The Unabomber was wrong
I’ve been paging through Ted Kaczynski’s essays — collected in Technological Slavery — which includes his manifesto, some editorials, some later essays, as well as his prison correspondence. Overall his critique of our industrial civilization seems correct to me. But his solution — which calls for a movement to destroy the foundations of our advanced technological society — doesn’t seem like it will succeed.
A revolution against industrial technology can be successful in the longterm only if this revolutionary ideology has sway over the whole world and can stop people — any and all people — from re-developing or continuing to use industrial technologies. But for an anti-technological society to be able to police the world this way, it would have to have global reach. And something can’t be global like that without being technological to a very advanced degree. How do you maintain and enforce this anti-technological purity in a totally decentralized human world of small societies? You just can’t. Some group in some region of the world is bound to develop its own ideas and follow its own trajectory — a trajectory that might lead them embrace the old taboo devil arts of technology. Why wouldn’t they? I guess it’s what A Canticle for Leibowitz was hinting at in its own way.
So any global revolution against a technological society might succeed in the short term but it is ultimately doomed to fail — it’s within the very logic of this kind of revolution. I mean, even the Butlerian Jihad was powered by advanced technology…technology that allowed jihadists to cross space and time to kill the evil thinking machines and then enforce a ban on them across the known universe.
Just as industrialism was foisted on the world at spear and gunpoint and then maintained and expanded through increasingly centralized and global and violent organizations, an anti-technological society would have to do that, too. You’d have to stamp out any pockets of resistance and then make sure no one starts to get itchy fingers and pine for the old days of their ancestors.
I guess there’s a depressing lesson there for degrowth thinking — thinking that I very much support.
Another strange thing I noticed in Ted’s text came early in his manifesto:
3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.
4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a political revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.
Huh? A revolution against our industrial-technological society isn’t political? What’s he talking about? This is like the most radical political goal imaginable today. I sent this passage to my friend Joe Costello, who writes brilliantly about the politics of technology, and his comment was that Ted is just like everyone else in our society: “Despite his radical crazy, he still had the very traditional take that technology isn’t political, held pretty much by all.”
There are other funny things about Ted’s biases and blind spots. Despite his radical thinking about technology, he manifesto shows him clinging to the banal cultural concerns of a conservative male of his time and place. It’s obvious as soon as you start reading the manifesto. I mean, before he even gets to the meaty political part of his critique of our technological society, he has to go on and on about the gays, the feminists, the affirmative action types, leftists…pages and pages of this stuff. Feels very 90s.
He also talks about individualistic freedom in a way that sounds like it could have come out of the Mises Institute — a concept that would probably be totally alien to the kind of small hunter-gatherer societies that he advocates. I doubt individual freedom mattered much to people who lived in small bands, totally dependent on the group for survival.