All these surrogate activities

>All these surrogate activities
Blegh.

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As much as I sympathize with Kaczynski his solutions are fucking insane.

If there ever is some worldwide destabilization that leads to a complete collapse of society, there will never, ever be a group of people motivated enough to destroy all industrial technology around the world so that humanity would be unable to recover, it is utter fantasy.

If you agree with Ted's philosophy (if you can call it that), you must also understand, as a rational person, that the technoindustrial system has already won. There is no turning back, there is no chance of victory whatsoever for your cause, so you can either give up and embrace the system or struggle and suffer all your life for a hopeless cause.

Or go innawoods for the rest of your life.

>there will never, ever be a group of people motivated enough to destroy all industrial technology around the world so that humanity would be unable to recover

It's actually more difficult to maintain modern, organization-dependent technology than it is for it to stop being maintained. Many different factors need to be working together even for something as simple and common as a refrigerator to be assembled. What he's proposing isn't that implausible. Industrial society only emerged once and much of the philosophy that fueled this approach to technological development didn't exist prior to the 17th century, so there's good reason to believe if the industrial system were to collapse that there wouldn't necessarily be a new industrial revolution any time soon.

That won't save you, Ted talks about the nature of the technoindustrial system's advancement - although it often preserves "freedom" through rights, it does also often make it intolerably inconvenient to not participate in the system. Cars changed the ways cities were built, and so now a car is almost a necessity in America when it was once only a luxury for the rich. You are still "free" to walk to work, but finding work within walking distance of your home is nearly impossible in a world shaped by automobiles.

Similarly, ignoring the problem by going innawoods is only a fleeting solution. You may go undisturbed for your entire life, but eventually your children or grandchildren or great grandchildren will need to deal with the reality of the looming technoindustrial system which will no doubt one day encroach upon their way of life. It is less of a solution as it is procrastination, as Ted mentions many times that the system will only grow more and more unstoppable and horrible as time goes on.

What would be the best way to destroy industrial society you think?
Operation Circuit Breaker ( operationcircuitbreaker.wordpress.com/chapter-6-operation-circuit-breaker/) is elegant for a city but would shooting transformers be efficacious on a large scale?
Maybe its the oil refineries- fewer of them than there are wells or power plants, right? Maybe they're the weak link.

No wonder he was so mad lmao

>It's actually more difficult to maintain modern, organization-dependent technology than it is for it to stop being maintained.
Its easy for a "small" group to maintain much of modern tech though they would be limited in the amount of commodities they can produce.

>What he's proposing isn't that implausible.
No its pretty implausible. The value of technology only goes up in the event of a collapse and any group capable of controlling agricultural/military technology will be able to dominate those that survive. The problem with technology is that it is powerful. He presents no solution to countering that power merely hoping that it collapses and things turns out how he wants them to instead of the going in some other direction.

He has a new book by the way, I got it offered in exchange for a review but am a bit reluctant to take that offer.
Might be interesting what he has to say, but indeed what he advocates can only result in misery, be it personal or otherwise.

If he is right, which I am unsure about, the only way any anti-tech revolution would be possible is that technology dives us into such a crisis that people are mobilized against it.

I can see that only happening if technology threatens human existence, whatever it is due to work or something else.

>Its easy for a "small" group to maintain much of modern tech though they would be limited in the amount of commodities they can produce.

No. Ted addresses this in Industrial Society and Its Future by the way. Insofar as what you're saying can be mapped onto something true, it's that a small group of people could maintain a totally different, non-industrial scale of technology. Nobody here knows ten other people who could maintain the construction of refrigerators on their own and no one person on the planet today knows how to organize, construct, and deploy refrigerators to the detail they could make it happen on their own. It's harder to keep it going than it is for it to fall apart, and this massive phase based organizational process of production has only really emerged once in all of history.

washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm

>We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology. Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance. Organization-dependent technology is technology that depends on large-scale social organization. We are aware of no significant cases of regression in small-scale technology. But organization-dependent technology DOES regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down. Example: When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romans’ small-scale technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build, for instance, a water wheel, any skilled smith could make steel by Roman methods, and so forth. But the Romans’ organization-dependent technology DID regress. Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were never rebuilt. Their techniques of road construction were lost. The Roman system of urban sanitation was forgotten, so that not until rather recent times did the sanitation of European cities equal that of Ancient Rome.

>The reason why technology has seemed always to progress is that, until perhaps a century or two before the Industrial Revolution, most technology was small-scale technology. But most of the technology developed since the Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent technology. Take the refrigerator for example. Without factory-made parts or the facilities of a post-industrial machine shop it would be virtually impossible for a handful of local craftsmen to build a refrigerator. If by some miracle they did succeed in building one it would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric power. So they would have to dam a stream and build a generator. Generators require large amounts of copper wire. Imagine trying to make that wire without modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for refrigeration? It would be much easier to build an icehouse or preserve food by drying or picking, as was done before the invention of the refrigerator.

>So it is clear that if the industrial system were once thoroughly broken down, refrigeration technology would quickly be lost. The same is true of other organization-dependent technology. And once this technology had been lost for a generation or so it would take centuries to rebuild it, just as it took centuries to build it the first time around. Surviving technical books would be few and scattered. An industrial society, if built from scratch without outside help, can only be built in a series of stages: You need tools to make tools to make tools to make tools ... . A long process of economic development and progress in social organization is required. And, even in the absence of an ideology opposed to technology, there is no reason to believe that anyone would be interested in rebuilding industrial society. The enthusiasm for “progress” is a phenomenon peculiar to the modern form of society, and it seems not to have existed prior to the 17th century or thereabouts.

>In the late Middle Ages there were four main civilizations that were about equally “advanced”: Europe, the Islamic world, India, and the Far East (China, Japan, Korea). Three of those civilizations remained more or less stable, and only Europe became dynamic. No one knows why Europe became dynamic at that time; historians have their theories but these are only speculation. At any rate, it is clear that rapid development toward a technological form of society occurs only under special conditions. So there is no reason to assume that a long-lasting technological regression cannot be brought about.

>Would society EVENTUALLY develop again toward an industrial-technological form? Maybe, but there is no use in worrying about it, since we can’t predict or control events 500 or 1,000 years in the future. Those problems must be dealt with by the people who will live at that time.

>tfw he will never be your qt innawoods bf

why live anons why even live

>Nobody here knows ten other people who could maintain the construction of refrigerators
That is one of the reasons why a small group (by small I meant relative to the current population, i.e in the thousands or low hundred thousands) could so easily lord over others as those who have the means and the knowledge to produce tech will be the most powerful.

Ted's comparison to Roman times is terrible because they didn't have machine guns. Why is that important? Because it is an example of tech that allow the few to rule over the many. Continuing to manufacture a small number of them especially when you don't have to worry about your enemy building better guns would be easy and you could easily get away with even lowering standards.

Guns aren't very high tech though, not to mention they're ridiculously prolific and it'd be impossible to hoard them. The most advanced part of a gun is the bullet, and it's not too hard to make some shitty gunpowder.

>Guns aren't very high tech though
Depends on what type we are talking about though I largely agree. Those that have and know how to use artillery in such a setting would most likely be top dog.

I'm not sure what he is getting at when he talks about the Middle Ages. Technology was no less important then. Advances in agriculture made it easier to support more people and advances navigation/military technology allowed certain European states to colonize and break open technologically backward empires like the Aztecs.

Our cosmos evolves. It's a fact of nature that if you leave a cloud of hydrogen around, eventually it might collapse into a sun, and then coalesce into life, and then people.

As genius as Teddy was, he somehow bit the "life is just an accident" meme and didn't appreciate the fact that this process has been leading towards us for billions of years. Even if you destroy almost all life on the planet, the genes that exist here are so sophisticated that it would probably take only a few hundred million years at most to get back to something like us, and any archaeology would just speed that along.

Stuff like artillery or tanks requires too much on logistics. Even if you had people who knew how use them they're probably have a few weeks before all ammo ran out of a integral part broke and so on. Guns would become the most powerful thing and they're common and simple enough to not be a problem if industrial society collapses.

>probably have a few weeks before all ammo ran out of a integral part broke and so on
You're not firing them every single day. Hell you may be able to get away without firing them at all because if one side has artillery and one side doesn't the former will generally win which could result in a "Fleet In Being: Land Edition".

>Stuff like artillery or tanks requires too much on logistics.
If you want to produce a hundred or more yes. If you want to produce ten or less no.

>Advances in agriculture made it easier to support more people and advances navigation/military technology allowed certain European states to colonize and break open technologically backward empires like the Aztecs.
In general you're absolutely right, but technology really isn't what did the Aztecs in.

Diplomacy and smallpox killed the Aztec Empire. Not European technology, excepting the shipbuilding/navigation know-how that got them there in the first place.

While I admit I don't know much about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs I've heard that superior Spanish arms/armor played some part though I'm not sure about how big that part was.

Well, it certainly played a part. It was one of three factors -- their weapons, the political situation in Mexico, and disease -- all three of which were crucial to the conquest. No two of them would've been sufficient.

The sparknotes: after Cortes landed, the Spanish had a couple of scuffles, not with the Aztecs but with some of their longtime foes (in particular Tlaxcala). The Tlaxcaltec almost certainly could've killed the Spanish, but were impressed by the level of resistance they put up (you can credit that to their superior technology), and so instead they chose to ally with them in the hopes that together they could take out the Aztecs.

So their weapons were obviously important, but without the unstable political situation in the valley of Mexico -- huge numbers of people chafing under Aztec hegemony -- the Tlaxcaltec would've had no reason to side with the Spanish, and then they wouldn't have had tens of thousands of native allies, who they absolutely needed to conquer Tenochtitlan, one of the most populous cities in the world at that point. All the gunpowder in the world doesn't matter when the enemy's charging at you and he outnumbers you literally 50-to-1 (And all that's ignoring the fact that they never would've made it to Tenochtitlan in the first place, since if they hadn't deemed them useful the Tlaxcaltec probably would've killed them on the spot.)

cont'd

As for disease, although it made Tenochtitlan much easier for the Spanish to conquer, the city might've eventually fallen without the smallpox epidemic -- but the rest of the "empire" wouldn't have. The Aztec Empire wasn't reliant on any kind of centralized bureaucracy; it consisted of dozens of entirely self-governing city-states that the Aztecs largely left alone so long as they paid tribute. Conquering Tenochtitlan alone, without smallpox depopulating the rest of Mexico, would've been like toppling Athens or Sparta or Thebes during one of their periods of hegemony over the rest of Greece -- it just leaves you with a bunch of other newly-free city-states, many of which are undoubtedly grateful to you for getting rid of their hated overlords, but who'll still kill the shit out of you if you try to take THEM over. So although technically they'd have conquered the Aztecs, who were really just based out of one city, they certainly couldn't be said to have conquered their "empire" in any meaningful sense.

All of which is a heck of a derail that I hope wasn't too boring.

>All of which is a heck of a derail that I hope wasn't too boring.
I appreciate the info user.

>it only happened once in history

Stupid argument. There's no reason to think it wouldn't happen again, and the materialistic requirements of the human existence all but ensure it would happen again as competing societies grasp and struggle for an edge over one another in the pursuit of their necessities and living space; this is what created it in the first place. If he genuinely thinks the ideal can overcome the material, he's a fucking idiot (and no, being a mathematician does not mean he can't be a fucking idiot)