the man's writing? Because I've been picking my way through his manifesto off and on this evening and so far what I'm encountering is calm, lucid, internally consistent, and a fairly accurate critique. Something about this exchange is reminding me of all of the decades of inarticulate hyperventilating about "communism" by individuals who hadn't bothered to so much as read the manifesto, much less examine Marx's writings.
                • lanstin 291 days ago
                  Fascinating how good writing and surface intelligence can make absolutely insane ideas seem sensible. Deductive reasoning is, unfortunately, not absolutely reliable for people who have pattern loving brains and good enough memory to make long chains of deductions; evaluating the entire chain as a gestalt and with an eye towards the great amount of data we lack, about the present and past and true material causes, is a necessary step. Like the German electorate that voted for a madman without seeing thru him, or TK in the woods, we are all equipped with he neural machinery to go down this path.
                  • armitron 291 days ago
                    Can you point at something in his manifesto that you'd classify as an "absolutely insane idea" ? I have the vague impression that people either don't engage at all with TK philosophy -but are happy to pass verdict nonetheless- or if they do, simply can't handle the cognitive dissonance that arises and immediately reach for quick relief ("madman", "insane ideas", "MKUltra" etc)

                    Few if any called Ellul a madman or characterized his ides as absolutely insane, but as far as I know he didn't kill anyone.

                    • lanstin 290 days ago
                      “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” First sentence. Does he object to the diminution of child hood death or violent death, or in his mind does being alienated from nature (fixable in principal by personal choices) outweigh the death of ones children? Totally insane.

                      On a more personal note, I am always getting panicked by emails from virus vendors about some grand new threat till I walk around for fifteen minutes. I bought toed shoes believing it would transform my experience of walking and hiking. I worried about Congress canceling NPR back in the 90s. When I try to remove some plastic toxic stuff from my diet,mit is extremely hard to avoid a big slide into “purity eating” where a choice to make a slight alteration to the effects on my world i to a matter of moral virtue. From “less antibiotics for the chickens slowing the spread of anti-biopics” to “why do you ask me to consume this swill of the devil?!” Is a small delta in my mind.

                      For a year or so I listened to all kinds of crypto podcasts or YouTubes / twitter spaces, and it was never long till people brought up anti-vax or global finance conspiracy ideas. I have watched flat earth / scientist debates, and the words of the flat earthers don’t parse as insane.

                    • emodendroket 291 days ago
                      > Few if any called Ellul a madman or characterized his ides as absolutely insane, but as far as I know he didn't kill anyone.

                      Yeah, probably some sort of causal relationship there.

            • bbor 292 days ago
              A) the hitler metaphor isn’t quite right - the parent isn’t saying that all of his ideas are inherently 100% false, but rather that reading his work is wasteful and disrespectful and dangerous. (Ok well some of that’s me but I’m guessing they’d agree) In my eyes, a better metaphor would be “refuse to read mein kampf even though it has some true paragraphs about the harms of monetary inflation”. Which, by god, I hope we can all agree is the right choice!

              B) seeing “moralist” in this context seems a little absurd. He didn’t swear a lot or start an OnlyFans, he tried to kill dozens of people…

              • goldenkey 291 days ago
                You can't read someone's book without being brainwashed by them? Sad state of affairs.
                • bbor 291 days ago
                  I disagree with this characterization. It’s not that reading Mein Kampf would brainwash you, it’s that reading it for it’s “nuggets of wisdom” is an insane, dangerous thing to do. I sorta thought that part would be uncontroversial but who knows
                  • goldenkey 291 days ago
                    Human beings are not one dimensional. I see nothing wrong with taking military wisdom from Hitler.
                    • emodendroket 291 days ago
                      Considering his lack of success and the fact that he had better military thinkers as subordinates, looking for "military wisdom" from Hitler sounds like the kind of thing you'd do because you had an ulterior motive.
                    • bbor 290 days ago
                      Lol very unexpected response. Why do you need military wisdom?
                      • goldenkey 287 days ago
                        Why does anyone need any wisdom? To be prepared for all areas of life that parallel one another. The Art of War is a book of life.
            • emodendroket 292 days ago
              A more accurate Hitler analogy would probably be to reject his racial theories out of hand since they led to the world's first industrial-scale genocide.
              • forgetfreeman 292 days ago
                Rejection out of hand is bankrupt regardless of what motivation one cares to use as a hood ornament. If one can't be assed to even examine the claims in question, one certainly isn't qualified to field a critique thereof. At minimum, one should know one's enemy.
                • happytoexplain 292 days ago
                  Your accusations are dramatic. It's OK to not consider this particular person's writings on the topic as required reading, or even particularly valuable, without rejecting the topic as a whole. And more subjectively, you shouldn't try to bully people into giving credence to murderers.
                  • forgetfreeman 291 days ago
                    I've done neither. I simply point out that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn about a body of work without first examining it. Not sure why y'all think that's controversial.
                    • bbor 291 days ago
                      If I linked you to a 35,000 word essay on why you're wrong about this, would you read it? What if I told you it was generated by GPT-2? How much of it would you have to read before you could decide the rest wasn't worthwhile?

                      I think you're falling prey to the trap many engineers and scientists do, by assuming that they are ultimately capable of pure logical discussion and analysis, and that their biases are known and minimal - and that others can be seen in that light, too. In such a world, perhaps it would make sense to give Hitler a fair shake.

                      In our current world, I see us all as flawed little monkeys who can be pulled this way and that by provocative rhetoric and incomplete information. Dismissing someone's ideology completely because it was a central part of their campaign to kill millions is by far the logical and ethical choice. To do otherwise is intellectual hubris, IMO.

                      All this is, of course, in addition to the "there's a billion books out there, why does Hitler get to the top of the list? What about his life, ideas, or the summaries of his books makes you think that his ideas are any better than a million political blogs you have yet to read?"

                • emodendroket 292 days ago
                  My time and attention is limited and I'd rather not spend it on the scribblings of someone whose intellectual work is only read because of its association with his more famous work sending letter bombs.
          • pixl97 292 days ago
            This gets messy quick. If for example you lived under a dictator and that dictator didn't like your conversation then you wouldn't expect to have a venue unless you took extreme measures.

            Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all dead anyway and if this is the price to pay to stop it, it will have been worth it.

            • happytoexplain 292 days ago
              First, I'm not sure you're using "quick" properly here. There is no trajectory - only individual cases. We can easily consider his actions unjustifiable and yet consider similar actions against a brutal dictator justifiable without straying into hypocrisy.

              Second, the "imagine you truly believed X" defense is a good argument for sympathy, but not a good argument for justification or credence.

            • onethought 292 days ago
              Yes, it should matter, because sane people admit there is a chance they could be wrong. You can walk back ideas, you can’t walk back deaths.

              Also unless you’re a government you probably shouldn’t be applying utilitarian ideas of ethics to your actions, you do not have a right to decide on behalf of anyone but yourself as an individual, so even by utilitarian standards you are likely being unethical.

              • emodendroket 292 days ago
                Anyway, if we want to apply utilitarian reasoning, taking someone’s ideas seriously simply because he garnered attention through random killings would seem to encourage more people to do violence for various different causes.
            • emodendroket 292 days ago
              I mean, yes, if I sincerely believed in his project maybe I’d think that way.
          • onethought 292 days ago
            Exactly if your ideas aren’t compelling enough to garner attention without murdering people… probably your ideas suck.
    • bmitc 292 days ago
      Thank you for the reference to Jacques Ellul, as I hadn't heard of him before. From looking a few reviews, I'm liking what appears to be him having a critique of the worship of technique, which is an interesting thought.
    • Kye 292 days ago
      You know how sometimes you'll see someone [dead] on here making salient points, then wonder why they're dead? Then you check them out, and every so often they go off on incoherent tirades.

      That's Ted Kaczynski. He may have had two good ideas for every bad one, but he was still a piece of shit who deserved to be isolated from society where he couldn't hurt anyone, and there are better advocates for whatever good came out of his head.

      Or to paraphrase the dril classic: you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"

      edit: to be clear, I think the dude was little more than an ecofascist and not worth taking seriously. But if you're going to, you ought to know he was the worst advocate for any position he held. You can do better than propping up a dead asshole.

    • bbor 292 days ago
      I'm curious to hear what in Ellul echoes Ted's manifesto? Ellul seems very like a very astute and interesting thinker, and Ted obviously referenced him, but to say that it's a "popular reduction" seems like a stretch to me. I say this based on this understanding of Ellul, pulled from his wikipedia page:

      > The solution is to simply view technique as objects that can be useful to us and recognize it for what it is, just another thing among many others, instead of believing in technique for its own sake or that of society.

      Which I would summarize as "we should examine technology as a means to an end, rather than a good unto itself". On the other hand, I would summarize Ted's thoughts (without having read the manifesto myself) as "technology of all kinds is inherently evil, and we have a moral imperative to dismantle and destroy basically all of it as quickly as possible."

      Those two ideas seem related in that they're talking about some of the same concepts, but it kinda ends there for me...

    • kevincrane 291 days ago
      “Do you like the unabomber’s ideas but get embarrassed when you talk about the unabomber in front of your friends? Try talking about Ellul instead, you might sound more worldly that way”
      • Aerbil313 291 days ago
        If you’re embarrassed to talk about anti-technological ideas in this current technological dystopia, you’re as oversocialized as Ted described you in his works.
    • JamesLeonis 292 days ago
      > Attacks the ideas, not the man.

      It's unfortunate that people stop at the Manifesto, as Kaczynski has other critiques, but also admits to limitations or failures in his thinking. In one correspondence he admits he has no criteria to decide if a given technology is benign (small scale) or harmful (organization-dependent), a critical distinction! He tries to shore it up with analyzing a primitive Steam Engine, but I would point to Bronze as a contradiction harboring both characteristics. My interpretation is that the distinction is political, not based on any aspect of the technology itself including production. Technology acts as a magnitude, and how we apply it is the essence of our social/political organization.

      This is, of course, one interpretation among many. Like professor Ellul, there are many other voices. There is Society of the Spectacle (a style ISAIF is imitating), or the works of Jean Baudrillard where he (early years) analyzes commodities under Consumerism or (later years) his work on Spectacle and Image. Even Karl Marx has a detailed understanding and critique of Machine Society in Chapter 15 of Capital [0].

      Finally, Kaczynski is harmful to many anarchist spaces. His True Crime reputation attracts tons of media footage and mystique, which furthers misunderstandings. Crimethink has a great essay, "The Unabomber’s Unending 15 Minutes of Fame" [1], which details how this warps perceptions and action while ignoring who the victims are.

      > As individuals within a movement professing a desire to reconstitute the world on the basis of love, harmony, peace, and sharing, an ethical question arises when a means inconsistent with an end is presented. In this case, the tactic of non-self-defense violence. This is not a question of armed defense such as was the case during the 1930s Spanish revolution, for instance, but rather, the validity of aggressive violence against those who are designated as The Enemy.

      > The question of who is our enemy is a slippery one. Most of the dead and maimed from the Unabomber campaign were involved in this massive, almost entirely inclusive system of destruction and repression in a manner little different from most of us. Under the Unabomber rubric of complicity, almost all of us are potential targets. It should be remembered, his toll of three dead and 29 wounded was severely limited only when his bombs failed to go off in an airliner and outside a university classroom. Apparently, all of us were indiscriminately designated as The Enemy.

      > I don’t have a lot of interest in people who advocate “armed struggle.” In this country, it usually comes down to those enthusiasts for armed adventures constituting a rooting section without taking the leap into the fray themselves. This is often accompanied by an arrogance and set of judgmental politics that condemn anyone not in the claque as timid, or reformist, or worse, counter-revolutionary. The latter, by the way, has historically been a pre-execution category, so I watch my back when ever I hear that phrase being thrown my way even by someone claiming to be an anarchist.

      > My experience is that advocates of violence have a short shelf life. They break windows or plant a few bombs while furiously condemning everyone else for a lack of revolutionary ardor and then they are gone, usually with some wreckage that has to be cleaned up by those committed to long range organizing.

      [0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm

      [1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/walker-lane-pseudony...

      • wahnfrieden 292 days ago
        Thank you for the anarchist references, with how conservative his ideas were and not only against "leftists" / libs I was looking for this perspective here (given anarchism gets unfairly lumped in with leftism or authoritarian communisms even as post-left anarchism is a thing)
    • emodendroket 292 days ago
      > Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.

      Who would care about Kaczynski's ravings without the murders?

    • msla 292 days ago
      He sounds like an ecofascist to me, someone willing to use violence in pursuit of a "green" ideology.
      • cogman10 292 days ago
        Funnily, Kaczynski was an ecofascist, he was also an anti-leftest.

        You have to remember that when he performed the bombing in the 70s environmental protections had bipartisan support (Nixon famously created the EPA [1]).

        It wasn't until much later that being green turned into a radical partisan issue. I mostly blame Rush Limbaugh [2] and the Koch brothers [3] for that shift. Turns out, a lot of big oil propaganda [4] can really sway public opinion.

        [1] https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa

        [2] https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-cli...

        [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch...

        [4] https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga...

        • NovaDudely 292 days ago
          One of his later letters he said was against Eco-fascisim. basically saying that a lot of it is driven by racism or some sort of political/social ideal. That these factors are not distributed equally globally means that it would never work as a long term strategy.

          If one half of the global turned to ecofascisim and they got a non-technical world they desired, the other half would immediately capitalize on this and take over.

          In a way I find Ted's idea fascinating in the same way I find a lot of smarter spiritual teacher fascinating. Here is this simple base idea, now here is 500 things you have to watch out for how the most simplistic path will cause more harm than good. To that, I don't think he had a complete picture on how to achieve what he wanted.

          Like Ram Dass saying, be here now, but take it too far and you will go insane!

        • gota 292 days ago
          Plugging in my (tongue-in-cheek, but maybe not a 100%) conspiracy theory that Big Oil was the financier and culprit behind the flat earth, anti-vax, moon landing conspiracies, and many others -

          As a way to discret the whole of the scientific and academic establishment in the minds of enough (voting) people, so as to delay the inevitable consensus that fossil fuel consumption is killing everyone slowly

          • gota 291 days ago
            *discredit
    • matkoniecz 292 days ago
      > Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead

      I refuse to read or become exposed to some ideas because one of their proponents murdered people.

      I want this strategy to be less effective, not more.

      • boredhedgehog 291 days ago
        But the very fact that Kaczynski's ideas were widely published and read directly led to his arrest. If the consideration is to be purely strategic, his case should be an argument in favor of dissemination.
        • matkoniecz 291 days ago
          This stopped applying since they were become caught.
      • halothane 289 days ago
        Would you apply the same logic then to Winston Churchill, the British monarchy and its government? Under the guise of "civilizing natives", they were responsible for exterminating and murdering large sections of the population across Ireland, Africa, India, Middle-East and East Asia. Churchill was racist and a terrorist to many in the colonized world but was a prolific author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What's the difference between him and the unabomber?
      • vkou 291 days ago
        It sounds like the easiest way for ideas to be killed, then, is for a few abhorrent people to champion them.
        • golemotron 291 days ago
          Not really. There's something called The Streisand Effect ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect ).

          Invariably, people take the opportunity to publicly declare how opposed they are to various abhorrent people, indirectly making others aware of them and their ideas. This entire page of comments on HN is a good example.

          It's hilarious that people don't recognize that when they say "I will not read this" it is an advertisement.

        • matkoniecz 291 days ago
          If I would become aware of some idea and not as result of someone trying to promote them by murdering people then I have no problem with reading it.
    • FrustratedMonky 292 days ago
      Agree, Kaczynski did make some good points. Maybe if he had learned to channel that energy better.
      • NovaDudely 292 days ago
        That is the saddest thing. He had some great ideas and knew how to communicate them. He just didn't think he would be taken seriously unless he used the bomb cheat code on life to get notoriety. I suspect that if he had gone the path of writer with publishing, not only would his works be more popular, there would have actually been a realistic means of implementing some of his ideas.

        He had some great ideas and simultaneously pushed back any real change by decades for his own self gain interest.

        • bbor 292 days ago
          Which ideas? Everyone keeps saying this but I’d love specifics.
          • Aerbil313 291 days ago
            Read his manifesto, they’re detailed. I was shocked for a straight week when I read it, I couldn’t believe I have been lied to my entire life. Or better yet his book Technological Slavery: https://archive.org/details/tk-Technological-Slavery
            • bbor 291 days ago
              Yeah... I appreciate you taking the time to respond but "read this 35,000 word manifesto by a schizophrenic idealogical serial killer whose conclusions you already know you find vapid and deplorable" is not a great pitch lol. Was just hoping to hear some highlights. I think I'll just have to wander along for the rest of my life without gaining any insight as to why Hacker News is so in love with that work, beyond some variety of SV-guilt!
              • NovaDudely 291 days ago
                Since we had know TK had been sick for a while and that this was coming soon, for about a month for I have been trying to distill TK's work down as an article about how others have gravitated towards his writing. It is not in praise of him it is just a study of some key points and as to why so many have seen solace in these works - especially over the last decade.

                Normally I could write something like that over a week end but this article... it is an absolute doozy and the further in I go the worse it gets!

                The issue is, you cannot really condense his writings down without doing a total dis-service to the points being made. Either you are going to misrepresent a point and it get wildly misinterpreted OR you come off a little to in praise of it.

                It is very clear that TK had an academic background, even going so far as numbering the paragraphs - and in his book, The Anti-tech revolution : Why and how - he is very clear at the beginnings that these writings are not meant to be just read but studied. I don't disagree, they are written in a very tight manner. So while Industrial society and its future is 35,000 words, it is very specific in those words. It is about a 2 hour read, or you can just find a audio version on youtube.

                If I had to summarize the essence of his works, he had a very decent analysis of the flaws of technology based societies. He had absolutely no idea on how to actually bring about change or even know where to start. The subsequent 27 years of writing from jail showed that he could analyses the problems and potential failings of revolutionary tactics but had no idea of how to actually analyze what technology as good or bad.

                There is a reason he was called an insane Genius.

                Personally speaking, yeah he was right on a lot of things... now what?

                I ain't going to do what he did and try to bomb the world into submission, that is just idiotic. It is all just a some really good analysis but with no means of achievable execution. I more worry about others that are coming after him that will do a lot more damage. Anders Beivik who killed many at a youth summer came in 2011 also deeply reference TK's works in his manifest - an example of how this line of thinking can only lead down a dark and terrible path. But doesn't mean you shouldn't read these things.

                One can read these things and take away some very good points without having to internalize the whole thing. Aristotle said something like that, you can read and think about ideas as though they are true and not necessarily have to believe them.

      • bbor 292 days ago
        What points resonate with you? With as much sincerity as I can express, I’ve gotta ask: why aren’t you living in the woods if you think the guy who said that industrial society was a mistake “had some good points”?
        • glimshe 292 days ago
          If you think that Buddhist monks have some good points, do you need to go live in a remote monastery? Kaczynski's critique can make us think about the extremes of modern life; it can encourage us to step back a little and live in more harmony with nature and less so in the grind of industrial society.
          • bbor 292 days ago
            So you (y’all) are focusing on some of his incidental points, not the conclusions/purpose of the manifesto. Makes sense! Thanks for taking the time to explain.

            I was writing a whole thing about why I find looking for nuggets of wisdom in a work that you fundamentally find severely flawed is a waste of time, but I think it’s best dropped. “Did you find these critiques interesting” isn’t even something I could really convince somebody to change their mind on lol, given all the paragraphs in Hacker News

        • FrustratedMonky 291 days ago
          Oddly, the "why don't you go live in the woods", is the extremist view. Like "if you believe in God, why are you not going to church every day and out proselytizing", "If you are a vegan why aren't you out shutting down factory farms.", "If you care about environment why don't you live in a hut".

          Why do you have to be an extremist about something or it doesn't count.

          Think this is all the same mistaken view that a lot of extremists have. IF you can't be 100% dedicated without any slips then you are a failure and hypocrite.

          So what if a vegan is stuck in an airport and has to cheat once and eat a burger, or I have family over for dinner and we do 'waste' more, or if I am vegan but on Thanksgiving, it is easier to eat some turkey and not argue about it.

          You see, your view is the extreme one.

          And also there is always Moloch. I may see technology and capitalism heading toward a brick wall, but I still do have to eat and live in the world. I'm not an extremists.

        • Aerbil313 291 days ago
          My life plan has in fact changed to living in the woods after I read his manifesto and his book Technological Slavery: https://archive.org/details/tk-Technological-Slavery.

          I don’t think he had just some “good points”, I think he’s completely right on the matter that modern (post steam engine & guns) technology is harmful for human life.

    • yawboakye 291 days ago
      “hate the sin, love the sinner.” agreed!
    • msla 292 days ago
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      • quetzthecoatl 292 days ago
        who knows who Kaczynski would have ended up as a person if not for the horrible, abusive mind control experiments that he had to endure through in his early adulthood.
        • jxramos 292 days ago
          why did he have to endure them anyways? Was he not a volunteer, what gives?
      • bryanrasmussen 292 days ago
        unless you can show with substantive research that there are some ideas that cannot be held by violent terrorists I don't see why that would color these particular ideas.
        • MollyRealized 292 days ago
          I'd argue that these ideas cannot be held by violent terrorists:

          * Commitment to avoid causing physical or emotional harm to others.

          * Absolute respect and preservation of all human lives, without exceptions.

          * Unconditional rejection of violence under any circumstances.

          * Belief that every human has the right to live, and recognition of the dignity, worth, and autonomy of every individual.

          * Full acceptance of differing viewpoints, cultures, religions, and lifestyles.

          * Consistent practice of understanding and sharing the feelings of others, and alleviating their suffering.

          * Refraining from initiating force against others.

          * Resolution of differences and conflict through conversation and mutual understanding, rather than force or coercion.

        • bmitc 292 days ago
          People are human and not logical, purely rational (whatever that would mean), data machines. We're emotional. I can certainly understand the perspective when the above commenter has seen the pain and suffering that those ideas, threaded amplified through either mental illness and/or pathological personality, led to. Okay, maybe Kaczynski had some points that resonate and concur with other more respected scholars and critics, but it is quite difficult to dissociate his ideas from his actions, especially when one can easily find others who did not violently kill and maim others with the same ideas.

          The substantive research is all of human psychology, biology, and sociology.

          • mdp2021 292 days ago
            > human

            Those things endowed with the capability of effortful judgement, abstracting from more "primitive" (biologically ancestral) instances.

        • cscurmudgeon 292 days ago
          The other angle is future deterrence. If a society collectively shuns ideals from violent terrorists, they will have less incentive to be violent.
        • AnimalMuppet 292 days ago
          It's not their ideas, exactly. It's their moral judgment.

          See, the unabomber manifesto was essentially a moral argument. "These things cause damage" is a moral observation. (Because how are you going to define "damage" without moral judgment?) "Therefore we should destroy technology" is a moral judgment (because you can't get there without the moral judgment of "humans should not be damaged").

          So, the point is, I'm not going to trust the moral judgment of a murderer. Every fact he says in the manifesto may be correct. But his moral judgment is self-evidently terrible. And he reaches his conclusions through that moral judgment.

        • watwut 292 days ago
          That still does not imply we should listen to people like Kaczynsky or take his ideas seriously. He sux and should not matter. If someone else with better decisions making recond expresses same ideas in another context, we can listen to him.

          The only thing that distinguishes Kaczynsky from, well, any random dude, are the bombs. Otherwise he is a no one. And random dude that did not send bombs makes more sense to listen to.

      • californiadreem 292 days ago
        While this is totally understandable, it's also an example of the Identfiable Victim Effect. Kaczysnki's actions are humanly understandable with the ability to impute human motivations. He intentionally maimed and killed people.

        Yet, from a utilitarian perspective, I honestly don't know if intent matters when we're talking about third-party maiming and death. Our society disrupts and injures the bodies, minds, and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not billions, on a daily basis.

        And in that sense, Kaczynski, Ellul, or really any dissident of the status quo could, can, and do point out victims of society that outnumber Kaczynski's by several orders of magnitude. The victims are not directly and immediately visible, don't have power-holding advocates, and have little to no incentive to disrupt their own lives to discover, let alone undo, the causes of their problems. And if they do, they encounter a system most unwilling to listen or change.

        All of this contributes to these innocents being left unmourned and the causes of their tragedies, like minefields for future generations, left unresolved (Kaczynski mails mines and dies in prison; Kissinger sows fields of mines and lives to be a centenarian and the eldest diplomat).

        For an example directly related to maiming, consider the allegations of SawStop. A technology was invented to prevent serious maiming when operating table saws in 2002. The inventor attempted to license the technology to manufacturers only to (allegedly, their lawsuit was dismissed due to supposed tardiness in filing) encounter a cartel among tool manufacturers that colluded to prevent adoption of the technology because it would become obligate to all models to prevent legal liability, which would largely eliminate budget saw models.

        The number of finger or hand amputations in the US annually is in the thousands, for one type of tool.

        Or consider meat packing (excluding power-butchering injuries that typically include hand and finger amputation):

        "There are many serious safety and health hazards in the meat packing industry. These hazards include exposure to high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals (including ammonia that is used as a refrigerant). Musculoskeletal disorders comprise a large part of these serious injuries and continue to be common among meat packing workers. In addition, meat packing workers can be exposed to biological hazards associated with handling live animals or exposures to feces and blood which can increase their risk for many diseases."

        And this is an industry where undocumented workers are prioritized because they lack the language and advocacy to receive adequate compensation and legal protections.

        Even something as benign-seeming as a Nalgene bottle follows a similar kind of delayed statistical violence. BPA, shown to be independently unsafe, gets replaced with Triton, unshown to be anything. Triton is effectively an analog with likely xenoestrogenic and endocrine disrupting capabilities, yet can slip through a loophole with decades of profitability before the externalities start directly emerging.

        I lost my grandmother to ovarian cancer, likely caused by long-term use of asbestos-laced baby powder. A certain corporation gets a single $9 billion penalty for poisoning millions over decades; I and countless others lose their family members. This corporation's gross profit last year was something like $64 billion.

        Now I also understand the argument that if industrial society has caused these things, they have also enabled untold material prosperity globally and billions of additional lives to live. Maiming, industrial accidents, and toxicity are the price to pay for this and they all "happen" to be the aberration rather than the norm, with constant incremental improvements as circumstances allow.

        And yet, I think I'd rather have less sophisticated stuff and fewer unhappy people alive at any present moment if I could guarantee that those living on this planet now and those born in the future could live healthier, happier, and more meaningful lives as a result. Killing and maiming people in retaliation is a terrible way of getting there. As a final note, I'm currently in the process of my own exodus to leave the city (wish me luck!) to follow this path of voluntary simplicity and pacifism, lest anyone accuse me of trying to improve society somewhat.

      • cvalka 292 days ago
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        • dang 292 days ago
          Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't.

          https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

          Edit: it turns out, unfortunately, that you've been doing this repeatedly:

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605613

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605547

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558731

          https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34328210

          That's seriously not ok and we need it to stop if you want to keep posting here.

          • siftrics 292 days ago
            I am writing now as earnestly and charitably as possible: could you tell me how what I wrote is a personal attack?

            I want to engage on HN in a productive way and I do not mean to personally attack anyone.

            I think the reason you were able to link to so many instances of me personally attacking someone is because I genuinely do not understand what you consider a personal attack. I thought I was arguing against ideas and statements, not attacking anyone individually.

            I'd consider personal attacks to be ad hominem, which is exactly the opposite of what I am trying to do in my comment — I am trying to point out what is and what isn't a logically valid and argument.

            Would you please help me understand? I'd like to learn and be able to engage in a manner that is accepted.

            • dang 292 days ago
              In the GP comment, I was reacting to this:

              > your intellectual dishonesty

              On the internet, combining a second-person pronoun with a pejorative is going to come across as a personal attack.

              Even this:

              > what you have written is intellectually dishonest

              is likely to land as a personal attack.

              Moreover, (1) you can't know whether someone is being dishonest because you can't know their internal state. Nobody says to themselves "i'm being dishonest right now", so a comment like this is almost always going to get flamewar-style pushback, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Also,

              (2) you don't need this! You can make your substantive points entirely without calling names, getting personal, etc. If you'd please do that in the future, we'd be grateful.

              Does this help?

            • AnimalMuppet 292 days ago
              "Intellectually dishonest" (in the great-grandparent to this comment). That's a personal attack.
              • siftrics 292 days ago
                No it's not. It's a technical term which means that the person is knowingly making an argument that is not valid.

                See the definition of validity [0] in logic.

                When I say they are "intellectually dishonest" I mean they are attempting to persuade others with an appeal to emotion in a subtly-crafted paragraph that looks like a rational argument, but technically is not a rational argument --- because it is invalid --- and they know it is invalid.

                They are attempting to win by emotional persuasion rather than a series of rigorous rational conclusions.

                How my statement that someone is intellectually dishonest is a personal attack, I do not know. Perhaps people skip over the "intellectually" qualifier and jump straight to the "dishonest" part?

                [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_(logic)

                • AnimalMuppet 292 days ago
                  "Knowingly making". You don't know. And, in fact, I wrote the comment that you were replying to, and I was absolutely not knowingly making an argument that is not valid, and I still disagree with your argument where you claim that it is invalid.

                  You're not psychic; you're not omniscient. You're wrong sometimes. And you're wrong here in your judging of my honesty.

                  And when you act like you can judge what you can't, and you judge negatively, and you say so publicly, that is at least indistinguishable from a personal attack.

                  So: Calling someone dishonest is almost always going to be considered a personal attack, whether you intended it that way or not. And if you do it here, it will eventually get you banned. Attack the logic or the data, not the person's intentions.

                  • siftrics 292 days ago
                    I'm sorry, I'm still not trying to personally attack anyone. I didn't even realize my comment would be interpreted as offensive rather than a statement of fact.

                    This is the definition of intellectual dishonesty according to Wikipedia:

                    "Intentionally committed fallacies in debates and reasoning are called intellectual dishonesty."

                    I read your argument as "this man emotionally affected me via a personal connection I have, therefore his argument is invalid" and interpreted it as a logical fallacy. I assumed you made this knowingly because that is like a super basic logic 101 fallacy. I wasn't trying to personally attack you or say anything about your character or intellect. I was just trying to point out that you had committed a logical fallacy and that I assumed you already knew this.

                    • dang 292 days ago
                      I've replied to you more fully at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277721, but want to mention something here too. The problem with what you're saying here is that word "intentionally". You can't know someone else's intent from internet comments. Overwhelmingly, when person A says something negative about B's intent, B will react with hurt feelings, anger, or outrage, because they don't think that was their intent at all. (This is exactly what happened in this case, as you can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277408.)

                      It will get you a very long way indeed if you simply remind yourself that you can't know someone else's intent and edit your comments until they no longer include any assumptions about intent. If, in addition to that, you make your comments without pejoratives (and especially without pejoratives that have anything to do with other commenters), you should be in good shape.

                      I believe that you're sincerely asking for clarity here, so I hope this helps!

            • SpaghettiCthulu 292 days ago
              I think "Are you insane?" from the first link is a clear example. Not so sure about the others.
        • arp242 292 days ago
          It's not really about intellectual honesty or validity, but about morality.

          The only reason any of us are discussing Kaczynski now is because he sent those bombs; he would almost certainly be an unknown if he had not. This gives us an moral quandary, because do we really want to make murderers famous, even when they have something interesting to say? Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism?

          And for what it's worth, I read his book and I thought it raised interesting points, but I am somewhat troubled by this, and I can 100% understand if someone would choose different, even more so if they personally know one of his victims.

          • AnimalMuppet 292 days ago
            Yeah, "morality" is a good word.

            See, Kaczynski's theory is also about morality. He's complaining about the damage that technology does. Well, why do we care that it does damage? That's a moral question, not a scientific or technical one. He's making a moral argument.

            So, if he's making a moral argument and murdering people, that means that I for one am unwilling to trust his moral judgment. It means I can't trust him when he says that we would be better off without technology. I can't trust his whole argument, because it's primarily a moral one.

            • siftrics 292 days ago
              That's a reductionist moral framework you have.

              Are we not justified in killing Hitler to prevent the suffering of millions?

              I think Ted is wrong, but I also think your counterargument is ridiculous.

          • siftrics 292 days ago
            > Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism?

            Yes, that's what he was trying to do.

            Ted claims we must stop technology, even with violent means, because technology causes greater suffering than the violent means to stop it.

            You claim "but that's violent!"

            That's not an argument. If you did try to make an argument (against Ted's ideas), I would agree with you. I would try to make that argument myself.

            We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"

            • arp242 292 days ago
              I never intended to make an argument against Kaczynski's ideas, I'm just pointing out that people could have reasonable moral objections against distributing his work. It's "negotiating with terrorists" kind of stuff. Whether his ideas are good or bad is an entirely separate matter.

              > We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"

              The people who are dead or wounded feel very bad indeed. And I never said you're wrong, either, or that Kaczynski's ideas are wrong.

              • siftrics 292 days ago
                Fair enough.

                I misread your comments because I'm too triggered by people stating their emotions as if they're arguments.

        • AmpsterMan 292 days ago
          If Ted's ideas lead to the destruction of human lives, I think invoking the victims' experience is a valid point in the discussion.
          • siftrics 292 days ago
            Ted's claim is that these people must die because they are propagating suffering via technology.

            I don't see how "but proponents of technology died" is an argument against his claim that stopping technology will stop suffering caused by technology.

      • Shinma 292 days ago
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      • canjobear 292 days ago
        > The reason Kaczynski stopped

        He stopped because he was arrested. At that time they found two completed bombs in his cabin, so he was planning to renege on his deal not to plant any more bombs.

        • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 292 days ago
          The deal was that he won't kill any more people with his bombs, but property was fair deal.
        • vlovich123 292 days ago
          Deal?
          • vaccarium 292 days ago
            He agreed to stop sending bombs in exchange for publication of his manifesto.
        • siftrics 292 days ago
          Them finding two completed bombs is not evidence that he planned to plant them.
          • irq 292 days ago
            Who wants to keep live bombs in their house? Obviously he was going to put them elsewhere. Which is what planting is.
            • sillysaurusx 292 days ago
              As asinine as it sounds, I agree with them. In this specific case, there’s no reason to believe that a completed bomb is the same as an intent to bomb anybody. I’d be surprised if any 20-year veteran bomb builder didn’t have a couple fully-working prototypes, the same reason I’d be surprised a 20-year veteran coder had no fully functional prototypes.

              Crafting is crafting, whether you’re doing woodworking or killing. Is it impossible to believe that someone like Ted might find bomb building every bit as gratifying as we find programming?

              He was unhinged. But it’s hard to argue he wasn’t a master craftsman. Few lone-wolf bomb makers survive 20 years without accidents, let alone evade authorities till their family turned them in.

              I know very little about Ted, and almost nothing about his philosophies or any of the subject matter. But it seems entirely consistent and reasonable that there would be deployable bombs that were sitting around for unknown amounts of time when he was captured.

              Dude’s a murderer. I’m glad he was stopped, and it’s sad he wasn’t caught on day one.

              • bigDinosaur 292 days ago
                Yes, that does sound asinine.
                • sillysaurusx 292 days ago
                  I agree. And history shows that it’s important to acknowledge skill in situations like this. One of the primary reasons Germany was so deadly to my ancestors is due to the oratory genius of one man. I’ve been reading though The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is a fantastic and dispassionate analysis of such evil. It makes you question what might’ve been different had others studied the means by which evil people exert power, as Ted has done here.

                  Remember, authorities weren’t able to catch him. His family turned him in. It’s only through luck that his spree came to an end. That alone makes his particular case worth intensive analysis.

              • op00to 292 days ago
                Dude. There is a difference between a bomb that has significant ability to kill and destroy and sample code.
                • sillysaurusx 292 days ago
                  Is there? Whoops. I’ve been doing it wrong for about 20 years now.

                  (My sense of humor has gotten me in hot water more than once, so I may as well go all-in. Probably a matter of time till it nips me though.)

                  In seriousness, the goal here is to have curious conversation, and follow that curiosity wherever it leads. I agree it sounds asinine, but think of the sheer number of details he had to get right merely to survive. He was one inch away from blowing himself up, quite literally, for years. I’m not at all ashamed to point out the obvious skill required.

                  If he pulled the pin on a few grenades and casually tossed them at people, we’d be having a different conversation. But he built things, just as we do. Certainly a different kind of thing, as you say, but he was still a builder.

                  • bbor 292 days ago
                    It was a live bomb. You don’t just keep live bombs sitting around your house unless you plan on using them…

                    Also wait what even is this comment. Why are you just praising the Unabomber unprompted? That’s not what the person you’re replying to was even talking about…

                • retrocryptid 292 days ago
                  I'm guessing you've never written code for nuclear device, then.
                  • op00to 290 days ago
                    /sample/ code for a nuclear device? no. not sample code.
            • siftrics 292 days ago
              I'm not claiming to know the timeline, but he could have built them before "the deal", then made the deal and decided not to plant them.

              Innocent until proven guilty. There is more than enough evidence to put away Teddy K for life. Lean on real evidence. Don't stretch the truth and muddy the waters for the innocent. Your line of reasoning could be used to convict the innocent.

              • jstarfish 292 days ago
                There was only one live bomb found and he did intend to use it.

                > Kaczynski replied Penthouse was less "respectable" than The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that, "to increase our chances of getting our stuff published in some 'respectable' periodical", he would "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published" if Penthouse published the document instead of The Times or The Post.

                Don't do victims of terrorism a disservice by suggesting a mass murderer deserves the benefit of the doubt as to whether he has any qualms about reneging on "deals" made with a society he doesn't respect. His calculus for who got to live and die hinged on factors as arbitrary as nitpicking over which periodical was willing to publish his bullshit. He was a fucking Narcissist to the extreme, who would waste no time coming out of retirement at the next perceived slight.

                "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply to the fucking Unabomber. Bombing people is kind of his thing. He proved it, what, 16 times?

                • noarchy 292 days ago
                  >"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply to the fucking Unabomber. Bombing people is kind of his thing. He proved it, what, 16 times?

                  That won't stop people determined enough to defend him here, and as you can see people will die on that hill.

                  How many lives were saved due to his arrest? That we will never know, but I suspect the number is not zero.

                  • siftrics 292 days ago
                    I'm not defending him. I'm simply stating the fact that him having a bomb in his possession is insufficient evidence to convict him of the crime in question.

                    I am exonerated by fact. The prosecutors did not have enough evidence to convict him of a crime related to the live bomb they found.

                    What are you going to do to argue against that? Deny history? It already happened. He wasn't convicted.

                    • noarchy 291 days ago
                      I didn't even call you out, yet here you are acting like you've been personally attacked. You weren't. Whatever your fascination with Kaczynski, his manifesto is only of significance because of his terrorism. We're better off that he was found, arrested, and convicted.
                • siftrics 292 days ago
                  Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted. (I'm not arguing this evidence doesn't exist.)

                  I don't get what the big deal is. We already have more than enough evidence from his previous plantings to convict him as a bomb planter and put him away for life. Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate the two things in your mind?

                  • watwut 292 days ago
                    He does not need any of that. He is not about to put Kaczynsky to jail. He is doing moral judgement and that one requires only reasonable probability.

                    > Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate the two things in your mind?

                    They are not separate. Past behavior predicts future one. And ignoring probabilities is just demanding that people act as if they were stupid.

                    • siftrics 292 days ago
                      Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt.

                      It's analogous to coming up with one counterexample to disprove something in mathematics.

                      I can reasonably theorize that he fully intended to stop bombing people based on this "deal". There. Done. I can doubt he planned to bomb people in a reasonable way.

                      The onus is on you to remove all reasonable doubt. You have not done so by simply showing that there are bombs in his cabin. He could have built them before he made the deal to stop bombing people. That's a completely reasonable scenario.

                      • Dylan16807 292 days ago
                        > The onus is on you to remove all reasonable doubt.

                        No it's not.

                        Again, that's the standard for criminal punishment. Not moral judgement.

                        And have you heard of civil law? Despite the high stakes that's usually decided based on the preponderance of evidence.

                        • siftrics 292 days ago
                          >Again, that's the standard for criminal punishment. Not moral judgement.

                          I never said anything about moral judgement. I was never talking about moral judgement.

                          > And have you heard of civil law? Despite the high stakes that's usually decided based on the preponderance of evidence.

                          Unrelated. Please, do share a link where Ted Kaczynski was convicted of a crime in connection with the unplanted bombs in question, because that's what I have been talking about in this entire string of comments.

                          I am exonerated by fact. Ted was not convicted of a crime for the unplanted bomb because there was insufficient evidence to do so. End of story ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

                          • Dylan16807 292 days ago
                            > I never said anything about moral judgement. I was never talking about moral judgement.

                            "Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted."

                            "He is doing moral judgement and that one requires only reasonable probability."

                            "Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt."

                            Aren't those lines all replies in order? Then you're using "reasonable doubt" as a couterargument to a moral judgement.

                            Either https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275516 is trying to apply reasonable doubt to a moral judgement, or you're not reading the comments you're replying to.

                            • siftrics 292 days ago
                              Okay, this is a miscommunication.

                              I should have made it more clear that "Yeah but I only have to come up with..." meant "With respect to what I claimed..."

                              Sorry, I really am trying to be as charitable as possible with my interpretations of these comments.

                              I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.

                              • Dylan16807 292 days ago
                                > I should have made it more clear that "Yeah but I only have to come up with..." meant "With respect to what I claimed..."

                                That's fine with respect to your claims, but it means your claims can't be used as-is to counter other claims that aren't on the same framework. Those people aren't trying to convict him.

                                > I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.

                                I don't think anyone is doing that in this thread? "he stopped because he was arrested" isn't an invalid takedown of his ideas. There was a mention of ideas further upstream, but from that comment on they don't come up.

                  • shadowgovt 292 days ago
                    TBF, we incarcerate people like him partially because benefit of the doubt no longer applies for some crimes.

                    Reasonable doubt shifts based on past behavior. The parable of them scorpion is retold for a reason.

              • op00to 292 days ago
                Isn’t it illegal to have a bomb intended to maim or kill?
              • shreyshnaccount 292 days ago
                Like the French arresting people for using encryption and linux
          • brezelgoring 292 days ago
            A guy with a history of bombing buildings has more bombs at his house and you say it's not demonstrative of future bombings?

            I don't see it, man, I think you just want to go against the grain, here.

            Explain yourself.

            • bsdetector 292 days ago
              I suppose it would be like how the U.S has a history of using nuclear bombs, has a bunch more assembled and ready to be used, but claims to have no plans to actually use them.
              • edgyquant 292 days ago
                Except they do plan have specific plans to use them and what criteria would entail doing so
  • chasing 292 days ago
    On one hand, he murdered a bunch of people and ruined a huge number of lives. On the other hand, wrote a mildly interesting manifesto that only attracted any sort of attention because it was published by The Washington Post in a desperate bid to figure out who he was so we could get him to stop murdering people. (Which worked, by the way.) So, y'know. Evens right out...

    Interested in his ideas? Read better manifestos by people who gained notice for their words and ideas, not because they murdered a bunch of people. Maybe there were explanations for why he did what he did, but at the end of the day his was a wasted life that made the world a worse place.

    • Aerbil313 291 days ago
      Are you saying only those manifestos who gain organic public attention are worth reading/can hold significant truth? Are you a the-majority-cannot-be-wrong or if-everyone-agrees-it-must-be-right person?
      • chasing 291 days ago
        Are you replying to the wrong comment? Because none of that is anywhere near what I wrote.
    • catiopatio 292 days ago
      None of what you said has any bearing on the intellectual validity of his manifesto. There’s nothing to “even out” — we can and do separate the work from the author.

      I found some degree of edification in reading his manifesto, and I see no justification for your attempt to dissuade others from reading it.

    • Dylan16807 292 days ago
      "Evens right out..."

      Put down the strawman, it's already dead.

  • crhulls 292 days ago
    His manifesto is worth reading. Although he was obviously a twisted man many of his predictions for the future were eerily prescient.

    http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf

    • sph 292 days ago
      Yes. Someone linked the manifesto in an HN thread ages ago, and I found more level-headed and thought-provoking than I would have imagined from someone able to commit such evil acts.

      I do not agree with everything he wrote in the manifesto, and certainly not with his violent methods, but it's stuck with me in this era of naive techno-optimism which I find myself more disillusioned with by the day.

      If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs.

      As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism and alienation we see today; he's not arguing as a 21st century conservative, but as a third position that is not represented by any mainstream camp. I had to read the manifesto of a killer to remind myself that there is more social critique to explore than the binary Liberal vs Conservative that's all the rage in our politicised world.

      • shrimpx 292 days ago
        This "third position" is basically anarchy, or anarcho-primitivism.

        It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the human mind-body, and we should all abandon society and go do that instead.

        • spurgu 292 days ago
          I'd say it's more about autonomy, self-sufficiency and freedom, rather than just "living primitive lives". Technological progress tends to stifle all of the above, in the grand scheme of things.

          Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads.

          There are probably better examples (horses just came to mind). We tend to choose the more "advanced" option because it seems more convenient, without considering the externalities of that convenience, whether that's pollution or handing over part of our self-sufficiency in order to do so.

          Something like a Carrington event would cripple us and cause utter chaos. Just think of the huge amount of technology that we rely on in daily life and it's not changing direction. At all. We are not becoming more resilient, we're becoming less. We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical.

          Technology can potentially enable us to have more freedom, autonomy and self-sufficiency, but for it to be sustainable it would need to be at the top of the decision-making tree.

          Right now it's mostly a balancing act between convenience and affordability on behalf of consumers and profitability of producers. And well, mix in some environmental concerns (but those tend to be secondary as well as almost always reactionary).

          And yes I'm probably somewhat of a neo-luddite. I take pride in being self-sufficient, to the extent possible. And I'm more than willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.

          • bbor 292 days ago
            > Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required.

            Ok A) I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow, horse or no, unless you were in the Great Plains or smtn.

            B) saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”. Do you think the untold millions who died (and continue to die) of starvation in subsistence-farming based society were just dumb? It’s hard, dangerous, luck-driven work, assuming you don’t get killed by animals or other humans.

            > We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical.

            Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible, why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?

            To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle? Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?

            • spurgu 291 days ago
              I thought I clearly stated that people tend to choose out of convenience, just like you're pointing out:

              > I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow

              I never said it would be faster or easier.

              > saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”.

              Yes! And you cannot build a modern car. You could, say, in 1940 (probably over quite a wide range of decades), but try building one now and getting it road-legal. You are arguing my point.

              > Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible

              I don't want to disregard that since you are yet again furthering my point. :) Our blind quest at throwing technological solutions at problems have lead us past this irreversible point (among many others). Money and greed made farming into huge corporations and technology (fertilizers made using fossil fuels) was one of the main tools to achieve that. To grow beyond the point of self-reliance.

              This is why the realization of this tends to lead to the necessity of some kind of destruction - downscaling has simply gotten (seemingly) too difficult.

              > why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?

              I had a paragraph that I edited out in the end about many people not caring about self-sufficiency - many naturally gravitate towards relying on others. I thought I loosely covered this in the end paragraph by mentioning that I take pride in self-sufficiency, as did Kaczynski.

              But also it becomes a basic incredient when you expand the scope of systems to small communities of people, rather than just one or a family. Or larger. But! The important idea is that the smaller the community of self-sufficiency is, the more resilience it has.

              > To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle?

              To assess the values and virtues of technology I think it should be judged in terms of characteristics like:

              - can I create it myself (tools, raw materials, licensing) - can I repair it myself? - what's the life-cycle and if not practically infinite (Ship of Theseus) how much of it can be recycled/reused/repurposed? - etc.

              So if your material synthesizer relies on a proprietary miniature fusion-reactor with the proprietary tech owned by a multinational conglomerate where, once humanity has grown to rely on the device will effectively be enslaved by it, I don't think it's that great of an idea (although the tech by itself sounds awesome). I wouldn't destroy it, but I think it'd be a terrible idea to adopt it worldwide.

              If however it was powered by open-source tech, where any reasonably equipped small factory can produce spare parts for it, that sould like it could be quite a revolutionary thing!

              > Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?

              Not sure how this is more near-term but no, I have nothing against interstellar travel, that seems like the obvious thing for any life form to do - to try to propagate outwards/further as much as possible.

              However! All life forms also tend to respect the boundaries in the environment and find an equilibrium. Animals tend to stay where there are resources available to sustain them. The problem with humans is that we, using our large brains and us-vs-them views, use technology to expand at the expense of everything else. If we were to solve this conundrum and find a happy balance, we might not even want to venture out to the stars (for much more than redundancy purposes as a species).

              Our planet is quite an incredible place, as is our minds. If we'd started looking more inwards we might find that we don't need to perpetually evolve external things in order to be happy.

              • bbor 291 days ago
                Thank you for the very in depth explanation! Very interesting, and you’re one of the first people on this site who has coherently presented a world view that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.

                I would say we fundamentally differ on basic assumptions, which I would perhaps characterize as: I think the world/universe is an inhospitable place that needs human cooperation to stave off some of the immense suffering it naturally causes, whereas you see the natural order as a fundamentally satisfying one. I guess when I say it like that it sounds like the obvious justification for primitivism, but still, your points are well received and novel to me.

                The perfect expression of that is the “magical object-creation machine” and your decision that no, you would not embrace/encourage it (presumably such a thing would be far too complex to make or repair alone). Im personally thinking less about resilience than of people dying of cancer, a child without enough food, a family shivering in a harsh winter, etc.

                Maybe another angle is “what is the purpose of life?” I’d say it is (at least partially) to reduce suffering in ourselves and our fellow man. I’m curious, if you have any more time - do you see your “natural balance > cooperative advancement” ethos as a better way to reach the same goal, or would you express your aim differently?

          • notjulianjaynes 292 days ago
            >Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads.

            How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.

            • spurgu 291 days ago
              > How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.

              Would've been easier had your example played out 10k years ago when there were still native horses in America. :)

              For domesticating horses, it doesn't rely on huge factories. You need basic tools (stone would suffice) to cut down some trees in order to create an enclosure where you train the horses. Then basic tech like cloth and rope making, and/or leather, for making saddles and bridles etc. Nothing a couple of people can't cobble together with basic knowledge. No reliance on huge complicated factories and supply chains or tech unobtainable by resourceful people, locally.

              For ships we've been building various boats for ages, with very simple tools. Building a small boat is something a single person can do in weeks to years depending on the size. And larger ones is mostly a question of adding more laborers (engineering calculations and considerations get more complicated with size so there are practical limits built in).

              Making iron helps in both cases. That doesn't require a ton of technology either but granted it's quite difficult to bootstrap. Still, once up and running doesn't take more than a small community to maintain.

              Ideally, in my mind, any "acceptable" tech should be manageable by a community of 150 people or less. I keep coming back to the Dunbar number whenever I think of human systems/societies.

              Your questioning bring up an interesting comparison point:

              Wood as building material vs. plastics. Wood being 100% recyclable plus it literally grows on trees, while plastics require immense knowledge and expertise in chemistry and raw materials include fossil fuels. The externalities for the latter are huge and will thus require an immense amount of interconnected people and technologies to create and maintain. Way more than 150.

              I do also realize that there are edge cases where distinctions become difficult, but that's the case with everything. The main idea here is that I think technology should be judged on a spectrum of self-reliance/freedom. Defining a hard limit in the middle can be difficult (or impossible). Although, not impossible or necessarily even hard if the community of people deciding where the limit is is small enough.

          • sph 291 days ago
            I agree with your entire comment, as another neo-luddite, but take exception with:

            > Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.

            Technology how it's wielded today, by lobbyists and government, controls and rules over us. But technology is a tool, and there is an unexplored problem space of using technology not to separate us from nature into rigid control structures, but to enhance our lives, to actually let us live longer, in harmony with nature.

            Technology is neutral, but has mostly been used against us and this is becoming unsustainable and unacceptable.

            • spurgu 291 days ago
              Good distinction, agreed.
          • ip26 292 days ago
            Living hand-to-mouth in the bush offers certain kinds of autonomy and freedom, but lacks others. Your stomach is not a lenient master.
          • inglor_cz 291 days ago
            " You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required."

            Nope, only in steppe-like environments, where horses are native.

            If anything, technical civilization tends to de-fragment environments worldwide. You can drive the same car in Patagonia or Borneo as long as the road is there, and your phone will use the same stack of communication protocols.

            Of course, it has externalities. The question is how these externalities can be mitigated. But a humanity numbering 8 billion people can't realistically think of individual self-sufficiency at a scale, and not even tribes of hunters and gatherers, 1000x less numerous, were ever composed of self-sufficient individuals.

            We might be more fragile than our ancestors, but we also gained some other forms of resiliency that they didn't have. Humanity actually passed through a bottleneck event about 70 thousand years ago.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#:~:tex....

            It would be a lot harder for a single natural disaster to threaten survival of the entire Homo sapiens species today.

            • spurgu 291 days ago
              Yeah but you're bringing up a kind of chicken/egg problem, where if we had thought about this properly from the beginning we wouldn't have ended up in a situation where we are now slaves to the technology, as in not having enough farm land for everyone without industrial fertilizers relying on fossil fuels, or not surviving without the car/truck infrastructure like you mention.

              The initial adoption of those technologies should've been discussed and decided through a different lens rather than through convenience and monetary profits.

              And now that we're past the point, any solution would involve destruction of some sort. That's a large conundrum.

        • avgcorrection 291 days ago
          > It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the human mind-body, and we should all abandon society and go do that instead.

          Which isn’t crazy if you strip it of its politics and just consider the lifestyle itself.

          Many people latch onto what are effectively caveman diets (especially that). And other people justify doing whatever “weird” stuff by saying that it works similar to how we used to do things, like defecating in a squat position instead of sitting on a throne. And indeed, some of the biomechanics are corroborated by findings that tell us that “sitting is the new smoking”.

          Then you have the deluge of news about how you literally can’t do anything, ever, in modern society (lightning, food, air quality) without giving yourself X and Y (bad stuff).

          That “caveman” philosophy is basically the most conservative approach to living that exists; better the evil you know than the evil you don’t (modern society changing all the time; see for example smart phones which are quite new).

          Of course, the caveat to the above paragraph is that we don’t truly know how to “caveman” since we didn’t grow up like that. So it’s not strictly true that it is an uber-conservative approach.

          Where anarcho-primitivism fails is that we’re seven billion people on this earth, way too many to go back to hunting deer and rabbits and whatever. The Unabomber figured out that he couldn’t simply make the individualistic choice (see: liberalism) of going out into the woods and start living by himself, because the found out that Civilization would encroach on him. And what’s a hermit got to say to the federal government giving him an Eminent Domain claim or whatever it’s called?

          And then he took it in a bad political direction.

          • shrimpx 291 days ago
            I kinda think that caveman life was inherently temporary, as we advanced toward organized society. You could destroy society and information, sending us back into a caveman lifestyle, but it would only be temporary as we would immediately start to climb back toward organized society. Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups. You compete, you iterate on tools and strategy, you develop borders and politics, and eventually we’re back to some kind of global infrastructure, with everything standing in a complex tension where it’s no longer easy to expand quickly.
            • avgcorrection 291 days ago
              > Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups.

              Ask an anthropologist if this is true.

              You’re effectively just saying that whatever the status quo is right now, that’s what we naturally gravitate towards.

              I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes. But for different reasons. (Basically: more population density leads to agriculture which leads to food stores which leads to a ruling class that can hoard the food stores which leads to things that can be raided (what’s there to be steal from hunter-gatherers except for slaves?) which leads to competition, and so on.)

              • shrimpx 291 days ago
                > I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes.

                This is roughly what I meant to express. Didn’t mean to imply we’d return to where we are now, but ultimately the drive to survive and thrive would bring us back to some kind of organized society.

                My core point being that “cavemanship” isn’t some kind of stable state like Kaczynski insists. It’s an ephemeral/unstable state on the way to some higher level organized society that balances tensions.

                • spiralx 290 days ago
                  Really “cavemanship” was small tribes with basically a socialist economy and that only scales so far, what we have today is 14,000 years worth of societal progress towards social structures that can support more than 150 people who all live together and know each other. If we fell back to that state we'd start developing past it as soon as there were enough resources available to support more than that amount of people - the end result might not be what we have today, but it probably would be more similar to it than to the starting point.
      • stubybubs 292 days ago
        > If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs.

        I disagree. His ideas are not novel or new. There are large bodies of work around the evils of technology, increasing polarization, isolation, disconnection from nature etc. Leftists are trending toward authoritarianism is old hat. It's all pretty standard stuff. There have been literally hundreds of popular books and films about these very subjects.

        The only reason people are reading it is because he murdered people. He said as much:

        “In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”

        You can get everything he said elsewhere, without accidentally or intentionally lionizing a murderer.

      • anon291 292 days ago
        > As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism we see today, and he's arguing not as a conservative, but as a third position that is not represented by any mainstream camp.

        Realistically his opinions are held by a substantial amount of people that most would label conservative, although it's not mainstream conservatism for sure. And certainly not mainstream republicanism.

        • sph 292 days ago
          As a non American, the dichotomy that is all the rage nowadays is two camps whose position is literally just "we hate everything the other side loves".

          The point of Kaczynski is that both camps are mostly composed of middle-class Western academics living a sheltered life that are deciding who is socially accepted and who need to be cancelled. Our culture wars are not minorities shouting for a better life, our culture war is made of middle-class white people getting offended on behalf of minorities. They are no Martin Luther King, no Malcolm X, they just are posers that are making the racial (and gender and sexual) divide even worse than it is, by polarising or alienating the silent neutral majority.

          This is a longer argument that's put more eloquently in the manifesto than I could ever write on a comment box.

          • katamarimambo 292 days ago
            Kaczynski was a middle-class Western academic who tried to literally cancel the lives of those he deemed unacceptable, which included people from both camps.

            Thank god there's a divide, otherwise I would be obliged to agree with you.

          • watwut 292 days ago
            You don't know much about Martin Luther King, do you?
            • Alenycus 292 days ago
              > You don't know much about Martin Luther King, do you?
              • watwut 291 days ago
                Definitely a bit more then someone who is trying to use his name in the above context.
        • notahacker 291 days ago
          And most of his arguments about the Left specifically is the generic list of conservative/right-wing characterisations of the Left (obviously the rest of his philosophy has little to do with conservatism, mainstream or otherwise!). Leftists hate strength and rationality. Leftists only pretend to care about minorities. Leftists are self-hating losers who are afraid of competition

          Genuinely amazed someone identifying with the Left would find these ideas interesting, and if so, they're going to love the deep philosophical musings on leftism offered by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Ron de Sanctis!

      • timeon 292 days ago
        > I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs

        Andreas Breivik copied large part of it in his manifesto, but then again he is murderer too.

        • sph 292 days ago
          Both are murderers, that doesn't mean they have the same ideas or ideals.

          Breivik is a right-wing fascist obsessed with racial and religious purity, Kaczynski's manifesto is critique of the Industrial Age not very distant from any 19th century anarchist essay. I'm not sure if he got more politicised in his later work, I'm only talking about that document.

          The point I'm trying to make is that people are more nuanced than your observation is trying to imply.

          • rvense 291 days ago
            > 19th century anarchist essay

            I think primitivism is a later invention. Certainly Kropotkin is very pro-mechanization. If there is a point of contention, it's to do with ownership, not technology itself.

      • edgyquant 292 days ago
        > and I found more level-headed and thought-provoking than I would have imagined from someone able to commit such evil acts.

        No one thinks themselves evil. Every evil act, or most of them, was conducted by a person who thought they were doing what’s best.

      • watwut 292 days ago
        > If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs

        I assure you a lot of incredibly smart writing doing absolutely accurate predictions is ignored by schools and clubs.

        Literally only thing that sets Kaczynsky apart are the bombs.

        > , I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism and alienation we see today

        Considering overwhelming majority of violence, authoritarianism and fictionalized is from right, by a large margin, this is massive meh.

        • zmgsabst 292 days ago
          [flagged]
        • isityouyesitsme 292 days ago
          "Right" or "left" wing is entirely meant as a sweeping generalized insult these days. The words are otherwise meaningless.

          Or more, they only mean whatever the person speaking them means to say.

          Example: Some of the most infamous acts of violence of the 20th century were sanctioned by a left-wing radical. Or a right-wing radical. It simply depends on which specific ideals you want to vilify when you by associating them with Hitler.

          Were the 2020 US riots were ultra surprising to you because they mostly left wingers burning cities and violently declaring demilitarized zones, or were they "meh" because right wingers are the only violent ones?

      • NovaDudely 292 days ago
        > If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs.

        This is the saddest part, he didn't have to do it the way he did.

    • jmull 292 days ago
      He’s really not coherent.

      His premises aren’t grounded in reality, and his conclusions don’t follow logically from his premises. It’s also lacks humanity or empathy.

      It’s an interesting read, because you can really see a broken mind at work, but there’s really not anything to learn from the ideas themselves. E.g., his mental model of “leftists” is truly bizarre. It would be funny except I know what it lead to.

      • dilap 292 days ago
        Really? I would completely disagree.

        Reading his manifesto at 14 after seeing endless newspaper descriptions of it as incoherent, rambling, crazy, etc. was an eye-opening moment for me:

        I found the manifesto to be lucid and well-argued.

        In a moment of shock I realized you can't trust the newspapers, at all -- a judgement I hold even more strongly today, with a few decades more of experience.

        I'd encourage anyone who hasn't to read it themselves and form their own opinion!

        • cogman10 292 days ago
          > I found the manifesto to be lucid and well-argued.

          > For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.

          To paraphrase 'ole ted "You see, affirmative action makes white people feel bad and mad at black people which is the real secret goal of leftists".

          Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action? I can even grant that you think affirmative action was a bad idea for any reason you like, that's not the question. The question is, did it make you or anyone you know mad at black people? My guess is anyone mad at a black person because of affirmative action would still be mad at them without it.

          This is what people mean when they say it's incoherent. He rambles for several paragraphs offering no evidence for his position (after all, he was pooping in a bucket in the middle of the woods... so not much opportunity to cross reference things). The examples he comes up with are laughably dumb.

          I don't mean this too harshly, but maybe you reread the manifesto with a more critical eye. 14 is too young to be reading stuff like this critically. You simply weren't old enough to spot the bullshit.

          • SantalBlush 292 days ago
            Not to mention, this is sloppy:

            >To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judgment in deciding who is a leftist.

            "You'll know one when you see it" is lazy handwaving for a guy who spent this much time blaming leftism, and it conveniently sets up the reader to rely on their own prejudice when determining who belongs to his problem group. Pass.

            • cogman10 292 days ago
              This sort of rhetoric is SUPER old and really common in conspiratorial thinking/circles.

              It has it's roots in antisemitism and is likely older than that. We've been having pogroms for centuries because of the fear of what outsiders might be doing behind closed doors. [1]

              [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews_during_the...

          • pschuegr 292 days ago
            Yep. I read this last year after watching some Unabomber related show. And there are interesting ideas in there about technology and society, but a lot of it is just dumb shit.
          • LawTalkingGuy 292 days ago
            > To paraphrase 'ole ted "You see, affirmative action makes white people feel bad and mad at black people which is the real secret goal of leftists".

            No. It's more like "Leftist activists push AA and other policies with no concern for the impact on the communities they're purportedly intended to help."

            > Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action?

            I'm pretty sure you could find a ton of people who do if you searched for it. But even if the harm wasn't real I think the point is that activists don't care about collateral damage.

            • cogman10 292 days ago
              > I think the point is that activists don't care about collateral damage.

              I disagree mainly because of this:

              > Helping black people is not their real goal.

              It's a weakening of Kaczynski's argument to say it's about activists not caring about collateral. His point is more that "leftist crave power and hate themselves so they'll push policies to punish their race and social class using a moral justification. These policies actively hurt those they are supposed to help"

              He absolutely mixes in there insinuations that this is all by some secret design. He spends ungodly amounts of paper writing secret about the motives of the leftist.

              • LawTalkingGuy 289 days ago
                > It's a weakening of Kaczynski's argument to say it's about activists not caring about collateral.

                Maybe, but what you say here isn't supported by the bit you quoted.

                That bit actually seemed completely level headed and well written. He defined his terms (leftist) and admitted it's a sloppy term, and then he wrote something I feel is true about most political ideologues - that they care more about their arguments and winning than the correctness of the arguments or value of their opinions.

                > He absolutely mixes in there insinuations that this is all by some secret design.

                Again, maybe in the overall manifesto, but not there. In the quote provided he just says "Xs works for the goals of X, even if their message is 'Save the Ys'"

                That's not hard to believe, it's something we all need to try to avoid in our own thinking.

                > ungodly amounts of paper writing about the motives of the leftist.

                :D Have you ever read what leftists themselves write? You could fill libraries just with analyses of Marx.

                I think the scary thing is that Ted is very well read and could be writing for the New Yorker ... and he justifies violence.

                But not because he's the only one doing so, he's just the one who decided to take it into his own hands instead of the acceptable ways to call for violence - to advocate using our military to do it, or hoping that someone 'punches' them for 'being a nazi'.

                He's scary because he disproves the narrative of a barely literate, ignorant, conservative-adjacent, god-fearing, terrorist who hates us because of our freedoms, or whatever. He is us, one of the best of us at one time, and we can be vicious.

        • varjag 292 days ago
          'Reading a manifesto at 14' explains so much of Twitter
      • karmakurtisaani 292 days ago
        He can't even define who the leftists are and even admits it.

        > Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far from clear what we mean by the word “leftist.” There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about this. To- day leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist movements ...

        > To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judg- ment in deciding who is a leftist.

        So yeah, just pick whoever you want as leftist. Some characteristics of the leftists:

        > He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically “en- lightened” educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims.

        Wow, sounds like those leftists are pretty cool, actually intelligent people!

        Seriously, I could make fun of this shit all day, but perhaps I'll do something more productive.

        • edgyquant 292 days ago
          Sounds like he gives a prettier clear cut definition of the demographic. You even admit to being apart of it at the end of your comment.
    • Aunche 292 days ago
      Even if Ted Kaczynski is in the top .1% of people worth listening to, which I don't think he is, that means that there are millions of people with equally profound ideas. You should prioritze learning from those people first rather than one who resorted to violence as a means to spread his message.
      • least 292 days ago
        It hardly matters if millions of people have equally profound ideas if there's no way to reasonably seek those ideas out. I'm quite certain a lot of knowledge is lost to the ether as very few people have the ability to think about things very deeply, and of those that can, even fewer are able to articulate them, and from that small group, an even smaller group of people are able to actually turn those articulations into something accessible to everyone else. Then it's a matter of how anyone else can find those things. A lot of the times it can't be found.

        Frankly, I don't see any reason to gate keep my own curiosity. Moral filtering just breeds ignorance.

    • ren_engineer 292 days ago
      not sure why people are so surprised he got some things right or was at least able to create compelling arguments for this ideas, the guy was a legit genius. Got into Harvard at 16, youngest math professor ever at Cal Berkley at the time he was hired
      • JKCalhoun 292 days ago
        I know I am stereotyping, but you're describing for me exactly why he was probably emotionally immature.

        Maybe related to something like Piaget's theory of cognitive development, I believe that if you advance too fast intellectually, there are other things, developmentally, that are trodden on, or left completely behind.

    • sebmellen 292 days ago
      For a person who exhibited such deranged behavior, his writing and arguments are remarkably clear and cool-headed.
      • anon291 292 days ago
        He was an extremely intelligent subject of mkultra so we should bear that in mind when talking about his violent tendencies.
      • ripourhero 292 days ago
        Out of curiosity, have you ever heard of operation condor? project mkultra?

        As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to win (= survive as a culture against encroachment from different cultures) without violence.

        Today's mantra of pacifism and non-violence is just propaganda from current governments (all of which were originally installed through bloodshed, and kept in power through never-ending bloodshed) to keep the masses impotent and avoid being toppled like their predecessors

        • FpUser 292 days ago
          >"and avoid being toppled like their predecessors"

          Ok. You topple one. If you do not create a replacement government you will have people preyed upon by violent gangs when eventually one become powerful enough to form new government. And if you do you are back to square one. So maybe it is better to try to fix what you have while trying to avoid violence. I am not telling it is always possible but at least it can be a goal.

        • kneebonian 292 days ago
          Interesting you mention MKUltra as one of the reasons claimed for Teds "extreme" personality is because he was unwillingly drafted into and forced to participate in MkUltra.
          • jonhohle 292 days ago
            I had no idea that he may have been part of MKUltra. Thanks for that rabbit hole!

            As I’m reading through The Devil’s Chessboard (recommend a few weeks ago in another thread) I’m increasingly despondent about the “people”’s role in the US (i.e. we are now just chattel for the ruling class), and I haven’t even gotten to MKUltra yet!

        • ip26 292 days ago
          As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to win without violence

          The threat of violence can be both effective and nonviolent. Every battle is won before it is ever fought- and by corollary, it is possible to win without ever having fought.

          • FooBarBizBazz 292 days ago
            Heh. When I think of "nonviolence" I think of Gandhi and MLK. Maybe I should really be thinking about Edward Teller and the RAND corporation?

            I'm not sure who would define "orthodox" nonviolence (ahimsa) -- maybe Mahavira? -- but whichever definition we chose, I suspect it would differ from yours on the subject of threats.

            Not that you're wrong, necessarily.

            But you can't play by only bluffing, can you? In optimal (say) poker play, the different actions, including what amounts to bluffing, are all chosen with some probability (a "mixed strategy"), fundamentally at random.

        • tsimionescu 291 days ago
          > As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to win (= survive as a culture against encroachment from different cultures) without violence.

          Have you ever read Jewish history? That's a culture that has survived for millenia, without perpetrating virtually any violence between the time they were exiled from Israel and the time they took over Palestine, while facing constant discrimination and violence against them.

          Not to mention that their culture set the foundations of the two biggest religions on Earth today.

        • Supermancho 292 days ago
          Violence one of the most effective means of motivation, known to man; second only to shame.

          Nonviolent change (toward peace)is somewhere down the imaginary page, but it can be effective. It is both less timely and long lasting.

    • codetrotter 292 days ago
      Ironically his manifesto is apparently what led to FBI arresting him.

      > The big break in the case came in 1995. The Unabomber sent us a 35,000 word essay claiming to explain his motives and views of the ills of modern society. After much debate about the wisdom of “giving in to terrorists,” FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno approved the task force’s recommendation to publish the essay in hopes that a reader could identify the author.

      > After the manifesto appeared in The Washington Post, thousands of people suggested possible suspects. One stood out: David Kaczynski described his troubled brother Ted, who had grown up in Chicago, taught at the University of California at Berkeley (where two of the bombs had been placed), then lived for a time in Salt Lake City before settling permanently into the primitive 10’ x 14’ cabin that the brothers had constructed near Lincoln, Montana.

      > Most importantly, David provided letters and documents written by his brother. Our linguistic analysis determined that the author of those papers and the manifesto were almost certainly the same. When combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski’s life, that analysis provided the basis for a search warrant.

      https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/unabomber

    • wellthisisgreat 292 days ago
      Wow Pocket browser extension refuses to save this link.

      Never seen that happen

    • Lammy 292 days ago
      I find “The System’s Neatest Trick” to be a much more enjoyable and applicable read: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-sy...
    • dennis_jeeves1 292 days ago
      Hey, thanks for the link, read a few paragraphs, it's an excellent read.
    • jongjong 292 days ago
      It's weird reading the first page and realizing that this was written in 1995. I didn't get a sense that any of these would have been relevant at that time in the country I was living though it seems highly relevant today everywhere. The problem seems to have spread like a contagion.
    • moffkalast 292 days ago
      I don't suppose anyone has a short summary?
      • murderberry 292 days ago
        "Technology bad."

        It's really that. He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed, when men lived meaningful lives in peaceful harmony with nature... juxtaposed with all the purported moral, societal, and environmental decay of today.

        Many people find it alluring today, but the themes are evergreen. They crop up in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages, and throughout history.

        Misplaced nostalgia aside, another problem with most such ideologies is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right. Whether that's blowing things up or taking away your rights is just an implementation detail.

        • j9461701 292 days ago
          Something that blew my mind long ago was learning the scottish highlands used to be a massive forest. Ancient humans clear cut the entire landscape and it still hasn't recovered. That sort of broke the illusion of there being some forgotten past of arcadian perfection, where we lived in one and balance with nature. Humans have always been humans. Exploitative, expansionist, perfectly willing to destroy our long term prospects for short term gain. At least in modern western societies we have the power to recognize this part of ourselves, and put aside areas like national parks free from our grasping fingers.
          • yeck 292 days ago
            That is post-agricultural revolution humanity. Sure it is ancient by the standards of an individual, but it is only a relatively recent and small part of the more than 100 thousand years of human pre-history.
            • edgyquant 292 days ago
              Okay but humans did this in a ton of environments pre-agriculture. The Amazon was a large grassland with patches of forest that tribal peoples shaped into a giant rainforest over time. This is thought to be the case with tons of places in the old world as well. Humans have been doing mega engineering type stuff for at least 20-30000 years
          • avgcorrection 291 days ago
            Like the sibling commenter said, this happened during agricultural times. A lot of Europe was deforested during the Middle Ages.

            Someone like the Unabomber doesn’t long back to the past of being a Middle Age serf…! Get real.

        • rough-sea 292 days ago
          Thank you. It’s depressing to find so many people on HN expressing sympathy for the nonsense written in the manifesto.

          People should read “Beginning of Infinity” for a strong counter argument.

          • katamarimambo 292 days ago
            Sadly, it seems that for one to be taken seriously as a thinker, it takes minimal coherence, median compatibility of ideals with the readers and maximal violence in advertising yourself.
          • lm28469 292 days ago
            [dead]
        • coldtea 292 days ago
          >He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed

          There's the opposite problem most have: the inability to understand that there are people who have actually experienced the past (within their lives) and might prefer it for reasons other than the cliche "they were young then, that's why they like it" compared to the present.

          And that, depending on your inclinations and ideas about how to live, it's not true that nothing better "ever existed".

          >is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right

          Well, the future comes at people with force too. People thrown out of employment into poverty because of technology and being told "just learn to code" for example.

          Or things getting integrated with the state and business world, and becoming increasingly necessary to have, even if you don't want them.

          • jonhohle 292 days ago
            I’ve mentioned before and there was a thread yesterday about a modern Usenet which I think falls into this line of thinking. In the early 90s there was an egalitarian messaging system that wasn’t actively and continuously abused. I would love to be able to be in a world like that, however, that world can’t exist again (at least not in the way it did).

            As the saying goes, the only constant is change.

          • lanstin 291 days ago
            If your ideas of how to live include less childhood mortality, and long and healthy lives, then I doubt there is a better time than the last hundred years (except probably the next hundred years).

            Everyone alive has only been in a modern time. Now what characteristics you want your world to have, certainly many people are fighting for different visions. The idea that a particular balance of corporate and legislative power is inevitable is just the messaging from those corporate powers. And it isn’t more than PR - when society gets unbalanced enough, you get changes even if most think it is impossible. Anything from the French Revolution to the end of Apartheid.

            • coldtea 291 days ago
              >If your ideas of how to live include less childhood mortality, and long and healthy lives, then I doubt there is a better time than the last hundred years

              And if your ideas of how to live examine other metrics, there are much better times in the past.

              Especially since if changes to bring back aspects of the past that were better were taken today, it wouldn't mean we have to give up technologies that improved the mortality rates. How about that, huh?

              In fact, even if your ideas of how to live are solely about less childhood mortality and long and healthy lives, you might be better served with a couple decades past:

              https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2023/04/26/research-update-u-s-se...

              • lanstin 290 days ago
                No other metrics really compare to chance my children will die early.And I lived a couple of decades past, and I am happy to still be alive, and looking forward with interest to the next few decades. If you don’t enjoy your time here, consider therapy, biking, a religious community, meditation, and a strong social network.

                I do particularly look forward to the highways being dug up and rewilded, while we get around with Cat Buses or blimps or jet packs. I didn’t get the idea you were advocating that we improve what we have; it came across as what we have sucks and we need to go back, back to the closet, back to less power, back to less information, back to the culture of conformity for the powerful and the culture of fear for the oppressed.

        • yeck 292 days ago
          I think you are forgetting that the "modern society" you are familiar with is not ubiquitous and in our present moment there are many people that lead completely different lives than you. If you are not ignorant of this, then you are supposing that no one in a different circumstance may prefer it and fight for it.
        • dsego 292 days ago
          > "Technology bad."

          I didn't read it like that, it was more like "I don't want a six lane highway in front of my house", "Oh, you're just against progress and modernism, so shut up", "Ok, maybe I blow your shit up"...

      • hackermailman 292 days ago
        The real summary isn't just technology bad. He claims mankind as evolved is not compatible with the industrial world we have created therefore humanity will never be able to adapt to it. In order to force adaptation he then lists all the ways those in power will attempt to do so from psych drugs to pleasure bribes to gene editing in order to remove this trait of mankind of needing personal power over one's own destiny so we can better adapt to being serfs in the industrial world (his claims, not mine). He lists numerous scenarios where we will be an unrecognizable species in the future serving the machines too, many of them familiar like how medicine will become too complex to understand so reliance on machines to cure us of problems which in turn becomes irresistible to those in power to make us even more dependent on them for survival.

        He also is definitely not any kind of primitive man utopia shill, that's why he rants in the beginning against 'green anarchy' type ideology. He is more of an evolutionist saying even if we returned to primitive life before the industrial revolution we would at least still be human and would have to accept all kinds of terrible things that come with primitive life as the alternative is being a spiritless organism serving machines (again his ideology not mine).

      • brvsft 292 days ago
        reject humanity, return to monke

        Edit: In all seriousness, it's been a while since I read it. His general ideas are that technology has been a disaster for humankind because, among other reasons, it's freed up time for us to be preoccupied with unimportant bullshit, to the point that it causes mental problems with people. People start to act out in various ways in resistance of our current state because we 'know' somewhere in our bodies that this existence is meaningless. People without the luxury of free time do not have to preoccupy themselves with this struggle for meaning.

        He also goes on at length about how leftists are self-hating people and worship victimhood, and their mentality is partly a product of this existential dilemma.

        But these are just a couple of points I took away. It's much more well-written than I could personally attempt to summarize in an internet comment.

      • knbknb 292 days ago
        There is a section "The Future" which talks about Artificial Intelligence (AI):

        The author postulates that if computer scientists develop intelligent machines that can do all things better than humans, all work will be done by machines and no human effort will be necessary.

        There are two possibilities: either the machines make all their own decisions without human oversight or human control over the machines is retained.

        173. If machines _are_ allowed to make all their own decisions, it is impossible to predict the outcome and the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. The author suggests that society may become so dependent on machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of their decisions, eventually leading to a stage where machines are in effective control and turning them off would amount to suicide.

        174. If human control over machines is _retained_, the average person may have control over certain private machines, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite. The elite will have greater control over the masses and because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous.

        If computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence and human work remains necessary, machines will still take care of simpler tasks resulting in an increasing surplus of human workers at lower levels of ability. Employed workers will face ever-increasing demands and will need more training, ability and conformity. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized and out of touch with the real world.

        The author envisions scenarios where machines take over most important work while humans are kept busy with relatively unimportant work in the service industries, which the author finds contemptible.

        The author acknowledges that the outlined scenarios do not exhaust all possibilities but indicates that if the industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, individuals will be more dependent on large organizations and their physical and mental qualities will be engineered into them.

        Technology is creating a new physical and social environment for humans that is radically different from the environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race and humans will either be adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered or through natural selection.

        179. The author concludes that it would be better to dump the whole system and take the consequences.

        (That was all summarized by ChatGPT. I have removed concluding sentences from some paragraphs containing deeply pessimistic motives of insubordination, enslavement, and extermination)

    • xwdv 292 days ago
      I don’t agree with what he did, but as time goes on I understand more why he did it.
    • Eumenes 292 days ago
      It should be required reading in public schools
    • testacct22 292 days ago
      [flagged]
    • rvz 292 days ago
      > many of his predictions for the future were eerily prescient

      Especially as his predictions were also true in technology in the past decades and is now more relevant with AI.

    • WheelsAtLarge 292 days ago
      I'm one that believes that advances in technology aren't necessarily a plus for society. We have a brain that was tuned for survival over millions of years. Our ancestors survived therefore those surviving traits were passed on to us. Technology is changing our environment in an evolutionary blink of the eyes. Our brain cannot adapt fast enough so we will use those survival traits as our technology gets more powerful. Survival in the past has mostly meant force. We literally fight to stay alive and that means we create ever and ever stronger weapons. Technology has already shown that we can and have created weapons that can destroy earth as we know it. New technology will only make that worse since we have never invented any new tech without ultimately using it for war. No, tech is not necessarily a plus for society and our world.

      My issue with reading Kaczynski, which I have not but have an idea of his manifesto, is that he was trying to bring about change through force and destruction. Through out the history of men, force has always been a temporary fix. It may seem like a relatively easy fix but once force is removed, we all return to whatever the force was trying to change.

      The only way change can thrive is through consensus. The majority needs to agree that a change should happen. That type of change is very time consuming, messy and long. But it's the only way to bring about long term change.

      There are better more deserving thought-leaders that people should read. Kaczynski is not one of them. His actions should really erase him from history rather than praise him.

      User californiadreem posted a few authors on a comment here that can get people started.

  • bheadmaster 292 days ago
    Ted Kaczynski was a genius, a mathematical child prodigy, became a professor at Berkeley at 25 and had a bright future. I completely blame CIA experiments for his downfall into radicalism and extremism. His ideas were very valid, but his mind was too tortured to deal with them in a healthy manner.

    Rest in peace.

    • miramba 292 days ago
      What did the CIA do? I checked his Wikipedia page, not mentioned there.
      • arp242 292 days ago
        He participated in about 200 hours of experiments from the age of 16 to 19 which basically consisted of "roasting" and bullying him. The experimenters intentionally sought out the most insecure "maladjusted" students at Harvard (Kaczynski was accepted at 16) and lied about what the experiment was going to do.

        The entire thing was horrible and profoundly unethical. His brother has stated it really changed Kaczynski.

        Some people have claimed that it was run by the CIA as part of MKUltra. This is certainly possible but not really substantiated by clear evidence as far as I've seen, and even if the CIA has some relationship they probably didn't instigate the experiments but just asked for research notes or something relatively benign like that. We'll probably never know for sure though.

        Whatever the case may be, of the group of students that were subjected to these abusive experiments only one became a terrorist, so "the CIA created the Unabomber" is rather simplistic IMO. The primary blame remains with Kaczynski, no matter what.

        • lvass 292 days ago
          >Whatever the case may be, of the group of students that were subjected to these abusive experiments only one became a terrorist

          Source? What is the incidence of terrorism in that group and in the general population?

          • arp242 292 days ago
            I don't have any data or sources on this; if my memory is correct the participants were actually anonymous and the only reason we know Ted Kaczynski participated is because of his brother, so we don't even know who the other people were. However, I expect if another one had also become a terrorist, we would have heard about it. There were just a handful of participants (1 or 2 dozen or thereabouts), so it's not really enough for a "proper study" anyway.

            Also: many people (myself included) were extensively and viciously bullied in their childhood and/or teen years. Many suffer profoundly negative effects from this, sometimes for decades or even their entire lives, but most are not terrorists. And even if it did turn out that the incidence of terrorists was higher: that still doesn't absolve them or their own responsibility in committing violent acts against random people (i.e. terrorism).

            • catiopatio 292 days ago
              Are you claiming that childhood bullying is equivalent to a program run by the CIA exploring the use of psychological torture and mind-altering substances?
              • arp242 292 days ago
                It was not run by the CIA, as I have mentioned, and it certainly didn't involve mind-altering substances. The specific experiments he participated in involved abusive interrogation sessions to measure stress responses, which is roughly analogous to bullying, yes.
              • l33t233372 292 days ago
                To wit, the study was run my Harvard psychologists, not CIA.
          • ginko 292 days ago
            Well, whatever the size of the group is (let's call it X) it's at least 1 out of X. Which is almost certainly more than the general population.
            • pdabbadabba 292 days ago
              By that logic, we might as well just blame it on his beard.
            • amelius 292 days ago
              And the p-value?
      • moffkalast 292 days ago
        > [1] The CIA was carrying out its mind control program at this university, using the most varied techniques for this purpose. Thus, he endured the administration of substances, hypnosis, electric shocks, and sophisticated psychological techniques. This Harvard experiment lasted almost three years and Kaczynski was one of those experimental subjects.

        [1] https://exploringyourmind.com/the-harvard-experiment-that-le...

      • bheadmaster 292 days ago
        Search for the section "psychological study" under "Early Life".
        • Mechanical9 292 days ago
          "Some sources have suggested that Murray's experiments were part of Project MKUltra" doesn't really seem like strong evidence.
          • quetzthecoatl 292 days ago
            right after that sentence, you have -

            "A Freedom of Information Act document released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2018 states that "a considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence suggests that Theodore Kaczynski. also known as the Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MK-ULTRA experiments conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962".[26] Chase and others have also suggested that this experience may have motivated Kaczynski's criminal activities"

    • netdoll 292 days ago
      [flagged]
      • jmull 292 days ago
        In the article it says he made an appointment to see a psychiatrist but left the waiting room before actually meeting with the psychiatrist (and then had an epiphany to kill people instead).

        Not sure you can really blame that on the University or psychiatrist.

      • fatfingerd 292 days ago
        I would generally discount any claims that someone that is a problem for the CIA is a sexual deviant.

        He had a serious problem with authority, needed to draft dodge and had a meeting with a psychiatrist where he planned to practise discussing feelings of being a woman with a psychiatrist.. I'm not really sure I should believe a forensic psychiatric evaluation decades later by a psychiatrist with a motive on what evaluation to give.

      • s9w 292 days ago
        [flagged]
      • jstarfish 292 days ago
        [flagged]
    • local_crmdgeon 292 days ago
      The media will report on this as the death of a terrorist. None of the real terrorists will be brought to justice - the CIA has done so many abhorrent things here and abroad.

      We act like the KGB/FSB is this unfathomable, foreign evil. We have the bigger, scarier thing that killed it in our backyard.

      • varjag 292 days ago
        This is such an American thing to write that part of me almost wants to applaud.
      • next_xibalba 292 days ago
        > real terrorists

        Did the CIA fabricate and mail the bombs?

        • Sebguer 292 days ago
          No, but they've bombed a lot more innocent people than TedK did. For one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Lawrence_Pope
          • timeon 292 days ago
            How does this make Unabomber not terrorist?
            • Sebguer 292 days ago
              I mean, Ted was definitely a terrorist, but the size of his crimes pales in comparison to the institution that experimented on him and continues to exist to this day.
        • Tao3300 292 days ago
          Whether or not the CIA was behind the psychological abuse he was subjected to, that it was made the bombmaker.
        • anigbrowl 292 days ago
          Not those specific bombs.
        • adamrezich 292 days ago
          did the CIA put crack in the hood?
          • torginus 292 days ago
            To stick to the facts, LA's biggest cocaine supplier got his stuff from a pair of Nicaraguans were members of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras raising money for the organization. A journalist named Gary Webb covered the whole thing, who later murdered by two gunshots, and his death was ruled a suicide.

            Make up your mind on this.

            • l33t233372 292 days ago
              Funding an anti-communist death squad that also sells drugs isn’t exactly the same as bringing crack to the hood.
          • next_xibalba 292 days ago
            No. This has been pretty thoroughly refuted.
            • adamrezich 292 days ago
              who refuted it? other federal agencies? the crack just materialized on its own?
              • ch4s3 292 days ago
                There was never any evidence to begin with. The author of the often cited investigative report even refutes the assertion that the CIA was involved. It’s pure fantasy.
                • adamrezich 292 days ago
                  right, and then the guy who wrote the report later "killed himself" with two gunshots to the head.
                  • l33t233372 292 days ago
                    People shooting themselves in the head often reflexively pull the trigger twice.

                    Do you suppose the elite hit squad that came to kill him simply added an extra bullet by mistake?

                    • adamrezich 292 days ago
                      from what I have been able to determine, this does not seem to be true—people who die from multiple self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head seem to be quite few and far between.
                  • ch4s3 292 days ago
                    His ex-wife and the LA county corner were pretty convinced that he did it himself. Why would the CIA kill him if he wasn’t point the finger at them?
            • Sebguer 292 days ago
              what about bombing merchant ships in indonesia, has that been refuted too?
        • local_crmdgeon 292 days ago
          No they broke him mentally with MKULtra
      • boppo1 292 days ago
        The CIA has done some bad shit, even to their own citizens, but are they really on the level of the KGB? Seems like the KGB was a more overt daily-life terror, whereas the CIA has a more 'occasional' history of atrocities.
        • EdSharkey 292 days ago
          CIA is worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies (AND THAT'S THE PUBLIC LIST)

          How many redlines they gotta cross and ops they gotta run before they rival the KGB for you?

        • retrocryptid 292 days ago
          Always seemed to me the CIA were more creative: fish robot, sewing transmitters inside cats, arranging for their former director to die days before he was to give testimony. KGB and GRU were just "we're going to push you out the window" or "murder your family."
        • localplume 291 days ago
          [dead]
      • Mechanical9 292 days ago
        [flagged]
        • brvsft 292 days ago
          > CIA FUD

          I can't tell if you're being serious.

          • Mechanical9 292 days ago
            I am being serious. I have a very low tolerance for conspiracy theories touted as facts.
            • brvsft 292 days ago
              Okay, let me point out the funny part to you.

              The CIA is still a piece of shit organization that has performed disgusting acts all over the world, and we don't even know about all of them (but, to be fair, the ones we don't know about shouldn't count in our opinion of the org). To talk about how Ted K. being a target of the CIA's MKUltra program as a "conspiracy theory" and "CIA FUD" seems laughably absurd, not because you may be correct that Kaczynski was never experimented on by the CIA, but rather because we know for a fact that MKUltra happened.

              So on the one hand, we have an organization that drugged and tortured people as part of an experiment, and on the other, we have a potential lie that Ted Kaczynski was one of the people on whom they experimented. You're getting upset about the latter in order to defend the organization doing the former from "FUD."

              You've literally chosen to stand up against "CIA FUD" to assert that even though the CIA performed these psychological torture experiments on people, Ted Kaczynski was not one of them! Or perhaps you don't believe MKUltra ever happened, I don't know.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra

              > Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra)[a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.[1][2][3][4] It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973.

        • local_crmdgeon 292 days ago
          He was an MKUltra victim, which was a CIA project
          • Mechanical9 292 days ago
            There does not seem to be any evidence that corroborates this. The most I can find are claims that some records were destroyed, so we won't know. That doesn't automatically mean there is a connection, though.
            • krisoft 292 days ago
              Let's unwrap this.

              It seems pretty uncontroversial that Kaczynski has participated in series of psychological experiments by Henry Murray. Do you accept this fact?

              It seems to be well supported via anecdotal evidence that these experiments were quite brutal and stressful, one might even call them torture. Do you agree with this?

              We know that the psychologist in question (Henry Murray) was associated with the Office of Strategic Services. Are you with me on this?

              We know that the Office of Strategic Services is the predecessor of the CIA.

              So what we know is that we have a researcher in the orbit of OSS/CIA who conducted brutal experiments on Kaczynski. So that is the connection you are looking for.

              We do not know if these experiments were part of the CIA program running under the codename MKUltra, or if they were part of some other CIA supported program under some other codename.

              > The most I can find are claims that some records were destroyed, so we won't know.

              You are making it sound like mice got to archived papers or the ink faded. But that is not the case. The CIA director ordered all documentation regarding MKUltra to be destroyed in 1973. That is it. Those papers would have told us for certain what is the truth. They made sure they are destroyed.

              As you say the fact that the documents were destroyed doesn't prove that Henry Murray's experiments were CIA backed. That would be crazy speak.

              But it is also not entirely fair to say that there is no connection whatsoever. In the absence of hard evidence we won't ever know for certain, but we can make reasonable inferences.

              If you disagree with anything I wrote in the above please be specific which part of it do you disagree with.

            • EdSharkey 292 days ago
              The volume of your n responses had me convinced until I saw you refuted n+1 times. I won't question your motives for sweating the unabomber.

              That said, if someone OTHER THAN YOU was paid by the post for posts akin to yours, and I was their boss, I would reassign that person to Reddit.

  • drones 292 days ago
    It's frustrating how he articulates so well the problems of modern society as it pertains to progress in human development, equality, and the environment, yet his actions were essentially the result of personal grievances against coworkers he didn't like. If only the 80's had twitter he'd be such a great poster.
    • Rebelgecko 292 days ago
      Yeah, he wasn't wrong about some things-the industrial revolution and its consequences have had some pretty big downsides.
    • fredgrott 292 days ago
      you are aware that his mind was harmed when he was a child at Harvard, right?

      See https://exploringyourmind.com/the-harvard-experiment-that-le....

      • drones 292 days ago
        [flagged]
        • dang 292 days ago
          Please don't do this here.
          • inglor_cz 292 days ago
            Dang, I am not sure he is wrong. His comment is snarky, but there are reasons to think that the explosion of social networks has led to a major mental health crisis, especially among the young, and it may indeed be true that social networks are optimized to make you angry, depressed and resentful.
            • dang 292 days ago
              On HN, not being snarky is more important than not being wrong—especially when it comes to drive-by oneliners. This is not a borderline call!

              Your longer explanation would have been fine as the GP, for example, but the GP comment wasn't anything like that.

    • veave 292 days ago
      [flagged]
      • DirectorKrennic 292 days ago
        Not really. It's a lot of disorganized nonsense with a high noise-to-signal ratio. Random excerpts:

        > 14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.

        > 15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

        > 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.

        > 35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.

        • arp242 292 days ago
          Reading Kaczynski is a little bit like reading the Bible: you shouldn't take everything literally but instead think about what's trying to be said, and you should ignore some bits.

          e.g. paragraph "15" is excessive and inflammatory, but he wasn't wrong that some people will try to find fault for anything that happens in the West while ignoring much greater crimes in other countries. See e.g. all the HN posters who trivialize China's problems while attacking the US (I'm sure this thread will have some of those types of comments, too). This point also wasn't original to Kaczynski, e.g. George Orwell also wrote about it, as did many others.

          Also remember much of this was written an era when people were literally collaborating with the USSR and East-Germany out of "socialist ideals" and (rightful) anger over the shady activities of the CIA or FBI, while also ignoring that those countries were significantly worse in almost every way.

        • joenot443 292 days ago
          Are those "random"? It seems like you chose them pretty specifically, actually. You seem like you're inching towards a point here, but not quite making one. Maybe you can expand a bit?
          • happytoexplain 292 days ago
            No need to be ominous. Those topics are forever the high-noise, high-politics topics. It's not eyebrow-raising to find them in this kind of manifesto, or for somebody to disagree with them.
          • DirectorKrennic 292 days ago
            > 77. Not everyone in industrial-technological society suffers from psychological problems. Some people even profess to be quite satisfied with society as it is. We now discuss some of the reasons why people differ so greatly in their response to modern society.

            > 97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free” man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, “Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century,” page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: “An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed.

            > 116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.

            As I said, a whole bunch of nonsense.

        • drones 292 days ago
          For the most part the underlying observations are hard to disagree, even if you disagree with the conclusions.

          14: - Yep this is quite off. I disagree.

          15: (Some) Leftists do operate under a slave morality, which does lead them to morally binary modes of thinking, resulting in things like supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine (because America is an imperialist, illegitimate state and therefore NATO is too).

          22: Not unique to leftists - the political machine demands conflict to justify it's own existence

          35: Mazlow's hierarchy of needs. This is undisputable. Why do billionaires waste money on backyard space experiments and vacuous social media platforms? Existential boredom and ego.

        • throw4548 292 days ago
          14 doesn’t insane

          15 seems spot on to me. It’s definitely how conservatives see leftists.

          22 and 35 do seem like rambling

          • 13of40 292 days ago
            I haven't read it in years, but I think 35 was part of a bigger argument that past a certain point everything in modern life is either impossible or trivially easy to achieve, so people seek outlets in hobbies, etc. Not universally true, as anyone who's ever job hunted or quit smoking knows, but not just thoughtless rambling.
  • hnuser847 292 days ago
    It’s fun to drop verbatim quotes from his manifesto into random internet discussions without attribution. A lot of people agree with his ideas without realizing it.
    • happytoexplain 292 days ago
      This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an attitude of superiority). He said and did a lot of things. It's normal to variously agree and disagree with each thing in a vacuum. This is true of most political/societal figures, no matter how horrific they are, taken as a whole.
      • HKH2 292 days ago
        > This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an attitude of superiority).

        I don't think it implies any of that. The GP just means some people can't or won't separate the art from the artist.

        • burkaman 292 days ago
          If we're talking about individual out-of-context quotes, I don't think it's correct to separate the art from the artist. Human language is very imprecise, and knowing the author of a quote can significantly change the meaning of a sentence.

          I'm just going to make up an example: let's say the quote in question is "Democracy requires active participation." If I saw this posted by an anonymous internet commenter in a political discussion, I would completely agree. The obvious interpretation is that democracy works better when people vote, speak to your representative, organize, etc.

          Now let's say the commenter reveals that this is a quote from a presidential assassin. Well, now I'm a little uncomfortable. Why did they choose this particular quote? Do they agree with the assassin's fringe definition of "active participation"? The intended meaning has completely changed with this new information. The identity of the author is part of the message, because we aren't talking about objectively true or false statements, we're talking about philosophical ideas that are much bigger than the quote provided.

        • Kye 292 days ago
          I just wonder how many people who could have done better were blocked by the actions of all these artists people want to make excuses for. How many great works were we denied because someone insisted on making space for someone who repelled (or worse) better people?
          • catiopatio 292 days ago
            The zero-sum command-economy view of free speech: we have to exercise prior restraint on what people can say to ensure that there’s room for the people we approve of to speak.
            • happytoexplain 292 days ago
              This seems pretty un-generous. The parent is citing a real, straight-forward cause-and-effect which does not necessitate or even imply a zero-sum game, nor does it imply the extremist solution you're accusing them of supporting.
              • Kye 292 days ago
                I was struggling to figure out how to respond to them, but I think you got it. I had that famous Stephen Jay Gould quote in mind: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/99345-i-am-somehow-less-int...

                "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

                My post was a call for being smarter about who we invest in. I always wonder about people who call for separating art and artist over such mediocre artistry.

              • catiopatio 292 days ago
                The zero-sum game and extremist solution are inherent in their position.

                As the parent says in their reply below:

                > My post was a call for being smarter about who we invest in.

                • Kye 292 days ago
                  "We can do better" is not a Hitlerian final solution. I'm calling for having taste, not building gulags.
                  • catiopatio 292 days ago
                    Tall about mixed metaphors!

                    Nobody said anything about a “final solution” or gulags.

                    “We can do better” and “calling for having taste” certainly seems to imply a command-economy approach to the marketplace of ideas.

                    If that’s not what you intended, what do you mean by “have taste” and “do better”?

                    • Kye 292 days ago
                      >> "certainly seems to imply a command-economy approach to the marketplace of ideas."

                      No. This is a trunk of ideas, not a "marketplace of ideas." I have some wares in there. You can move on if none of it appeals to you.

                      I'm just some strings in your computer. I can't make you do anything. There's no policy work being done here.

            • HKH2 292 days ago
              More charitably, attention is zero-sum and we personally have to prioritize if we want to maximize quality.

              What you said assumes that people will give up on that and jump to coercion. Maybe your cynicism is warranted.

    • danbolt 292 days ago
      I haven’t read the entirety of his manifesto, but his ideas always struck me as typical narratives that resonated with people’s anxieties about modernity.

      A bit of a bait and switch. Get attention with something shocking and violent, then appeal to worries through apocalyptic boogeymen. The solution, of course, is a sense of comforting tradition that the naturalness of the past is safe. A killer combo!

      • molly0 292 days ago
        An interesting observation!
    • madballster 292 days ago
      That however is unfortunately true for quotes from many of history's dark figures, be it Hitler, Stalin or Nero.
      • timeon 292 days ago
        Why unfortunately? Quotes are just fragments.
      • George83728 292 days ago
        What are some good Nero quotes? Wikiquotes only has two; one of which is "I wish I could not write." which seems a bit ironic since it seems most of his writings are now gone.
    • SergeAx 292 days ago
      This also works with some Hitler quotes, what's your point?
      • HKH2 292 days ago
        Which ones?
        • SergeAx 292 days ago
          "If you want to shine like sun first you have to burn like it"

          "If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower"

          "The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people"

          He was quite a speaker, old Adi.

          • ginko 292 days ago
            Compared to the Kaczinksy quotes from this thread I have to say that these are mostly lame truisms.
          • mdp2021 292 days ago
            > [Death in the battlefield] is what the youth is for, after all

            ...Which suggests (cpr. the "treasure" quote) how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given broad statements.

            > I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few

            ...Which suggests - hopefully - how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given its non exhaustive intrinsic nature.

            --

            Edit: related (with the first branch):

            > He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future

            Put the three together ("treasure", "battlefield", "owning"), the whole idea gets a sinister tone; take "treasure" alone, it may even raise "awww"s - without substance.

          • HaroldBolt78 292 days ago
            [dead]
    • lost_tourist 292 days ago
      That's because he took virtually all of his ideas from other people who said it better, and thus I'm not sure why one wouldn't quote those sources rather than a known terrorist and murderer? Young minds are often easily influenced and bad at separating the person and the message of the writing. It's kind of like inverse MAGA, where the cult of personality is the important thing and the content doesn't really matter, only its source.
    • duxup 292 days ago
      Does that matter?
    • znpy 292 days ago
      one of the funniest things for me is the fact that many left-wing people add Kaczynski quotes without realizing that left-wing people are basically the first people to be criticized and almost mocked in Ted's main piece, "Industrial society and its future"
      • arp242 292 days ago
        I would describe myself as left-wing, and I agree with some (not all) of his criticisms of "the left" in general. Turns out that left-wing people can have disagreements. Furthermore, I can reject argument X while simultaneously also accepting argument Y from the same person or book.
        • numpad0 292 days ago
          Turns out leftists love self criticism for self improvements. That’s inherently bad, right?

          (set aside that it often builds up to violent inner conflicts)

          • znpy 292 days ago
            > Turns out leftists love self criticism for self improvements.

            they really don't, and this is one of the reasons why there is so much fracturing in the left, usually.

            • happytoexplain 292 days ago
              Isn't that backwards? In-group criticism is how you get so-called "fracturing", which is arguably healthier (if less politically useful) than the alternative: "loyalty". I'd be highly suspicious if any group of tens of millions of people all ostensibly agreed on everything.
      • timeon 292 days ago
        Not sure why is funny agreeing with selected quotes while not agreeing with others.
        • znpy 292 days ago
          would you still stand by your point if the quote came from (extreme case) Adolf Hitler?

          if the answer is no... there you go.

          • happytoexplain 292 days ago
            This doesn't seem like the tough question you think it is. I assume Hitler had some opinions that, taken away from the context of his goals, are reasonable to agree with. What makes you think it's an exception to the parent's point?
      • pfffr 292 days ago
        "Leftists" offended by these sentiments are most likely centrists. The goal of neoliberalism (read: the DNC) has been to shift the left to the center. This has been their objective for years. See: Obama, Biden, the Clintons.

        TK was post-left before it was cool.

      • happytoexplain 292 days ago
        Why do you think they don't realize (or don't disagree with your premise)? I think you'd be surprised by how many people are not in fact one-dimensional stereotypes who must disagree with everything a person says just because they disagree with some things that person says. I'm also confused as to why you seem to imply that people should be that way.
      • scaredginger 292 days ago
        To be fair, infighting is extremely common in left-wing circles
      • ldehaan 292 days ago
        [flagged]
        • robobro 292 days ago
          A lot of the "leftists" Ted K disagrees with in that work are not proper Marxists but SJW/radical liberals (what's called the American Left but has little relation to Marxist thought)
      • Barrin92 292 days ago
        Virtually everyone who quotes Kaczynski is aware of his statements on the political Left, it's just that nobody takes that particular aspect very personal or seriously given that ecological anarchism, Kaczynski's position, has always been overwhelmingly a left-wing position.
        • pfffr 291 days ago
          Anarcho primitivism is hardly "left wing"
      • krapp 292 days ago
        His "criticisms" of the left read like something a denizen of /pol/ or Reddit would come up with. It's entirely possible to see the merits of his arguments against technology while dismissing his deranged hatred of leftists, feminists, etc.
        • piaste 292 days ago
          The OP literally asked to "attack the ideas, not the man", and here you go attacking the ideas solely because of the kind of men who share it...

          What do you mean by " it reads like something /pol/ or reddit would write "? Does Kaczynsky use tired cartoon memes? Does he accuse the left of insufficient weightlifting? Does he challenge them to a 1v1 in a Nintendo fighting game?

          What part of his criticism do you actually find wrong?

          • FrustratedMonky 292 days ago
            Lol had not heard this one. The left has "insufficient weightlifting". Might be true.

            Could it be that on the left there are more endurance sports, for health. And on the right there are more muscle building sports, so they can strike cool poses with their guns?

            • Vecr 292 days ago
              It's pretty common. Don't be surprised if you get called a dyel (DYEL, Do You Even Lift) lanklet (small, not fat or muscular) runcell (someone who runs to try to get women, but would be better off lifting).
        • hackermailman 292 days ago
          His criticisms of leftist activism in the 1990s is that it will always seek to control and exploit technology to implement their ideology so followers of his anti-tech movement should not rely on them. He then rants against 'green anarchy' claiming it is a kind of naive forest worshipping cult that also should not be included in whatever anti-tech movement. It is a small part of his overall manifesto on who you shouldn't trust to join a specific (terrorist) movement and likely came from his time in academia.

          It's definitely not the standard fare you would find on those 2 sites you mentioned just a brief 'don't trust these activists they want the philosopher stone for themselves'.

        • anigbrowl 292 days ago
          That's overly reductive. Kaczynski's political views continued to evolve while in prison; his later writings are notably different in tone.
          • krapp 292 days ago
            Industrial Society and its Future is the only work anyone ever mentions, especially where Kaczynsci's anti-leftist politics are concerned.
            • anigbrowl 290 days ago
              That's unfortunate because he expanded on ISAIF at length in his prison writing and took a more thoughtful and look at a lot of existing political tropes. For example, in his Anti-Tech Revolution* he lauds the tactics of early feminists' campaigns to obtain voting rights for women, and similarly deconstructs a lot of flaws in right wing ideology.

              I disagree with a lot of Kaczynski's ideas and methods, but I still regard him as an important thinker and wish people would read his output in full rather than rushing to have the hottest take (not meant as a dig at you, rather the avalanche of attempted zingers on Twitter and in the media over the weekend).

    • Shinma 292 days ago
      [flagged]
  • spencerchubb 292 days ago
    I don't find Ted Kaczynski's manifesto to be insightful. It points out that technology has flaws, which is frankly quite obvious and is a fact that everyone already agrees with. Furthermore, his proposed solution is crap.

    He proposes that we just go back to wilderness, which is bad for many obvious reasons. Technology and division of labor has allowed us to spend our days improving humanity rather than finding food just to survive. We need to find better coordination mechanisms that allow us to apply technology towards good things.

    • lumb63 292 days ago
      I had a different take on his writings than yours. Rather than thinking his solution was bad, he encouraged me to question why we “spend our days improving humanity”.

      What does “improving humanity” even mean? What’s the metric we are optimizing for? Are we, humanity, any happier than we were when we were hunter-gatherer tribes? I don’t think so - we’ve just found new metrics to focus on and to be disappointed in ourselves in.

      His writing encouraged me to consider that we are evolutionarily ill-suited for our current situation. We have resources far in excess of our needs, and yet we struggle. We find new issues to focus on, new problems, new fights, new causes. Our desire to “improve humanity” will never end, because it cannot end. When it does, we will find something new to take its place.

      Maybe our purpose in life is to find food to survive. It is the task our ancestors evolved to do for millions and millions of years. It is our inheritance, in that way.

      • cambaceres 292 days ago
        What is stopping you from moving out in the wilderness if you think it's the best way to get truly happy?
        • beebeepka 292 days ago
          Doesn't make sense in regards to what lumb63 said. They're talking about society as a whole
      • guerrilla 292 days ago
        The way you put it sounds like a part of the foundational thesis of Buddhism.
      • bbor 292 days ago
        > Are we, humanity, any happier than we were when we were hunter-gatherer tribes? I don’t think so - we’ve just found new metrics to focus on and to be disappointed in ourselves in.

        This seems crazy to me, leaning heavily on the proof that you yourself obviously are not choosing that life when you easily could. It’s possible in the same way that anything is possible, but cmon - the world is objectively less violent, sick, and ignorant. Sure we might be sad because the economy sucks, but I’d rather be sad than, ya know, fighting for my life…

        A basic rundown from GPT expresses why I think this. Curious to hear where you disagree!

        “Sure, let's consider these factors:

        1. *Pleasure (Epicurus)*: Likely harder in a tribal society. Threats of violence and disease may significantly limit opportunities for pleasure and heighten experiences of pain.

        2. *Virtuous Life (Aristotle)*: Potentially harder in a tribal society due to the pressures of survival, which might necessitate actions that conflict with virtues like honesty and generosity.

        3. *Self-Actualization (Maslow)*: Much harder in a tribal society. The constant threats of violence and disease could make fulfilling basic needs a priority, leaving little room for self-actualization.

        4. *Moderation (Confucius)*: Easier in a tribal society, as the threat of violence or disease could necessitate moderation and caution to ensure survival.

        5. *Freedom (Sartre)*: Likely easier in modern society. The risks of violence and disease in tribal societies may limit the opportunity for individual freedom and choice.

        6. *Inner Peace (Buddha)*: Likely harder in tribal societies, where the constant threat of violence and disease might disrupt efforts towards finding inner peace.

        7. *Authenticity (Heidegger)*: Likely harder in a tribal society, where survival concerns might pressure individuals to adopt roles for the group's benefit rather than personal authenticity.

        8. *Community (Marx)*: Likely easier in tribal societies, as the constant threats would necessitate cooperation and mutual support, fostering a strong sense of community.

        9. *Mindfulness (Thich Nhat Hanh)*: Likely harder in a tribal society, where the constant threats could make it difficult to focus on the present moment and achieve mindfulness.

        10. *Acceptance (Stoics)*: Equal in both societies; acceptance is about personal perspective and can be challenging in any circumstance, including violence or disease.

        11. *Physical Well-being (Plato)*: Much harder in a tribal society due to a higher risk of injury from violence, more limited medical knowledge and treatment, and potential prevalence of disease.

        12. *Purpose (Nietzsche)*: Likely harder in a tribal society, where survival threats might narrow the scope of one's purpose to primarily physical survival.

        13. *Knowledge (Socrates)*: Easier in modern society due to broader access to information, whereas tribal societies may lack the resources to gain knowledge beyond immediate survival needs.

        14. *Creativity (Fromm)*: Harder in a tribal society where threats of violence and disease might limit the time, resources, and mental energy available for creative pursuits.

        15. *Love (Fromm)*: Possibly harder in tribal societies, where the constant threats could overshadow relationships and the expression of love.”

        • lumb63 291 days ago
          In future discussions, you might have better luck eliciting useful responses from people when you don’t pit them to argue against an AI, IMO. It reads to me like “I didn’t want to put in the effort to generate my own thoughts, but I expect you to: good luck!”

          That aside I’ll focus on the Maslow point since I think it’s the easiest to discuss and has the most obvious carryover to a lot of the other points. Maslow tells us we have a hierarchy of needs. At the top of that is self-actualization, but we need to fulfill all the lower-level needs before we feel any need for self actualization. I strongly doubt anyone would be disappointed that they are not “actualizing themselves” if they were fighting every day for food, shelter, etc. self-actualization is basically what Ted describes as a “surrogate activity” - a need we have made up because all our “real” needs have been met, and now we have all this spare time with which we have to do something. So we create new needs for ourselves to fill our time.

          You can carry this concept, of our needs being relative to our position in life, over to a lot of the other philosophies you listed. Concepts like love, generosity, pleasure, purpose, are all relative. From a modern western perspective, generosity might be buying a friend a nice gift, cooking someone dinner, etc. Those are much smaller in magnitude than, say, sharing the limited food and resources you gathered with your tribe so that they can all survive. We today think of pleasure as sex, or achieving a goal, or seeing something that makes us happy in passing. Those probably pale in comparison to the sense of pleasure of knowing a hard day’s work allowed you to live another day in a hostile environment. We think of purpose as what we were put on this earth to do. Had we not all the resources we needed, and had to work for them, I think it’s very reasonable to expect our sense of “purpose” would change to match our capabilities.

          You can even see evidence of this in modern society by comparing high and low income areas. Children from lower income areas, where their physical and emotional needs are not being met, don’t get as good of grades. Why should they care about who built the pyramids or how to work a Bunsen burner when they don’t know where dinner is coming from?

          • bbor 291 days ago
            Sorry if I offended by bringing up the AI - I was trying to use it to offer many possible avenues of more specific disagreement, so I could understand their stance better. Less about convincing or arguing.

            On the rest of it… I think i asked a bunch of questions last night and am now facing the harsh reality that the answer is “some people see the whole shape of the world and human experience completely differently than I do and always have”. So not too much to discuss lol

            To illustrate that, consider “ I strongly doubt anyone would be disappointed that they are not “actualizing themselves” if they were fighting every day for food, shelter, etc.”. I find this absolutely insane (no offense). You bring up poor modern people in the end, and I think that’s a great example of my concerns: being poor sucks, not knowing where your next meal come from feels terrible, and watching loved ones die of preventable causes is fucking heartbreaking. The idea that poverty/primitivism would lead to better self-actualization is so, so far from how I see the world that I think debate is impossible

            Thanks for the detailed response! Appreciate the dialogue, for sure.

            EDIT: on re-read it appears your point is that if we’re struggling for the lower needs, we won’t miss the higher ones. That’s not my understanding of Maslow, but since his theory isn’t really about happiness at all but motivation, I can’t appeal to the author there. It just seems very counter-intuitive that higher needs would not be missed while struggling to achieve lower ones; for example, does someone without shelter not miss love?

            • lumb63 291 days ago
              Of course I’m only speculating on how someone who has lived their entire life primitively might feel - I haven’t done that myself. I’m looking at things from the perspective of if I were born into a tribal, primitive society. As you alluded to in your previous post, things clearly change when you’ve lived a modern life.

              Having lived a modern life, we know that the diseases primitive societies face are preventable. We know that we don’t need to struggle for food. If we didn’t know that, we’d probably feel differently. For example, a lot of primitive cultures have very different relationships and views of death.

              I think that “going from modern to primitive life” versus “always living a primitive life” is a huge difference.

        • avgcorrection 291 days ago
          > This seems crazy to me, leaning heavily on the proof that you yourself obviously are not choosing that life when you easily could.

          Yeah, you know who already did that? The Unabomber! And instead of just keeping to himself, he eventually realized by all the development being done near him that Civilization would eventually encroach upon him and keep him out.

          As a politics, “choosing that life” is not sufficient because only a small amount of people can do that; it is not sustainable for a large mass of people to opt into that lifestyle since we (at least in population dense areas) haven’t been able to live like that for thousands of years.

          The idea that you can just shut up, f off and “choose that life” is a liberal fantasy. But political liberalism is the dominant ideology so that’s the usual response.

          • bbor 291 days ago
            Well Tbf he saw a road - not exactly “forced out”. His campaign of violence was over a decade long and I don’t think I’ve read anything about him starving or caving on his self-sufficiency ideals in the meantime. But maybe this is covered in the manifesto?

            I’d say that if people who value a self-sufficient primitive existence decide they can’t coexist with me in my tech-enhanced world, my natural response is “suck it up”. The idea that they like something that a huge majority of people don’t so we all need to comply to make room for them feels selfish to the point of narcissism. It doesn’t help that, as you said, going this route today would necessitate a massive… let’s charitably say “intentional population decrease”.

            Not sure if you're endorsing such views or not, but point well taken - I see how some would find self-sufficiency unsatisfying if they can’t escape all traces of the rest of society.

        • Eisenstein 292 days ago
          > This seems crazy to me, leaning heavily on the proof that you yourself obviously are not choosing that life when you easily could.

          Can someone do this? Find a place you can live and hunt for free that isn't incredibly difficult to survive in because of its inhospitable climate or lack of resources.

          • bbor 292 days ago
            I mean, Africa and LA seem like strong contenders. Most non-rich nations, really. One could say “but I want somewhere safer” but obviously that would be a little bit self-defeating, ideology-wise.

            “For free” is also pretty much impossible, especially if you factor in travel, but my intuition tells me that a very modest American or European savings could buy access to land somewhere. Especially if you sold all your possessions, or used credit without intending to pay it back.

            Re: resources… I mean that’s kinda the deal? Living immersed in nature without society’s support doesn’t mean relaxing in Eden in the vast vast majority of places, it means fighting like hell. Imo.

            • virgildotcodes 291 days ago
              I mean, humans are a social species, and tribal societies that live off the land have a chain of countless generations passing down wisdom and customs to train their people on how to effectively survive in their respective environments, and still they rely on their community to effectively do so.

              To take a single (or even a couple) of fully formed adults without any of that lifelong education and training, who are accustomed to a wholly different environment and way of life, and to drop them into a survival situation without that surrounding community to rely on, seems like an obvious recipe for failure.

              Not that I’m arguing that tribal life is actually desirable over a modern western lifestyle.

              • bbor 291 days ago
                I agree, well put! Overall I’m arguing against primitivism but Ted’d particular brand of it (schizophrenic complete isolation) is even easier to find problems with as a political or social message.

                The man needed health care, not a shack in the woods…

          • defrost 292 days ago
            It's not for everyone, but FWiW the overwhelming majority of people I went to primary school with did exactly that, as had their families since they'd walked across the world to get there.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

        • perfmode 291 days ago
          you misunderstand inner peace.

          inner peace is a peace which cannot be disturbed by external circumstances.

          inner peace means peace even amid disease. peace even amid violence.

          • bbor 291 days ago
            Fair enough! I’d say it’s “equally possible in either scenario” then.
    • pyuser583 292 days ago
      It’s not insightful. But it’s obvious he is highly educated, and familiar with academic culture.

      I don’t understand how the FBI profiled him as poorly educated.

      • carabiner 292 days ago
        They profiled him based on the bombs, which had deliberate crudeness and mistakes as red herrings. They hadn't seen the manifesto at that point.
      • Eisenstein 292 days ago
        Because FBI profiles are only good for crimes that happen often enough to have perpetrators willing and available for psychological study.
  • mypastself 292 days ago
    It’s been years since I’ve read Industrial Society and its Future, but I remember it felt like the author was rationalizing his own emotional state into a philosophy supposedly explaining society. It contained many subjective ideas presented as hard fact, as well as some naive romanticization of pre-industrial societies.

    He was right about one thing, though. No one would give his writings a second look if he wasn’t a terrorist. Even if the many copycat manifestos would be much worse.

    • JamesLeonis 292 days ago
      > I remember it felt like the author was rationalizing his own emotional state into a philosophy supposedly explaining society.

      Your intuition is correct. Here's TK's own words on the matter [0]:

      > But even leaving aside all questions of “political” utility and considering only my personal predilections, I have little interest in philosophical questions such as the desirability or undesirability of the “herd mentality.” The mountains of Western Montana offered me nearly everything I needed or wanted. If those mountains could have remained just as they were when I first moved to Montana in 1971, I would have been satisfied. The rest of the world could have had a herd mentality, or an individualistic mentality or whatever, and it would have been all the same to me. But, of course, under modern conditions there was no way the mountains could have remained isolated from the rest of the world. Civilization moved in and squeezed me, so…

      [0]: https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/ted-kaczynski-s-lette...

    • californiadreem 292 days ago
      >It contained many subjective ideas presented as hard fact, as well as some naive romanticization of pre-industrial societies.

      You may enjoy reading this:

      https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-tr...

      • mypastself 292 days ago
        Interesting, will check it out.
    • icpmacdo 292 days ago
      Here is a timestamped clip of George Hotz Twitch stream from 6 days ago making the same point about rationalizing his own emotional state of powerlessness in Industrial Society and its Future

      https://youtu.be/Mr0rWJhv9jU?t=7169

  • justinator 292 days ago
    His opinions may be credible. His methods to gain attention towards them were absolutely not.

    A travesty how he was treated in those medical experiments. It's always tragic to find out reasons why people hurt others.

    • sneak 292 days ago
      Credible? Absolutely - I wouldn't have read his manifesto had he not systematically engaged in the premeditated slaughter of human beings. That doesn't make his methods not reprehensible.
      • justinator 292 days ago
        I think it's worth thinking about how climate science during the 80's and 90 s (at least) was suppressed by the very companies that were in business to profit from practices that actively harmed all life on Earth. There's rarely justice against huge multinationals. It's just business as usual.

        I don't condone domestic terrorism (especially with so many innocent hurt), but I also don't condone climate change denial for shareholder profit. Is that ever going to stop? Given the velocity already created, I would say: not in my lifetime.

    • dsego 292 days ago
      Would his methods be credible if he was doing it in the 40s and they were directed against nazi intelligentsia for example?
      • margalabargala 292 days ago
        Of course they would be.

        Morality doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not objective, it's collectively determined by society.

        As a society we have decided en masse that blowing up randomly selected people to draw attention to one's political views is not acceptable.

        As a society we also have decided that violent actions taken against the German government in the early 1940s were acceptable.

        This isn't a contradiction, nor hypocrisy, simply the ability to have nuanced opinions.

        • willcipriano 292 days ago
          People like Ted aren't even allowed in the room when society decides these things.
      • justinator 292 days ago
        LOL wut? I'm not a ChatGPT prompt - use your own critical thinking skills for your thought experiment.
    • Shinma 292 days ago
      [flagged]
  • fairity 292 days ago
    My takeaway from Kacynski’s manifesto is that he makes an astute observation about the root causes of unhappiness, but then proposes an absurd solution.

    The astute observation is that a lot of unhappiness is driven by over-socialization and a commitment to inauthentic, subjective values.

    The solution, to tear down technology to force mankind to work on more primitive goals, only makes sense if there are no alternatives.

    Thankfully there are many alternatives. First and foremost, I think people like Ted just need to realize that the yearning to be important and useful is natural, but something you can let go of if you stop taking life so seriously.

    • dennis_jeeves1 292 days ago
      >Thankfully there are many alternatives.

      What exactly are they?

      (the last I checked is that it's virtually impossible to live somewhere (even remote) off the land, without paying a ton in taxes, if you did succeed in some manner without attracting attention in a remote place it would soon get the attention of authorities in due course).

      • fairity 292 days ago
        IMO, the alternatives are all based on a reframing of mindset versus a change in external environment.

        My understanding is that most of Kacynski’s disillusionment was born out of:

        - a recognition of how artificial most people’s values and goals are

        - an inability to find authentic & fulfilling values and goals

        - an innate urge to be useful and important

        Put another way, Kacynski didn’t want to be like the brainwashed masses that chase status, approval, and riches. But, when he looked around for better things to spend his time on, he didn’t find any bc technology is so advanced.

        I think the alternative to burning everything down is learning how to disconnect from the need to feel important and useful. It’s this inability to disconnect from the need to be useful and authentic that ultimately causes the disillusionment.

        The ability to do so starts with an acceptance of the absurdity of life and a release of one’s ego. To put it colloquially, learning to not take things so seriously.

        • armitron 291 days ago
          "the alternatives are all based on a reframing of mindset versus a change in external environment."

          In other words, being forced (or reengineered as Kaczynski writes) to take it. Not exactly an alternative now is it? Imagine telling the victims of the Holocaust, on their way to the crematoria, that they should accept the absurdity of life and release their ego, learn to not take things so seriously. Kaczynski's essential view on the destruction of the human condition by technology is of similar order to the contemporary view of Holocaust atrocities.

          I don't agree with Kaczynski's philosophy as I'm as far from a luddite as one can possibly be, but I have put the time in to digest his work and I find few-if-any flaws in his major positions. Superficial dismissals of the sort one frequently encounters in this thread expose their originators as hopelessly naive and reinforce Kaczynski's message.

          • fairity 290 days ago
            Whether it's appropriate to "force someone to take it" depends on the degree of pain being caused.

            There's some threshold of pain over which it's reasonable to consider major restructuring of society, and it could be useful to have a discussion on where that threshold is, but the fact that you're comparing your current state to being in a Nazi labor camp doesn't make me think that's a good use of my time.

            The disillusionment & accompanied emotional pain described by Kacynski simply doesn't pass the bar for me, especially when a bit of meditation and dedication to your mental health will bring happiness.

        • dennis_jeeves1 292 days ago
          All I wanted to do was live life off the land without interference, guess from what you are said it's too much to ask for...
    • lostmsu 291 days ago
      > only makes sense if there are no alternatives

      Ah? I don't think it makes sense, alternatives or not. Neither the "commitment to subjective values* nor taking down society to solve that.

  • bm3719 292 days ago
    Certain points in Kaczynski's manifesto greatly influenced how I view the world, and I feel they have positively influenced my life in many ways (e.g., trying to live life less wastefully, using nature to ground oneself in reality, evaluating the true total cost of ownership of products of industry).

    RIP.

    • jstarfish 292 days ago
      The person who erected the Georgia Guidestones had a similar philosophy, and engraved his own manifesto for peaceful and sustainable living on slabs of granite as a monument for all to enjoy.

      It was recently bombed into rubble.

    • dennis_jeeves1 292 days ago
      Well if that manifesto influenced you, have a look at my profile and the link on it which have my cynical writings.
  • mihaic 292 days ago
    The one thing I still wonder about Ted is actually how many more actually good and thought provoking "manifestos" like his are out there, only for nobody to push them to in the public's eye.

    After all, almost all smart people that identify uncomfortable truths won't go to extremes to convince strangers of actually giving their non-mainstream ideas a chance.

    • Fricken 292 days ago
      The notion that industrialization and modernity in general bring about feelings of profound alienation has a rich lineage of philosophy and storytelling going back to the dawn of the modern era.

      Nietchze, Carl Jung, Marshall McLuhan, William S Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Fritz Lang, PK Dick, Stanley Kubrick, Jared Diamond, Pink Floyd... this list could go on for a while.

    • drones 292 days ago
      There are way more Ted K's running around today - it's just that you don't need to kill people to get heard anymore. Nowadays the spectacle of ruining your own life is enough to get noticed. Anyone with an internet connection today has access to world stage provided they are interesting enough. Back then you'd need to catch the eye of a producer for a mainstream news broadcast to get any coverage. Now you can just fire up a camera and there's a 50% chance you'll end up on a podcast circuit and end up talking to Joe Rogan.
      • JKCalhoun 292 days ago
        You seem to suggest that Kaczynski murdered as a kind of marketing strategy for his ideas. I highly doubt that.
        • drones 292 days ago
          Terrorism isn't marketing? Marketing is all about advertising your ideas and changing people's ideas. 9/11 wasn't marketing for Al-Quaeda?

          Even if he was purely driven out of self-interest and ego, the result of his actions is that today we are discussing his ideas when we should be working.

          • JKCalhoun 292 days ago
            I think it comes down to order of operations and intent. If we knew that he first had a manifesto to present, then decided to murder strangers to draw attention to it then I grant you it was terrorism as marketing.

            I'm just suspicious whether this was the case.

        • brvsft 292 days ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber_Manifesto

          > Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski engaged in a mail bomb campaign[4] against people involved with modern technology.[5] His initial targets were universities and airlines, which the FBI shortened as UNABOM. In June 1995, Kaczynski offered to end his campaign if one of several publications (the Washington Post, New York Times, or Penthouse) would publish his critique of technology, titled Industrial Society and Its Future, which became widely known as the "Unabomber Manifesto".[6]

          In a sense, he used the murders as a marketing strategy, but honestly it was more of a threat to force his manifesto to be published.

        • AnimalMuppet 292 days ago
          From the manifesto itself: "In order to attract attention to our ideas, we've had to kill people."

          Quoting from memory - may not be word for word.

          So, if you can believe him, then yes, he murdered as a marketing strategy.

          • timeon 292 days ago
            That is also marketing. He was hiding his personal grievances behind these ideas.
          • JKCalhoun 292 days ago
            That's interesting.

            I'm skeptical enough though (having read books about the Zodiac Killer, for example) that I see it just as likely to have been an unexpected opportunity that Kaczynski exploited.

            I guess I'm not surprised that a murderer, enjoying their new-found public lectern, might engage in rationalization of their murders.

        • adamrezich 292 days ago
          it's 2023 and everyone has an Internet-connected smartphone in their pocket at all times—in 1995 this was not the case.
          • JKCalhoun 292 days ago
            And yet people in this internet age still go on shooting sprees and leave behind "manifestos".

            My take away is that there are and always have been sick people. Citing lack of a megaphone shouldn't even be a sliver of rationale for a murderer's behavior.

      • paulpauper 292 days ago
        the odds are way worse than that. think how many emails his producer gets from people wanting to be on his show
    • JKCalhoun 292 days ago
      I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that "manifestos" are inherently elitist. I'm only aware of manifestos coming from people who speak with an air of self-importance. Kaczynski seems no different.
      • sph 292 days ago
        That's tautological. You write a manifesto if you think you have something worthwhile to share with the world.

        Same with writing books, asking people to subscribe to your blog newsletter, shouting on a street corner or asking people to vote for you.

        That said, who says having some self-importance is inherently bad? Trying to be humble is a cultural and religious virtue, not an absolute truth.

      • opportune 292 days ago
        The Declaration of Independence was a manifesto

        Had the American revolution not succeeded it would be relegated to being classified as a typical rebel manifesto that people basically do not care about

      • arp242 292 days ago
        It's just a name; might as well call it a "book", "publication", "article", "website", or "blog post". It's also a name given by the FBI and the media, not Kaczynski himself.
    • kandel 292 days ago
      If you like manifestos the futurist manifesto is pretty cool.
  • bigmattystyles 292 days ago
    No mention of MKUltra, it doesn’t excuse his behavior but does explain why he may have been pushed over the edge.
    • api 292 days ago
      A big chunk of his manifesto reads like very personal grievances because it probably is. He’s doing the usual defensive thing of globalizing and generalizing something that is actually profoundly personal. Kaczynski was a victim of unethical human experimentation.
    • JKCalhoun 292 days ago
      You'd have a point if other subjects of MK-Ultra allowed a similar trajectory as Kaczynski. Were there other cases of self-destruction? I don't even know how many people were subjected to these experiments.
      • tenpies 292 days ago
        Realistically, the CIA will not release full details on MK-ULTRA for another couple generations, so we will never get official confirmation of the alleged names in our lifetime. There is a starting list here under "Notable subjects", although presumably there are subjects that were just vanilla murderers and subjects that tried (and hopefully succeeded) to live a normal life[1].

        When this information is finally released, the people around for that will say "wow, the CIA used to do some real evil stuff against our own people, good thing they would never do that these days!" as the CIA carries out some absurd level of evil that makes MK-ULTRA seem like a fender bender.

        ---

        [1] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/project%20mk-ultra%5B15...

      • anon291 292 days ago
        Yes quite a few mass murderers were purported subjects of mkultra. Of course we do not know with certainty the full scale.

        Sirhan sirhan and Charles Manson come to mind.

      • MarkMarine 292 days ago
        Charles Manson. Frank Rudolph Emmanuel Olson.
        • JKCalhoun 292 days ago
          I saw Charles Manson and a few others on the MKUltra Wikipedia page but they use phrases like "alleged", "according to author...". Without an idea of the sample size of people subjected to experimentation it's still inconclusive.
          • MarkMarine 292 days ago
            I’m sorry, is your point that MKUltra experimentation on people isn’t proven to be bad for them?

            Unexpected high doses of LSD, attempts at programming, manipulation and what can only honestly be described as torture… the CIA destroyed all the records of this and because we don’t have complete records we just have to make a big shrug and say “ah well JKCalhoun isn’t convinced, guess it’s not bad for you.”

            What would it take to convince you that dosing unexpecting people with high amounts of LSD could have a detrimental effect on their mental health, possibly making people crazy?

            • JKCalhoun 292 days ago
              > is your point that MKUltra experimentation on people isn’t proven to be bad for them?

              Not at all. Rather, drawing a line backward from Kaczynski's bombing spree to experiments done on him as a part of MK-Ultra I think is questionable "science".

              • MarkMarine 292 days ago
                I don’t think it’s science, but if you read about what was done to him, it puts a big asterisk by the discussion about how he could do such evil things.
      • elliekelly 292 days ago
        Why? Different people react differently to things. Especially psychologically. What might be merely uncomfortable for one person could push another person over the edge.
      • jscipione 292 days ago
        Kanye West was drugged by his Personal trainer Harley Pasternak who has connection to Canadian Military where he talks about using mind-control drugs on soldiers.

        https://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/did-kanye-expose-holl...

      • ekaryotic 292 days ago
        [flagged]
      • jscipione 292 days ago
        Brittney Spears comes to mind, she is still under a conservatorship after her mk-ultra caused mental break.
        • vlovich123 292 days ago
          MK ULTRA stopped in 1973 as far as I know. Claiming that Britney Spears’ mental issues are caused by this seems novel and I’ve never heard of this before. Do you have a news letter I can subscribe to to hear more of your insights?
    • reaperman 292 days ago
      Yeah I don’t think it excuses it at all but I wonder at what point it would? If MKUltra had removed 70% of his brain, would that excuse his actions?
      • somenameforme 292 days ago
        It's not about forgiveness, it's about the story. MKUltra is a critical factor in this tale. And from a journalistic and social point of view, society would be a far better place if more people knew about MKUltra [1] than do. Beyond that it's also important to ever emphasize that actions have consequences which may not always be easy to predict. One of the countless reasons Machiavellianism is absolutely idiotic.

        [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra

        • sameolddiffterm 292 days ago
          They still do it. It's still under the cover of front organizations. It's called research. They usually target people that don't follow the grain. One group that is targeted are expats, nomads, etc... Due to the rules/laws/regulations that don't apply because their subjects are traveling and in a temporal state and are abroad they can get away with much more.
      • ajhurliman 292 days ago
        This line of thinking has always puzzled me. At some point one’s brain must be so compromised that we really can’t expect them to function as a human, but most people’s reaction to that is “excusing” their behavior.

        If you’re willing to admit that they don’t really have self-agency at that point, don’t they become an object at that point? Like we would have no problem putting down a dog that bit a child, let alone a dog that blew up buildings. The only reason we’re so accepting of putting down the dog is its lack of human status.

        In our courts, claiming insanity seems to give you a defense against crimes you’ve committed but also maintaining all the rights and privileges of personhood.

        • morelisp 292 days ago
          I don't think you know what an insanity claim entails. You absolutely give up rights and privileges if you "win" by invoking it.
        • edgyquant 292 days ago
          Not really. Temporary insanity maybe but I think that’s harder to prove. Insanity pleas get you sent to a medical prison where they keep you low on zombifying drugs.
        • anon291 292 days ago
          Well .. I think prison was a good place for him but I also think his manifesto is coherent and should be more widely read.
      • wslh 292 days ago
        Is there more precise and credible information about MKUltra program and Ted K.?
        • meepmorp 292 days ago
          No. The only thing that's really documented is that he participated in a psychology experiment at Harvard.

          People have alleged that it was part of MKULTRA, but there's nothing to support that beyond allegations and some circumstantial things (e.g., Murray consulted for the OSS on a profile of Hitler during the war). There were also just a lot of unethical experiments done on people in the 50s and 60s.

          • surfingdino 292 days ago
            This. The CIA story is likely based on the fact that Henry A. Murray did work for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Kaczynski may have been taking part in the experiments that led to the creation of the Thematic Apperception Test. The CIA may have been interested in the results of these experiments as all intelligence agencies are.
          • wslh 292 days ago
            Isn't weird that Ted hasn't written about this? I mean, based on his writing style and ideas skipping talking about this experience as a lab rat seems like a missing piece of a specific puzzle.
  • perardi 292 days ago
    I know the tendency to mythologize serial killers and terrorists is disgusting—serial killer TV shows and movies are sure-fire hits, which is a pretty dark insight into human nature. (I mean, Netflix is like half serial killer shows now.) And trying to generalize and overanalyze and learn lessons from one-off instances of people snapping and killing is just not productive.

    But…

    …it’s hard not to mythologize and over-analyze Kaczynski. He had what appears to be a totally average suburban upbringing, he was unambiguously wildly intelligent, and yet he done broke bad.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

  • martythemaniak 292 days ago
    I find it very curious the fawning treatment this murderer's death is receiving here. The guy killed three innocent people and maimed a number of others because he went crazy and wanted to get back at the world. What is wrong with you people?

    You know there's plenty of people that are smarter than him, being able to produce more coherent, balanced and informed views of society, and also not murder people.

    • sneak 292 days ago
      Barack Obama murdered hundreds of innocent children via drone strikes he ordered or approved. Donald Trump continued the process, killing hundreds more. Both received widespread support from millions of citizens.

      Our society already celebrates mass murder of innocents, and those who do the murdering. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

    • brvsft 292 days ago
      This moral argument doesn't really work on people from the US after about 20 years of global militarism, especially that whole stint in Iraq and Afghanistan.

      I hate murder as much as the next guy, but our political and military leaders constantly make decisions that result in needless deaths. You don't even know how upset I personally was after voting for Obama and seeing him continue using drones to target terrorists while also killing innocent civilians as collateral damage.

      Please, grant me the luxury to like this one guy who killed three innocent people because I just think his manifesto was pretty good. My 'leaders' have already taught me that murder can be overlooked by the vast majority of the public, or at least one half of it, every 4-8 years. I think I'm allowed to like Uncle Ted.

      • Invictus0 292 days ago
        You know what we did before drones were developed? Carpet bombs. Drones are a huge improvement.
        • brvsft 292 days ago
          Sorry, I forgot about carpet bombs and nukes. You're right, dronebombing a terrorist and killing an innocent child in the process is net actually good because even worse bombs existed and were used sometimes in the past.

          Everything the US government and military does is good, and Ted Kaczynski was bad, especially the terrible things he wrote. I promise I will buy more of these new Apple products, in resistance of Mr. Kaczynski's evil message. *I place my hand on my chest patriotically.* I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

  • neilv 292 days ago
    Many of the comments are taking the occasion to speak favorably of the Unabomber's manifesto.

    IMHO, there's a time to consider ideas, but I think it would be better not to do that when talking about a terrorist who attacked innocents to promote exposure of those ideas.

    Otherwise, it would seem to be validating and rewarding terrorism, and thereby encouraging future terrorists.

  • RagnarD 292 days ago
    It's worth noting Kaczynski was the subject of a brutal psychological experiment while a young student at Harvard. It's unfortunate in the present day that so many naive tech individuals don't understand that they've been deliberately recruited by the left in universities worldwide via indoctrination one class at a time.

    https://www.history.com/news/what-happened-to-the-unabomber-...

    • l33t233372 292 days ago
      > Harvard. It's unfortunate in the present day that so many naive tech individuals don't understand that they've been deliberately recruited by the left in universities worldwide via indoctrination one class at a time

      Can you elaborate what you mean by that? I find the notion ridiculous, but I’d like more detail before I write it off.

      • lucaspfeifer 292 days ago
        Universities, especially the more prestigious ones, have been trending towards aggressively simplistic labeling of complex social issues. While their stated goal is to protect minorities, the oversimplification increases polarization and division. These doctrines in fact harm the minorities that they were intended to help, by forcing people to choose a side. Plus, they focus too much on the negatives, when we need more positive, meaningful, constructive discourse.
        • l33t233372 292 days ago
          You specifically said “one class at a time” what did you mean?

          > trending towards aggressively simplistic labeling of complex social issues

          I think that’s the opposite of true.

  • tyingq 292 days ago
    I'm very surprised he didn't die earlier. Take his mental state at sentencing, then consider he was in ADX Florence Supermax from 1998 to December of 2021...23 years. The regimen there is 23 hours a day by yourself in your cell. There's one hour a day outside in a sunken concrete area, each prisoner is placed in an individual 12x18 foot wire-mesh cage, and can speak to other nearby caged prisoners under the watch of guards. There's a thin slit window in the cell that shows only the sky, no landscape visible. All meals eaten in the cell, passed through a hole. They did transfer him to a medical prison in December of 2021.
    • arp242 292 days ago
      His cell was apparently 12×7-foot, or 3.6×2.1 metres (I was curious). Seems awfully tiny, and personally I consider it inhumane no matter what he has done, but apparently he wasn't too unhappy with it: "I consider myself to be in a (relatively) fortunate situation here. As correctional institutions go, this place is well-administered. It’s clean, the food is good, and it’s quiet, so that I can sleep, think and write (usually) without being distracted by a lot of banging and shouting."[1]

      Come to think of it, I might prefer a smaller cell over a larger one if it's clean and doesn't have "a lot of banging and shouting", but that probably says more about the general state of the US prison system than anything else.

      [1]: https://news.yahoo.com/the-unabomber-s-not-so-lonely-prison-...

      • boppo1 292 days ago
        did they allow much of his writing out of the prison? Who holds the rights to something written in prison in the US?
        • tyingq 292 days ago
          There's not a universal country-wide law in the US. Some states have "Son of Sam" laws that keep prisoners from profiting from publicity about their crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Sam_law

          Though with Ted, he probably had things other than his crimes he could have published and made money from. Of course, any earnings could end up going to a civil suit or existing orders of victim restitution.

          None of that seems directly related to intellectual property rights though. The prisoner retains those just like anyone else. I suppose there might be some cases of asset forfeiture for remediation or fines?

          • tyingq 292 days ago
            Just noticed that the forward for one of his books (mentioned in a peer comment) has an example of what I described above in Kaczynski's words...

            "I simply have not had the time to organize, rewrite, and complete the contents of this book. The principal reason why I have not had time is that agencies of the United States government have created unnecessary legal difficulties for me. To mention only the most important of these difficulties, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of California has formally proposed to round up and confiscate the original and every copy of everything I have ever written and turn over all such papers to my alleged "victims" through a fictitious sale that will allow the "victims" to acquire all of the papers without having to pay anything for them. Under this plan, the government would even confiscate papers that I have given to libraries, including papers that have been on library shelves for several years..." [1]

            [1] https://ia800300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Sl...

            I don't know how that turned out, though. He does mention his lawyers were fighting the plan. Also interesting that he keeps putting the word victims in quotes, in a book published in 2008.

        • arp242 292 days ago
          As far as I know he was able to correspond fairly freely, but all of mail was being read (which is standard practice for high-security prisoners I believe). In my other comment I linked to an author who corresponded with Kaczynski and wrote down his experiences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36273216

          He also published some books (Techno1ogica1 Slavery, Anti-tech Revolution), which is his manifesto with some additional essays and letters.

          > Who holds the rights to something written in prison in the US?

          The author; nothing changes about that.

  • mberning 292 days ago
    Blowing people up is wrong. But his manifesto was right about many things. It’s interesting to skim through it every couple years.
    • bheadmaster 292 days ago
      > Blowing people up is wrong.

      So is performing torture experiments on them to see what happens them locking them up when they crack.

      • dredmorbius 292 days ago
        For those missing the reference, this being arguably what may have occurred in the present instance:

        <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Murray#Harvard_human_exp...>

        Covered in Harvard and the Unabomber : the education of an American terrorist:

        <https://archive.org/details/harvardunabomber00chas/page/18/m...>

      • davisr 292 days ago
        Melting the polar ice caps, killing most if not all life on Earth, is also wrong. While Ted overstepped his boundaries on a man-to-man basis, the argument can certainly be made that it's _more_ wrong to see the wreck of this sick society and where it leads (death to all Earthly life) and doing nothing to stop it.

        I don't agree with Ted's actions that directly hurt other people (not random people by the way), but god damn he was hurting too. We should all feel the same pain he felt. The world would be better if we did, and maybe then we could kick our addiction to finite resources and short-term monkey-brain thinking.

    • spurgu 292 days ago
      The problem he realized was that there's no political solution. Bombing people is obviously wrong but if you're convinced that humanity is heading down a destructive path then doing whatever you can to stop it makes sense, where the damage/suffering of the bombings would be comparatively (way) less than letting said future play out.
  • IceHegel 292 days ago
    Best manifesto of the 20th century imo. Modern man is an animal in a cage. He behaves increasingly abnormally because his environment is unfamiliar and out of his direct control.
    • miramba 292 days ago
      I don’t think that‘s modern, it was the same in the centuries and millenias before. Unless you were born into the 1% upper class, you were ruled by them with random degrees of benevolence. I would argue that although you could say that this hasn’t changed much, everyday life for most of us ruled subjects is equal or better in almost every respect, for example being able to write this comment to you, my fellow underling.
    • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 292 days ago
      The modern man is the best man that has ever been. Ted was just a nutcase.
      • IceHegel 292 days ago
        On what measure? Certainly he is quite healthy and even considered sick.
        • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 292 days ago
          On every measure, there was never a better time in the history of civilization to live.
          • wahnfrieden 292 days ago
            Graeber & Wengrow propose an interesting set of 3 measures:

            >But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’). Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

            >What we can now see is that the first two freedoms – to relocate, and to disobey commands – often acted as a kind of scaffolding for the third, more creative one. Let us clarify some of the ways in which this ‘propping-up’ of the third freedom actually worked. As long as the first two freedoms were taken for granted, as they were in many North American societies when Europeans first encountered them, the only kings that could exist were always, in the last resort, play kings. If they overstepped the line, their erstwhile subjects could always ignore them or move someplace else. The same would go for any other hierarchy of offices or system of authority. Similarly, a police force that operated for only three months of the year, and whose membership rotated annually, was in a certain sense a play police force – which makes it slightly less bizarre that their members were sometimes recruited directly from the ranks of ritual clowns.

            >It’s clear that something about human societies really has changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it might be like to live in a social order based on them.

            --David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of Everything, p. 503.

            https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpre...

            • lostmsu 291 days ago
              Huh? At what point in human history moving was more accessible than now?

              Prehistoric humans could barely move around and until recently slavery ment average Joe had 0 freedom.

              • wahnfrieden 291 days ago
                Simply wrong and I provided a link with at least some references and passages that answer that
                • lostmsu 291 days ago
                  The quotes you mentioned say nothing about the two issues I raised.
                  • wahnfrieden 291 days ago
                    Not what I said, but - goodbye
                    • lostmsu 291 days ago
                      The article is no better. It says there was free movement between tribes and over large distances, but there's no real proof of the first one, and the last one is only mentioned for large communities, not for individuals.
          • whitepaint 291 days ago
            > On every measure

            Are we happier than we used to be? Are we more connected? Are we less lonely?

          • IceHegel 292 days ago
            Obesity rate.
            • krapp 292 days ago
              Obesity in a world where you could diet and exercise is still preferable to starvation in a world without easy access to food. At one time it was a sign of wealth and privilege to be able to afford enough calories to put on any weight at all, and enough leisure time to not have to work it all off through brutal, constant labor.
              • IceHegel 292 days ago
                You say it is preferable today. In a way we all must agree it’s preferable. Unlike the state’s “social contract” which you cannot exit, any of us could - for the price of a bus ticket - find ourselves back in the wild. None of us go.

                But just because humans have a revealed preference doesn’t mean that’s the way we should live.

                In all honesty, I don’t think abundant food itself is a problem, but I do think the ethos of democracy basically allows everyone to ignore should questions and an addicted and obese population is the result.

                Imagine showing our world to an 19th century English laborer. They would be awe of our technological achievements, but I think they’d find our social structures extremely distressing.

  • kajaktum 292 days ago
    Not enough scrutiny/blame have been given to the US government. TK is not entirely to blame for his crimes. This is why we should make away with libertarian concept of free-will. If a cow had been poisoned to murder people, no one would necessarily blame the cow or think that it "deserves" some kind of punishment. After killing the cow to simply stop its spree, we would focus our attention to the actual perpetrators. In this case its the US government. However, all I see in this thread, most of it anyways, is directed directly towards TK. He was undeniably a genius with so much ahead of him, but all of that went to waste.

    To some people, it is not enough that he is murdered/punished, he needs to be made "rightly" suffered through similar pains. Why? If there is a cure to mental illness, why would we not administer this drug and let the man free? Without free will, this concept of "punishment" would simply wither away.

  • not2b 292 days ago
    In the early 90s I was a grad student and research assistant with a desk in Cory Hall at UC Berkeley, where I spent a lot of time for 3.5 years. That building has the distinction of being the only place that Kaczynski (we didn't know his name then) bombed twice. He maimed a professor with his first bomb and a grad student with his second. He wasn't caught until after I left, and I made sure never to deal with mail at the office. Good riddance.
  • waihtis 292 days ago
    Kaczynski's entire opposition to technology seems to focus purely on amplifying the negative aspects of technological advancement. But after reading David Deutsch, I cannot but think all and any technological advancement is desirable and there's little merit to technological doomerism.
    • notacoward 292 days ago
      "Any and all"? It's not a particularly surprising attitude to find here, but I think it's a hard one to justify. Does ubiquitous surveillance technology not bother you at all, no matter how it's likely to be used? Are new methods of killing people always good? How about mind control? Not that we have it, but "any and all" would cover it. Is "doomerism" the only alternative you can think of to infinite optimism? That's a textbook example of the excluded middle.

      I hope you just phrased that poorly, because if that attitude were widely and sincerely held it would be scary indeed. I say that, BTW, as someone who's generally optimistic about the possibilities inherent in new technology, and has even created a bit here and there. The uses and effects of technology must always be considered, not just naively assumed to be beneficial. Un-nuanced optimism is just as simplistic and "meritless" as its mirror image.

      • waihtis 292 days ago
        Surveillance tech is usually a derivative of other technological advancements which would still result in a net benefit.

        The middle ground between infinite optimism and doomerism seems to be regulation which more often than not results in very subpar conditions. I feel there's really no other position to hold.

      • dennis_jeeves1 292 days ago
        People on this forum are generally the un-nuanced peasants of yesteryear who now have white collar jobs.
  • digbybk 292 days ago
    I vacillate between excitement for the future and fear that people like Kaczynski are right (not the violence, obviously). It often does feel as though the direction of technological progress is independent of what is best for the wellbeing of humanity.
  • arp242 292 days ago
    Gary Greenberg's "In the Kingdom of the Unabomber"[1] is a pretty interesting write-up of the palace intrigue stuff surrounding Kaczynski while he was in prison, Greenberg also did a great interview with Errol Morris about it.[2]

    [1]: best quality I can find right now: https://www.garygreenbergonline.com/media/unabomber_letter.p...

    [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECNsiK5MB-4&list=PLVmRJGCDzW...

  • skellyclock 292 days ago
    A few people on 4chan's /g/ technology board used to write to him regularly to keep him updated on the horridness of modern technology and always got a letter back. He always complained about censorship of his mail.
  • sterlind 292 days ago
    I read Industrial Society to my parents last year. They were both quite surprised that, rather than just being the schizophrenic ramblings of a crank, it made a lot of sense and raised good points. Uncomfortable, finding yourself in agreement with some points raised by a notorious domestic terrorist and murderer.

    I recommend the Manifesto to the HN audience. The section on AI is particularly timely, but a lot of it holds up well - especially the discussion of surrogate activities and the problem with hobbies.

  • celtoid 292 days ago
    Kaczynski is a warning to all intellectuals with an an activist streak. If harming and killing innocents is your solution, you're already off the path. In this regard, he was no different from many of the people and institutions he critiqued.
  • theodric 292 days ago
    Ted is, for better or worse, one of my heroes. Not for his entirely ineffective, pointless, counter-productive explosives work, but because reading his work, Thoreau's, and others, helped pull me out of a serious funk at the bottom of my burnout curve and find a new direction for my life after tech. It inspired me to spend €200k of the tech cash I'd hoarded on a farmstead and land in the Irish countryside, and try to do something that doesn't make the world worse in the way that working in edtech (one of the parasites keeping tuition high) or finance/fintech (no explanation required) does. I'm not a Luddite, and I'm certainly not opposed to technology - I use it everywhere - but I agree with Ted that surrogate activities hamper our capacity for fulfilment. That they stop us from seeing the fruits of our labors and connecting them viscerally, emotionally to positive outcomes in our lives. That focusing on meta-level societal noise only serves to make us unhappier. That living deliberately empowers and breeds satisfaction.

    I'm poor as shit now, from an income perspective, but I've never been more fulfilled. Pity it took me 40 years to figure this all out.

    RIP TedK.

    • dbcooper 292 days ago
      [flagged]
      • theodric 292 days ago
        I addressed that. You must separate the art from the artist.
  • catminou 292 days ago
    I remember in the 90s a classmate in my junior high lived across the street from the house that Ted grew up in (evergreen park, il). When all this was going down he mentioned how before it went public that there was a suspicious amount of people visiting that house and removing things in boxes (I guess Teds brother owned the house and still had his writings in the attic).
  • api 292 days ago
    I have never been able to accept any form of primitivism or reactionary ideology for many reasons.

    Chief among them is this: if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we not end up right back here “repeating the grade” so to speak?

    The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely skeptical of narratives that excessively glorify the past. I think it’s all a bunch of survivorship bias. Things often seem better in the past because we are experiencing only those cultural artifacts of the past that survived, which tend to be the most memorable or interesting.

    Lastly, I have doubts about the very possibility of revisiting the past. The arrow of time is unidirectional. I can’t think of a way we could even attempt to return without an insanely totalitarian system that attempted to forcibly suppress modernity at incredible cost in human life and freedom. That would end up looking like the worst caricature of precisely the totalitarian tendencies of modernity that these authors often call out. Pol Pot is kind of an example from history of someone who tried to return a society to a pastoral mode of existence by force.

    At their core these writers are critics, and I’ve come to see mere criticism of any form as broadly intellectually weak. It is far easier to criticize than it is to improve or fix things. Creation is infinitely more difficult than accusation or destruction.

    All our significant problems must be very hard to solve or they would already be solved. If they seem simple it’s because we haven’t fully grasped their scope, which in most cases includes ourselves.

    The reactionary is a particularly lazy kind of critic. They don’t even bother to propose an unworkable solution. That’s too much work for them. They just point back at an imagined past and blame people for having done things between then and now.

    • bmitc 292 days ago
      > Chief among them is this: if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we not end up right back here “repeating the grade” so to speak?

      This is a quite limited perspective that ignores momentum of change. In the book Against the Grain, the author observes that the earliest societies that transitioned from hunter-gatherers to agrarian worked harder and longer hours with less time to relax and have leisure and were actually less healthy and didn't live as long. That's just one example where "progress" was not such. We see this again and again though. Yea, we've amplified the amount of stuff we can grow but at the great cost of the environment and even our own health and well-being. We now ingest food filled with plastics and toxins, like mercury.

      Human technological progress has occurred at rates that we cannot emotionally and biologically keep up with, and the distance is only accelerating.

      > All our significant problems must be very hard to solve or they would already be solved.

      Most significant problems were created by us in the first place.

    • notacoward 292 days ago
      You've buried an assumption in there: that there is only one possible future. That we can only choose between that one future and the past. Since at least the original Luddites, the real tension has been between multiple futures enabled by technology. Kaczynski was in this tradition. It was an argument against inevitability, against the same glorification of one future that you condemn when it's about the one past. I suggest that you consider the possibility of one or more different futures, where technology still exists but is applied in ways that enhance our humanity instead of suppressing it.
      • api 292 days ago
        If this is the case then these writers should be spending 95% of their words talking about how to go from here to a different better future, or even better rolling up their sleeves and attempting to live or create such a future here and now.

        The only criticism you need is whatever it takes to frame the problem.

        I’ve read Kaczynski and numerous other primitivists and reactionaries and that’s not the dominant theme. The emphasis is on a lost golden age (that I do not believe actually existed) and accusing modernity in a moralistic tone.

    • kodah 292 days ago
      > if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we not end up right back here “repeating the grade” so to speak?

      "Progress" doesn't occur because things are "better" it occurs because things are incentivized. A system can incentivize bad things, and at many points in life we may choose bad things for one group and good things for another. Progress is merely another point further down on the timeline, as is the past. Qualitatively judging these points in isolation is difficult, but when viewed in collective over time I think people will often reflect that some things have gotten better, some have gotten worse, and we also have new problems. I view the past less as a former grade and more as just a different state of things, neither better nor worse in totality, but I'm also not cynical enough to say that restoring a previous state is the right choice either. Somewhat anecdotally I hardly ever believe in software rollbacks, I almost always bias towards rolling forward but I understand why some people think rollbacks are something they'd want.

      > The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely skeptical of narratives that excessively glorify the past. I think it’s all a bunch of survivorship bias. Things often seem better in the past because we are experiencing only those cultural artifacts of the past that survived, which tend to be the most memorable or interesting.

      Again, the present doesn't necessarily mean that things are better for people. We make choices every day to marginalize a group or way of life over another. A lot of times, this is just necessary but I can understand why people don't like it.

      > Lastly, I have doubts about the very possibility of revisiting the past. The arrow of time is unidirectional.

      You and I agree here, in that I understand the state of the past, even yesterday, can never be fully recreated. Again, I understand why that's difficult for people to wrestle with.

      It sounds like for you and I, life is mostly good, so it makes dealing with the present and optimism for the future quite palatable. For others, I think that's challenging, so the past looks favorable even if unviable.

      > The reactionary is a particularly lazy kind of critic. They don’t even bother to propose an unworkable solution.

      Unfortunately this is most of our politicians. Pretty much anyone that media would call a "firebrand" from Matt Gaetz to AOC is a reactionary, and they're so absorbed in their own thoughts, world, and problems that they can't help but take it out on the rest of the world. It's a symptom of a broken, tired, and frustrated system that we put trust in people who are simply meant to agitate rather than build comprehensive, intersectional systems.

  • carabiner 292 days ago
  • BMc2020 292 days ago
    There was a lot of controversy about publishing his manifesto, but his brother saw it, recognized his writing style and tipped off the police.
  • Nasrudith 292 days ago
    I find it deeply disturbing the number of people here who take this complete historical illiterate seriously. Seriously get some self-esteem and stop with this self-flagellating "technology is the source of all problems" bullshit.
  • UberFly 292 days ago
    This I've had bookmarked for a while - lots of photos from inside his cabin: https://helenair.com/photos-a-look-inside-the-unabombers-mon...

    Also, for those who don't know, they actually moved his cabin to a museum in DC: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-unabombers-cabin-was...

  • mxkopy 292 days ago
    I think we should all feel a little more guilt for gluttonously consuming everything all around us and making such consumption morally defensible under the guise of "just taking care of family"/"living a peaceful life". We should all feel a little more hatred to those aloof imbeciles smiling and pointing at animals to their children in zoos.

    Though I think we would eventually reach this conclusion without needing to kill random people.

  • mutant_glofish 292 days ago
    Archived version: https://archive.is/hhw9F
  • jzellis 292 days ago
    Ted's manifesto is a remarkable piece of analysis. It's his solutions that weren't really, uh, constructive.
    • dredmorbius 292 days ago
      It's a classic challenge in Big Problem resolution:

      - Is there a problem?

      - What is the problem?

      - What is its cause?

      - How can it be remediated / addressed?

      There are a few elements, though those tend to be the big ones. It's possible to go wrong at pretty much any point in the chain.

      <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc...>

  • vonnik 291 days ago
    I grew up in the nearest large town to Ted’s Montana hideout, Helena. A friend’s father was his early defense attorney. We shopped at the same used book store, borrowed from the same town library.

    I just want to say here that lots of smart people fleeing to Montana fetishize the wilderness and vilify American society, even as they continue to depend on the latter in many ways large and small.

    Their way has nothing to offer. A primitive existence barely above subsistence, and a closed future in a war they can’t win.

    What’s more, despite his intellectual capacity, let’s pause for a moment to consider the arrogance, wrongheadedness and unhappiness tipping into insanity of a man who left civilization and assumed for himself the role of passing death sentences on sometimes random strangers.

    He’s a more literate school shooter whose best offering is a form of nihilism.

  • mdp2021 292 days ago
    Points #171 to #178 - chapter "The Future" - of ISaiF contain the discussion about Artificial Intelligence and general Automation (and further prospective areas such as Genetic Engineering).

    The analysis, while lucidly exposed, lacks the sophistication which should reveal more major possibilities (e.g. the machine as an enhancer for the decisor and the public).

    Nonetheless, we read

    > On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite

    where the missed addition of quantifiers and specifiers in the expression «may have control» makes said relative "lack of sophistication" even optimistic.

  • digbybk 292 days ago
    Do we know how his views changed, if at all, over the years?
  • ehsankia 292 days ago
    Maybe a stupid question, but I'm curious what he's been up to in the decades since in prison. A brain like his doesn't stop working just because he's in jail, does it? I'm not sure what kind of terms he had, was he allowed to read? to write?
    • spurgu 292 days ago
      He's written a couple of books (didn't have complete freedom to do it, I remember him complaining about some hurdles) and done mail correspondence with various people.
      • drexlspivey 292 days ago
        > and done mail correspondence with various people

        I hope the prison guards checked those mails thoroughly

        • ehsankia 292 days ago
          From some cruising on Wikipedia, apparently all his correspondence is available University of Michigan's Special Collections Library (over 400 letters), though the identity of the people won't be unsealed until 2049.
  • GnarfGnarf 292 days ago
    We cannot escape that "all our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end" (Thoreau).

    The perversion of knowledge is a paradox that was known to the writers of Genesis: it's the Tree of Knowledge that gets the first humans in trouble.

  • mynonameaccount 284 days ago
    Glad he's dead. Modern technology is evil" I call using a stove modern technology. He wears clothing. He uses a knife, pot. Total psycho and hypocrite.
  • Blackstrat 292 days ago
    Kaczynski’s ideas are irrelevant. What matters are his actions. For those, he should have been executed. Why he did what he did, what he believed, what he said, are all irrelevant.
  • pseudolus 292 days ago
    There was an interesting podcast about the Unabomber and his eventual capture - "Project Unabom". [0] Some of the episodes feature material about his relationship with his family and the pool of other suspects that emerged during the investigation.

    [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/project-unabom/id16276...

  • markx2 292 days ago
    • hguant 292 days ago
      The FBI of course giving the credit to their "linguistic analysis team" and "fearless investigators" when Ted's brother literally turned him, told them where he lived, and that he had talked about bombing the targets in question.

      Many, if not most, murder investigations are resolved by confessions, or someone turning the culprit in. Absent that, after...I want to say 48 hours, the police know that they should essentially write off the case. There are obvious exceptions, especially if there's public notoriety (crudely, young white coeds or "sexy shit"), but most murders are poor drug addicts murdering other poor drug addicts.

      Source: worked 2 years in DC as a freelance reporter, was ultimately not successful there, but soaked up a lot of stories/cynicism

  • naravara 292 days ago
    There’s a podcast series called “Cabin” by The Relentless Picnic that does an excellent dive into Kaczynski’s manifesto, the relatable bits as well as his deficiencies, and contrasts it with Thoreau, ties it into some email they got from an angry incel type guy, as well as a bunch of personal stuff the casters are going through themselves.

    It really defies categorization into a genre or anything but it’s really insightful.

  • toomuchtodo 292 days ago
  • pierat 292 days ago
    To be fair, he seemed to line up pretty strongly with Ned Ludd, and the evils of capitalism in relation to 'who owns the machines'.

    Note: the original Luddites weren't against technology. They were against technology minimizing worker power.

    I don't follow why he chose to send bombs to people. But at least to the Luddites, sabotage of the means of production was considered laudable.

  • pfannkuchen 292 days ago
    A lot of comments here talk about how terrible Kaczynski’s actions were, and I agree with them. I do wonder, though, at what point does such behavior qualify one as mentally insane? He seems fairly insane to me, and I’m not sure whether we should see him as an evil person with true agency or someone with a mental illness.
  • ROTMetro 292 days ago
    FYI Butner might be a medical designation spot but it's definitely the 'where they send the crazy people' spot and also a higher security level (I think it's a medium). Would not have wanted to do time there.
  • nimish 292 days ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD4xrnzKN1Y is a good exposition of his mathematical work for the non-mathematician.

    His other work is better known, of course.

  • arisAlexis 292 days ago
    Approaching the era of AGI we will see a lot of more occurrences of technofobia, violence and probably new movements to go back to sq1 and live like 200k years ago. It looks inevitable if the pace grows exponential.
  • maratbn 292 days ago
    According to the US law enforcement system, in the context of TK, a long slow torturous death is more moral and humane than a quick execution.

    Another aspect to TK's story is that prior to becoming a murderer he was involved as a subject in the "MK Ultra" human experimentation.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra

    There is a public perception that the effect of this dirty experimentation (that also involved help from good ol' dirty German Nazis, which BTW could not have been any less evil or murderous than TK, but were spared the kind of prison term that he got) was not sufficiently considered during TK's trial and sentencing.

  • j3s 292 days ago
    i read ted's manifesto awhile back and wrote a review about it: https://j3s.sh/review/industrial-society-and-its-future.html

    overall i was pretty disappointed. ted's writing wasn't very good at all & his arguments did not convince me. i was surprised because of his writing seems to be universally praised in tech circles.

    in my opinion it isn't worth reading. it's philosophical cosplay.

  • paiute 292 days ago
    I'm surprised mention of David Gelertner hasn't come up at all. He is a computer scientist who was attack by Ted kaczynski. He is an interesting person.
    • dredmorbius 292 days ago
      What might you have to say about him that's of interest?

      (It's generally more interesting to contribute to the conversation you find lacking or underrepresented then to meta-comment on it. I do this (contributing, not meta-comment) frequently myself.)

    • DonHopkins 291 days ago
      It's "interesting" that he pushes Intelligent Design, denies climate change, supports Donald Trump, and defends birtherism.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelernter#Positions_on_s...

      The Washington Post, profiling him in early 2017 as a potential science advisor to Donald Trump, called Gelernter "a vehement critic of modern academia" who has "condemned 'belligerent leftists' and blamed intellectualism for the disintegration of patriotism and traditional family values."[29] Shortly thereafter, The Atlantic published a rebuttal of The Washington Post profile, saying it was "hard to imagine a more misleading treatment" of the "pioneering polymath" Gelernter.[30]

      Gelernter has "expressed skepticism about the reality" of anthropogenic climate change,"[31][32] rejecting the overwhelming scientific consensus in the field.[33]

      In July 2019, in a review of Stephen Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, which Gelernter wrote for the Claremont Review of Books, he also rejected the scientific consensus of evolutionary biology.[34] On the other hand, Gelernter stipulates he "cannot accept" intelligent design either, saying that "as a theory, it would seem to have a long way to go."[35] In "A Response to David Gelernter's Attack on Evolution", Patheos, August 26, 2019, Bob Seidensticker writes: "Let's subtitle this story, 'Guy who made his career in not-biology is convinced by other not-biologists that Biology's core theory is wrong.'"[36] Computer scientist and mathematician Jeffrey Shallit wrote: "Gelernter's review was not published in a science journal, but in a politics journal run by a far-right think tank. His review cites no scientific publications at all, and makes claims like 'Many biologists agree' and 'Most biologists think' without giving any supporting citations. So, not surprisingly ... Gelernter makes a fool of himself in his review, which resembles a 'greatest hits' of creationist misconceptions and lies."[37]

      https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/una...

      https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/david-gelernter-...

  • Aerbil313 291 days ago
    Someone can condemn his actions yet agree with his views on technology, except his opinion we should use violence to bring the technological system down.
  • voisin 292 days ago
    No praise for his methods but reading his manifesto a few years ago I was surprised about how much I found to have been an accurate warning of what would happen.
  • darkclouds 292 days ago
    I wrote to him a few years ago after hearing about him.

    I wanted to understand his point of view to see if it could be changed, but I never got a response so I dont know if one of the five eyes (US or UK) or some other entity was interfering.

    My position/point of view is something caused the events, so what where they?

    Those events are what need tackling, Mr Kacynski is the product in much the same way as Google users are the product!

  • andrewinardeer 292 days ago
    That's two heavyweights from Florence Supermax dead in two weeks. Hanssen is the other.
  • iJohnDoe 292 days ago
    It’s too bad the CIA isn’t even mentioned. Horrible what they did to him and other students.

    I can’t remember, but I think the professors that ran the experiments were all mostly killed or killed themselves.

    Doesn’t excuse what Kaczynski did. Others should have been brought to justice as well.

    Watch the Netflix series. Really well done.

  • userbinator 292 days ago
    "There's a fine line between genius and insanity."
  • alphanullmeric 292 days ago
    Gotta love the terrorist sympathizers in the comments. Always bet on a certain side of the political spectrum to violate the ‘force is only justified in response to force’ rule when they find it convenient.
  • nottorp 291 days ago
    Please add "unabomber" to the title?
  • hknmtt 291 days ago
    i have his "industrial society and its feature" saved but haven't got time to read it(200 pages).
  • dijondreams 292 days ago
    Anyone else find it strange that Ted and Robert Hanssen died at the same time? Locked in the same place....
    • meepmorp 292 days ago
      They weren't in the same place. Kaczynski was moved to a federal prison medical facility in December 2021.
    • sgift 292 days ago
      Why would that be strange? One was born in 42, one in 44. Old age is a killer.
      • mdp2021 292 days ago
        We have Bayesian formulas to scalarly determine "strangeness".
  • LatteLazy 292 days ago
    A sad end to a sad life.
  • fsckboy 292 days ago
    dark humor, my favorite haiku, one last time:

    open your present!

    no, you open your present!

    Kaczynski Christmas.

  • alex_lav 292 days ago
    Good.
  • hn2017 292 days ago
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  • Slava_Propanei 292 days ago
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  • wahnfrieden 292 days ago
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  • martythemaniak 292 days ago
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  • carabiner 292 days ago
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    • relyks 292 days ago
      He was literally a murderer... no one like that deserves a black bar here even if they did make important contributions to technology, sciences, and/or engineering
    • local_crmdgeon 292 days ago
      Not to mention nearly every prediction in the Manifesto came true. He was a genius broken by the government.

      We should blame the CIA, not him. He was just a math nerd in the beginning.

  • local_crmdgeon 292 days ago
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  • whatscooking 292 days ago
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  • activiation 292 days ago
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    • dang 292 days ago
      Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
      • msla 292 days ago
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      • pfdietz 292 days ago
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        • dang 292 days ago
          No one is saying you owe convicted murderers better, but if you're participating here, you owe better to this community than empty pejorative comments.
  • noobdev9000 292 days ago
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    • dj_mc_merlin 292 days ago
      What do you mean? Half of US will like you for doing the latter two.

      Ted Kaczynski is more acceptable to like than most terrorists because of MKUltra and since his ideas are more advanced than "my religion is good" or "I hate $minority!". Doesn't mean it's not wrong to bomb people, but he is easier to understand than a guy who brings an AK47 to a concert.

    • thr0waway001 292 days ago
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  • dbcooper 292 days ago
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    • comeonbro 292 days ago
      > He targeted people like me and you, and would probably kill you in person if he had the choice.

      Yeah. I initially came into this news ready to edgelord out with everybody else, but, synthesizing from some other comments I've read on the internet today:

      Thinking of the dads that owned their little computer stores in the 80s getting their fingers blown off and dying in their parking lots while reading these comments.

      > Friends recall Hugh as a man who embraced life, a gentle man with a sense of humor who had traveled around the world, climbed mountains, and studied languages. He cared about politics, was “fair and kind” in business, and was remembered as “straightforward, honest, and sincere.” He left behind his mother, sister, family members, a girlfriend who loved him dearly, and a circle of friends and colleagues who respected and cared for him.

      Kaczynski’s account of the killing:

      > Experiment 97. Dec. 11, 1985. I planted a bomb disguised to look like a scrap of lumber behind Rentech Computer Store in Sacramento. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 20, the “operator” (owner? manager?) of the store was killed, "blown to bits, on Dec. 12. Excellent. Humane way to eliminate somebody. He probably never felt a thing. 25,000 reward offered. Rather flattering.

    • whatscooking 292 days ago
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  • swellguy 292 days ago
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    • constantcrying 292 days ago
      >Guess I would call him a hypocrite, as I can't imagine living in prison for one day much less years and years.

      You are usually not asked whether you want to go to prison or not.

    • mahathu 292 days ago
      Why does that make him a hypocrite?
      • swellguy 292 days ago
        I guess he is a hero? I hope he didn't mail you anything before he died. He had a grudge and took it out on random people. He survived longer in prison than he did in nature. Weird/Toxic lifestyle, IMO.
        • meepmorp 292 days ago
          But how does it make him a hypocrite?
          • swellguy 292 days ago
            I you talk big, you must act big. You can't go around using a post office and subjecting yourself to prison time and lawyers. It's as simple as that. Otherwise you are not pure and sane and a real naturalist. In fact you're insane and a hypocrite living in prison for ~40 years.
            • meepmorp 292 days ago
              Can you zero on a particular espoused belief and how he practiced other than he preached? What specifically should he have done differently that would've made him not a hypocrite?

              I'm honestly trying to figure out what your point is.

            • mahathu 292 days ago
              Did he choose to go to prison?
  • jmull 292 days ago
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    • martythemaniak 292 days ago
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      • brvsft 292 days ago
        At least most of us have the ability to engage in a discussion about it. You seem to be here to do some backslapping with people who agree with you, and you have no response to a refutation of your normie opinion that He KiLL tHrEe PeOpLe = bAd. Keep on with those deep thoughts that fixate on who Kaczynski killed and never turn that ire towards your government or society. Real brave of you.
      • s5300 292 days ago
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  • dbcooper 292 days ago
    Great to see that most of this site is celebrating a mass murderer.

    He would have killed any of you by choice.

  • syndacks 292 days ago
    Just goes to show you what kind of freaks are on HN, idolizing one of their own. Ole Ted was also a proponent of remote work from his lil cabin on the prairie.
  • 2-718-281-828 292 days ago
    he moved into a shack in the mountains searching for tranquility and silence. just to get tormented there by noise from local wood industry and dogs. So, he kills the dogs and then sabotages machinery. for me - he's an unsung hero. may he finally rest in peace now.
    • jmull 292 days ago
      He’s a hero for killing dogs because they annoyed him?

      I think that’s sick, not heroic.

      • 2-718-281-828 292 days ago
        i find it reasonable if the owners don't discipline the dogs effectively.
  • ahoy 292 days ago
    Kaczynski was essentially a blackpilled fascist. He spends the huge bulk of his manifesto ranting against leftism. I think its fine to attack the ideas as well.
    • j-krieger 292 days ago
      None of his ideas have anything to do with fascism. Rallying against leftism does not make one a fascist. As far as I remember, in Industrial Society and its Future, Kaczynski did not propose authoritarianism or nationalism in any way or form.
      • readthenotes1 292 days ago
        "Rallying against leftism does not make one a fascist."

        You must have missed the memo that defines "fascism to be anything someone more conservative than AOC believes in.

      • adamrezich 292 days ago
        it would be nice if that word wasn't overused to the point of becoming essentially meaningless in contemporary discourse—it seems like a word that should probably retain a significant amount of gravitas!
  • fwungy 292 days ago
    K. made the rational observation that no one would pay attention to him unless he did something drastic to force it. He'd just be a forgotten loner who scribbled in notebooks.

    A politician might kill or harm many more people in the course of pursuing their objectives but they'll always have the story on their side provided they win.

    K. had to understand that the achievement of his objective, publishing the manifesto, would likely lead to his capture, but he did it anyway. He sacrificed himself in the end.

    If you believed you had information that would save the planet but you had to kill some innocent people to make it known? Utilitarians would say yes because saving billions of innocent lives is more important.

    K. probably saw himself as someone taking revenge on an evil system that had harmed him. He's one of the more fascinating characters of modern history in that he was so effective in attaining his goals with violence.

    • sealeck 292 days ago
      But he attained none of his goals?
  • paganel 292 days ago
    RIP to one of the few real prophets of our time.

    We’re long past gone the point where anything could have been done to avert all this current dystopic madness (two years ago, when I entered a bookshop, I had to show some QR magic code that I had gotten as a result of having a needle inject me stuff in my body), but we can’t say we hadn’t been warned.