Unabomber's Manifesto

From skimming over it, it seemed like he was saying, "technology is bad because it will eventually kill us"

Well, we're eventually dead anyways. It's really just a matter of degrees. Do we die tomorrow, do we die 2 billion years from now, do we die 2 trillion years from now?

We know there's a hard limit on how long life will last on Earth before succumbing to our star's red giant phase as it exhausts its supply of hydrogen. That's around 1-2 billion years from now - technology presents us the possibility of surviving longer than this, as well as extinction long before it.

He's worried about us killing ourselves off with technology, but technology is the only viable survival option in the long run. If we go extinct 200 years from now - well so what? The time between 200 years and 2 billion years is infinitesimal when compared with the chance at eternity we otherwise have with technology.

I think he has a myopic point of view and fails to see the forest for the trees.

> pure evil

This is childish.

It was too long and his lack of self analysis was telling.
I understood his basic reasoning though.
Leftism is a problem and even though he oversimplified human motivations, I can still get behind his logic.

communism is just a tyranny where the tyrants convinced the proles to give up everything they have, freely and willingly, so the tyrants may own it all.

To even have communism be anything but despotism in disguise, you'd have to completely decentralize the production of food, goods, and energy and the closer you get to that ideal, the less and less your society even needs anything resembling communism in the first place.

Make no mistake, communism is only about tyrants wielding power over the proletariat and nothing more. When they say, "to each according to his need" what they really mean is "To me, everything, and the crumbs for the rest of you".

Capitalism also goes down this road, but it's by a different and slower process that involves the acquisition of capital over time by the tyrants.

This is what schools teach children.

commies are faggots including you

maybe you haven't noticed, but schools today indoctrinate students into communism

I think both the interpretations that seem to be in this thread of the manifesto as either 'absolute babble' or 'clearly intelligent' kind of miss the mark.

I think that, like most political/philosophical polemics in mass culture, it's assembled from tropes and clichés from the popular discourses that people use to understand power. This is an extended, more articulate version of the kind of gritty monologue you'd get in a David Fincher film. If you look at zines by warez scene autists from the 90s on textfiles.com, the same ideas crop up again and again.

What the manifesto is is an accumulation of these tropes and commonplaces: man's primal urges are being suppressed by industrial society, entertainment is a drug that keeps us pacified, capitalists and leftists alike want to keep us individuals down and make us all conform, the system seems to have a robotic will of its own, psychology is the root of politics (and bad politics come from a personality flaw.)

It's an accumulation, linked together by coherent and plausible logical connections between the ideas that make it up. But it doesn't offer a theory above and beyond the clichéd ideas. It doesn't assess how these ideas share a history with the system and society its trying to critique. 'Technology', 'psychological types', 'human nature,' etc all work together coherently, they all manage to do the job of dividing the world up into 'true and good' and 'deceitful and bad', but he doesn't address why these categories are the ones he uses.

I don't know if the above paragraph is totally clear, but what I'm getting at is that the manifesto offers absolutely nothing new, or useful, or insightful. My point is that any set of ideas from popular political discourse can be strung together into an argument, because they all come from the same popular political discourse, and because they inform our day-to-day empirical experience of our society. We will immediately recognise them with a kind of 'right on man, ain't that the truth.' But I don't see how the manifesto goes beyond that step.

Unabomber for president desu senpai

what part of what you're describing is included in communism as a theory in general, or communism as a strategy for struggle in general. It seems that you're describing one specific political use of communist ideas. If I were a working involved in organising with other people in my community to plan production according to popular decision that removes economic antagonism, instead of production for profit based on antagonistic labour relations, there would be nothing relevant to my experience or useful to my strategising in what you're saying.

*If I were a worker . . .

He's not worried about it killing us, but us being enslaved by it for those billion or trillion years. He says each new advance in technology removes some of our freedoms (even technology that seems to add freedom eventually reduces it)

No, it isn't.

thought it was cool at the time, couldnt care less now

Do you seriously think he makes no good point? The guy did not seem to babble even once during the manifesto. It all seemed very articulate and thought over, not like a political treatise from the XVI century, of course, but still could be read and debated.

>We know there's a hard limit on how long life will last on Earth before succumbing to our star's red giant phase as it exhausts its supply of hydrogen
That sounds more like an assumption than something "We know"
But yea the manifesto is fatalistic Malthusian nonsense.

Has Kaczynski ever commented on Nick Land and Accelerationism?

>He says each new advance in technology removes some of our freedoms (even technology that seems to add freedom eventually reduces it)
archive.fo/EJquW
youtube.com/watch?v=8UsI9CXHm6o

My father will not shut the fuck up about him so I don't really care.
>WOW user DID YOU KNOW HE WAS SPELLING ALL THESE WORDS RIGHT

>Has Kaczynski ever commented on Nick Land and Accelerationism?
I doubt he's aware of either of them. He's not even interested in people like John Zerzan, who he considers naive and misguided.

That video is /r/getmotivated material.