Our last episode from our Haight-Ashbury living quarters. We talk about the cult of technology, the annoying self-driving cars that have been taking over San Francisco, and we discuss Ted Kaczynski’s work — what he got right, what he got wrong. RIP Ted.
Incidentally, I've always suspected that who Ted's reacting to specifically in his tirades about the left-technologists is Murray Bookchin. Bookchin's ideas were increasingly popular just at the time that Ted's attacks were increasing, and his version of "social ecology" had really taken over the US left imagination during those years. Especially with Ted's statement about the left wanting to "manage" nature, this feels like a direct reference to Bookchin.
Thank you for this tribute! I think you're right about the world catching up with Ted's main ideas.. a few years ago I kept a blog and apparently wrote a lot there, sometimes about "primitivist" writers, and I got a copy of Ted's second book (anti-tech revolution) sent to me out of the blue, asking that I review it. So I felt extremely important, needless to say, and dilligently wrote a really long review of it that probably made no sense. It wasn't particularly favorable, I think I thought Ted's prescriptions for how to change society were naive or something... But in general I think he was prescient, ahead of his time, and somewhat confused in the matter of individual or collective aspects to our society.
Interesting! I guess my take is that most social argumentation based on primitivist presuppositions is often suspect, and at a minimum falsifiable. A lot of current scholarship seems to suggest that over vast stretches of archaeological time human economic and social arrangements have displayed a lot more bandwidth and collective mobility than the traditional images of hunter/gatherer societies and so forth, offered up as obvious by definition since Rousseau and Hobbes, seem to suggest. Maybe one of the problems with the development of industrial societies is that they’ve choked that bandwidth of collective liberty off (by the way, for the sake of individualistic liberty— a thought which Kaczynski seems to have totally missed.)
(One recent book that really goes into great detail about all this is Graeber and Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”)
Plus it’s a long-running controversy as to just what sort of organic, necessary or contingent developmental connections exist between technological development and the economic activity (growth) characteristic of the historical development of actually existing capitalism. Was —as is often argued by anarchists — the development of social democracy in Soviet Russia compromised in its cradle by its embrace of a state capitalist plan of industrial development? (please enlighten me). What would technological development in the west have become had it been divorced from the dictates of huge-scale financialized rentier economies and their imperial politics — that is, instead of having what we have now -- entire economies stabilized and organized around the creation of weapons of mass destruction, with monopoly production, property rights and rents sucking the life out of the productive economy elsewhere? Hard to untangle those threads I think. Like a lot of people I have intuitions but no real answers, or know ultimately, even if these are the right questions.
But Ted K seemed to be absolutely certain that he knew the answers — to the point where he was comfortable with gratuitously offing a few relatively harmless people. Like blowing your way through a hard math problem set — QED! Maybe there’s something really pathetic and self indulgent and childish about that.
You two are spot on though about that woke CIA woke Lockheed shit. The identity washing of imperial politics— at least as bad as drenching such stench with the perfume of “traditional values”. WTFF.
Thanks again to you both for your fascinating and enjoyable tag-team approach to the work.
I'm reading debt by graeber, and he is the only place I've ever seen the idea of collective liberty even broached.. have you come across it anywhere else? I think it's really interesting
Not explicitly, but I’ve seen things that point toward those kinds of conclusions, such as in Michael Hudson’s historical work (the more recent of which I’ve read was influenced by Graeber, and vice versa) on the political antagonism between rentier interests and the imperatives of the productive economy. His latest work, Collapse of Antiquity, an economic history of the conflicts between oligarchs and the popular leaderships of city states in ancient societies up to the Roman Empire, is great on all that.
I think the concept of the Jubilee itself embodies a lot of that kind of thinking about collective mobility, not so much the idea, centered in liberal individualist discourse, of minority groups being able to escape political oppression (I’m not suggesting that that sense of it is valueless), but more literally and generally, the notion that different modes of social organization are optimal for different kinds of ecological or social circumstances, and what works best for humans is when people can move freely between different social arrangements, or to new arrangements, and not be stuck in one or the other regardless of its dysfunctionality for existing conditions, just because such stuck-ness might serve the interests or dominance of some fraction of the population.
I agree that it’s a fascinating concept. IMO it dovetails with kindred notions about methodological pluralism, with the notion (not stylishly pomo-anti-essentialist, but more simply) of an ecology of resistance which embraces diverse kinds of social thought as each being possibly (contingently) valid, and looks at social theory as not monolithic or law-like in application (that is, as neither a transcendental historicism nor a natural science) but as a practical toolbox which includes ways of organizing society and solutions, each of which are better for some situations and worse for others. I think this is the only way out for radical politics from its current logjam, the kind of flexibility and potential for building broad solidarity which resistance to both decaying liberalism, and the current trends toward authoritarianism, demand.
Thank you, will check out Michael Hudson! I think Fredy perlman was also making his way around towards a concept like collective liberty in his writing. Maybe it seems so appealing to me in part because it's undefined and ripe for hanging all kinds of wishful thinking on, but at the very least I want to see someone smarter than me explore the idea.
Thanks for the reference to Fredy Perlman. I’ve never read any of his work. Looking at some things online now— can you recommend an essay or two? Seems he was fond of Melville (yes?), and understood him as a social critic. A fondness and understanding which I endorse wholeheartedly.
For me, it's preferable if every other place people like you find not dishonest sticks to the murdering and the maiming, so I can think or discuss the ideas here without the violence baggage. Conversely, if you wanted to read about capitalism and "democracy" sans the murdering of civilians, you'd presumably not read noam Chomsky or whatever.
I completely agree with your point about capitalism killing and destroying civilians. Please excuse my rant. The podcast was discussing his philosophy. I was just about to erase my whole post with one short statement.
"Respectfully, I disagree with your depiction of who The Unabomber was. Especially at the end. His philosophy aside, he was a murderer of civilians for his political philosophy. Please excuse my rant."
Here’s what I took issue with. This is from the end of the show.
+++
1:09:14 – 1:10:09
Like they're actually convincing. Yeah. Means that there's like a deeper something there, you know? And so we kind of are living in a Ted Kaczynski world. And so, I mean, I don't know. I think, I think we should get, yeah, yeah. Rest in peace, man. I mean, I think you, you did, you did what you could, uh, in your own way, and that's more than what most people do.
I, I, one thing I, I respect, that he kind of followed through with his vision, and, uh, if it wasn't for his bitch of, of, uh, not his wife, his brother's wife, it looks like, I mean, maybe he wouldn't be discovered, not discovered, given away or imprisoned. Um. Yeah, no. You know, cause he basically, there was a snitch in the family, you know?
Yeah. So there's, there's that. But um, yeah, on this note, I think, yeah, no, yeah, I'm kind of, I'm actually kind of sad. I don't know. I mean, I actually, well, he was probably, if he had cancer, he might have been in pain. So he is in a better place.
Great episode! I just ordered "Technological Slavery". Do you guys know Alex Sheremet? He's a culture critic (also of Russian origin) and he talked about Kaczynski on his channel with a radical climate activist, it was also very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0HNSRH1sKA
Zerzan was unknown to K. (see link below) but they corresponded while K. was in prison. Z. work is labeled as anarcho-primitivist and can be found in the journal The Fifth Estate. "In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, many of Kaczynski’s followers came from the
outer fringe of the green movement. One of his early correspondents and confidants was John
Really really great discussion.
Incidentally, I've always suspected that who Ted's reacting to specifically in his tirades about the left-technologists is Murray Bookchin. Bookchin's ideas were increasingly popular just at the time that Ted's attacks were increasing, and his version of "social ecology" had really taken over the US left imagination during those years. Especially with Ted's statement about the left wanting to "manage" nature, this feels like a direct reference to Bookchin.
ah, that makes sense. i guess. thanks.
Thank you for this tribute! I think you're right about the world catching up with Ted's main ideas.. a few years ago I kept a blog and apparently wrote a lot there, sometimes about "primitivist" writers, and I got a copy of Ted's second book (anti-tech revolution) sent to me out of the blue, asking that I review it. So I felt extremely important, needless to say, and dilligently wrote a really long review of it that probably made no sense. It wasn't particularly favorable, I think I thought Ted's prescriptions for how to change society were naive or something... But in general I think he was prescient, ahead of his time, and somewhat confused in the matter of individual or collective aspects to our society.
Interesting! I guess my take is that most social argumentation based on primitivist presuppositions is often suspect, and at a minimum falsifiable. A lot of current scholarship seems to suggest that over vast stretches of archaeological time human economic and social arrangements have displayed a lot more bandwidth and collective mobility than the traditional images of hunter/gatherer societies and so forth, offered up as obvious by definition since Rousseau and Hobbes, seem to suggest. Maybe one of the problems with the development of industrial societies is that they’ve choked that bandwidth of collective liberty off (by the way, for the sake of individualistic liberty— a thought which Kaczynski seems to have totally missed.)
(One recent book that really goes into great detail about all this is Graeber and Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity”)
Plus it’s a long-running controversy as to just what sort of organic, necessary or contingent developmental connections exist between technological development and the economic activity (growth) characteristic of the historical development of actually existing capitalism. Was —as is often argued by anarchists — the development of social democracy in Soviet Russia compromised in its cradle by its embrace of a state capitalist plan of industrial development? (please enlighten me). What would technological development in the west have become had it been divorced from the dictates of huge-scale financialized rentier economies and their imperial politics — that is, instead of having what we have now -- entire economies stabilized and organized around the creation of weapons of mass destruction, with monopoly production, property rights and rents sucking the life out of the productive economy elsewhere? Hard to untangle those threads I think. Like a lot of people I have intuitions but no real answers, or know ultimately, even if these are the right questions.
But Ted K seemed to be absolutely certain that he knew the answers — to the point where he was comfortable with gratuitously offing a few relatively harmless people. Like blowing your way through a hard math problem set — QED! Maybe there’s something really pathetic and self indulgent and childish about that.
You two are spot on though about that woke CIA woke Lockheed shit. The identity washing of imperial politics— at least as bad as drenching such stench with the perfume of “traditional values”. WTFF.
Thanks again to you both for your fascinating and enjoyable tag-team approach to the work.
I'm reading debt by graeber, and he is the only place I've ever seen the idea of collective liberty even broached.. have you come across it anywhere else? I think it's really interesting
Not explicitly, but I’ve seen things that point toward those kinds of conclusions, such as in Michael Hudson’s historical work (the more recent of which I’ve read was influenced by Graeber, and vice versa) on the political antagonism between rentier interests and the imperatives of the productive economy. His latest work, Collapse of Antiquity, an economic history of the conflicts between oligarchs and the popular leaderships of city states in ancient societies up to the Roman Empire, is great on all that.
https://michael-hudson.com/2023/03/the-collapse-of-antiquity-release/
I think the concept of the Jubilee itself embodies a lot of that kind of thinking about collective mobility, not so much the idea, centered in liberal individualist discourse, of minority groups being able to escape political oppression (I’m not suggesting that that sense of it is valueless), but more literally and generally, the notion that different modes of social organization are optimal for different kinds of ecological or social circumstances, and what works best for humans is when people can move freely between different social arrangements, or to new arrangements, and not be stuck in one or the other regardless of its dysfunctionality for existing conditions, just because such stuck-ness might serve the interests or dominance of some fraction of the population.
I agree that it’s a fascinating concept. IMO it dovetails with kindred notions about methodological pluralism, with the notion (not stylishly pomo-anti-essentialist, but more simply) of an ecology of resistance which embraces diverse kinds of social thought as each being possibly (contingently) valid, and looks at social theory as not monolithic or law-like in application (that is, as neither a transcendental historicism nor a natural science) but as a practical toolbox which includes ways of organizing society and solutions, each of which are better for some situations and worse for others. I think this is the only way out for radical politics from its current logjam, the kind of flexibility and potential for building broad solidarity which resistance to both decaying liberalism, and the current trends toward authoritarianism, demand.
Thank you, will check out Michael Hudson! I think Fredy perlman was also making his way around towards a concept like collective liberty in his writing. Maybe it seems so appealing to me in part because it's undefined and ripe for hanging all kinds of wishful thinking on, but at the very least I want to see someone smarter than me explore the idea.
Thanks for the reference to Fredy Perlman. I’ve never read any of his work. Looking at some things online now— can you recommend an essay or two? Seems he was fond of Melville (yes?), and understood him as a social critic. A fondness and understanding which I endorse wholeheartedly.
Most of Fredy perlman's writing is perhaps somewhat abstract, definitely highly idiosyncratic but in my opinion all extremely worth the effort. If that's off-putting, maybe the most straight forward of his works is https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fredy-perlman-the-new-freedom the new freedom: corporate capitalism, an earlier work. It's hard to find hard copies of it. His most famous, against his-story, against leviathan is more esoteric, but really great in parts. https://booboobooks98732400.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/against-his-story-against-leviathan/
Many thanks. I will read him when I can and share my thoughts!
Please excuse my rant.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9L0fS7ZgAJA
For me, it's preferable if every other place people like you find not dishonest sticks to the murdering and the maiming, so I can think or discuss the ideas here without the violence baggage. Conversely, if you wanted to read about capitalism and "democracy" sans the murdering of civilians, you'd presumably not read noam Chomsky or whatever.
I completely agree with your point about capitalism killing and destroying civilians. Please excuse my rant. The podcast was discussing his philosophy. I was just about to erase my whole post with one short statement.
"Respectfully, I disagree with your depiction of who The Unabomber was. Especially at the end. His philosophy aside, he was a murderer of civilians for his political philosophy. Please excuse my rant."
Dear The Russians,
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/54f57aeb-a862-4417-bcff-8941094f9c1e
Here’s what I took issue with. This is from the end of the show.
+++
1:09:14 – 1:10:09
Like they're actually convincing. Yeah. Means that there's like a deeper something there, you know? And so we kind of are living in a Ted Kaczynski world. And so, I mean, I don't know. I think, I think we should get, yeah, yeah. Rest in peace, man. I mean, I think you, you did, you did what you could, uh, in your own way, and that's more than what most people do.
I, I, one thing I, I respect, that he kind of followed through with his vision, and, uh, if it wasn't for his bitch of, of, uh, not his wife, his brother's wife, it looks like, I mean, maybe he wouldn't be discovered, not discovered, given away or imprisoned. Um. Yeah, no. You know, cause he basically, there was a snitch in the family, you know?
Yeah. So there's, there's that. But um, yeah, on this note, I think, yeah, no, yeah, I'm kind of, I'm actually kind of sad. I don't know. I mean, I actually, well, he was probably, if he had cancer, he might have been in pain. So he is in a better place.
+++
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying?
https://tenor.com/view/muppets-statler-and-waldorf-who-cares-boring-bored-gif-21768725
Great episode! I just ordered "Technological Slavery". Do you guys know Alex Sheremet? He's a culture critic (also of Russian origin) and he talked about Kaczynski on his channel with a radical climate activist, it was also very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0HNSRH1sKA
Zerzan was unknown to K. (see link below) but they corresponded while K. was in prison. Z. work is labeled as anarcho-primitivist and can be found in the journal The Fifth Estate. "In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, many of Kaczynski’s followers came from the
outer fringe of the green movement. One of his early correspondents and confidants was John
Zerzan, a prominent anarcho-primitivist." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13569317.2021.1921940
Thanks will check this out.
“In his second year as a student at Harvard University, 17-year-old maths prodigy Kaczynski volunteered for a psychological study run by Dr Henry Murray, a Harvard professor who was secretly employed by the CIA.” https://www.theweek.co.uk/86961/mkultra-inside-the-cias-cold-war-mind-control-experiments
I was all in on this episode.... until Yasha said he didn't care for McCarthy. Now I'm wonder what other crimes he's committed.
Many, if you know where the bodies are buried.