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Ted Kaczynski - the Unabomber - is dead.
I always found it interesting how, when I first learned about this guy, he was mostly portrayed as an ecoterrorist. The spectre of ecoterrorism and animal rights terrorism actually probably loomed larger in the 90s and early 00s than now, which might explain this. There was even a popular quiz with Unabomber and Al Gore quotes, purporting to demonstrate that the former American VP was just as extreme as the Unabomber.
However, if one actually reads the manifesto, or his other work, it soon becomes fairly clear the ecological aspect was not the central point of his critique, and didn't actually feature in it too much at all. He clearly felt some sort of a connection to the anarchoprimitivist and eco-anarchist movements, but mostly in the way of believing they might be allies and converts to his cause, not in the way of actually being one.
No, Ted K.'s true problem with the technological society was that it made people leftist. Since this is immediately obvious when one actually reads the manifesto in even a cursory way, and since during the last decades, parts of the extremely online right seem to have adopted "Uncle Ted" as some sort of a prophet, I don't suppose this actually needs much demonstrating, but to quote it:
Not that this criticism is INVALID, of course, as such - I just always found it interesting how, despite the fact that Ted K. got what he wanted and his manifesto was printed very visibly in newspapers - the actual contents then went pretty much ignored until recently, and even now are acknowledged mainly in small and fringe circles. I don't suppose his death will ameliorate that situation.
An aspect of this whole thing I haven't seen touched on yet is that TK mostly did his thing in the pre-internet age. It seems that he started his bombing campaign before he actually wrote his manifesto, but he did indicate that he was willing to stop it entirely if a sufficiently "respectable" publication was to publish it. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that he basically carried out a mail bombing campaign to get his manifesto published.
Doesn't it seem at least a little bit crazy that in the modern but pre-internet age, if you have a viewpoint that's severely heterodox but not inherently dangerous, you basically have to carry out a terrorist bombing campaign to actually get it distributed. (Or at least a pretty smart guy could come to think that this was the only practical thing to do.) Yet nowadays, you can post every conceivable variety of batshit insane stuff on the internet for the whole world to see, basically for free. We get some pretty damn heterodox stuff posted on this very forum every day. I can go pull up his manifesto right now, for free, and it doesn't actually matter whether it was published on the Washington Post's website or some random free blog somewhere.
On the other hand, maybe it was fame and readership he was really after, which still doesn't come for free. Sure you can post anything you want on a random blog somewhere, but you won't necessarily get any more readership or engagement than you would if you made a few hundred photocopies and started handing them out at public events in the 80s. I guess if you were doing it now, you could post a URL in your bombs and presumably you'd get a lot more readers, along with an aggressive FBI investigation of where you posted it and who had been posting things there etc.
Anyways, there's gotta be something to the fact that anyone can post anything for the whole world to see now, whether it's strictly conventional, heterodox but reasonable, or completely bonkers.
But there is much more competition because the barriers have been erased. it has not gotten easier. anyone can publish something. making ppl read it, way harder. this is true now as it was 30 years ago
Thinking practically this seems hard to believe. Was it really easier in the past to start a subscription magazine that reached 100 readers than it is now for a Substack blogger to hit 100 paid members?
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Kaczynski could have self-published his manifesto or gotten a small independent press to publish it, and it would have sunk like a stone. The only reason any of us have heard of it and him is because of the notoriety his bombing campaign afforded him.
If you're unsympathetic to his cause, you might accuse him of being a narcissistic glory hound, only interested in the pursuit of personal infamy. If sympathetic, you might say that his message was so important, urgent and heterodox that he needed to use extreme measures to reach a mass audience.
I'm about a third of the way through reading it myself. It's interesting enough that I think he would have made a better than average Motte contributor. I haven't found anything yet that would seem to justify a terrorist bombing campaign though.
It's just a dream, and the timeline doesn't match of course, but I want to think we could have told him:
Of course, that might not work. But the greater the extent to which he had the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously and did that anyways, the more he's just a midwit terrorist asshole whose ideas aren't all that interesting.
The more interesting discussions is, to what extent are people with heterodox viewpoints nowadays able to avoid any urge to take radical action because they can find a community that agrees with them, or at least is willing to listen, on the internet?
No, however much his ideas might resonate with me, his bombing campaign was in no way justified, and he fully deserved to be imprisoned for a very long time. I'm not a huge fan of the death penalty, but if he had been executed I would've found it hard to shed a tear.
A lot of people seem to have this idea that censoring far-right opinions on social media platforms will just cause the people who hold those opinions to change their minds and embrace woke neoliberal globalism like good little boys and girls (alright, good little boys). There's no evidence that this strategy has ever worked, either in the specific case of social media or in the case of censorship generally (diehard Marxist Freddie deBoer was castigated and tarred as a neo-Nazi simply for pointing this out), and yet the strategy is still doggedly defended by every mainstream platform going. If anything the opposite seems to be true: that censoring even moderately heterodox opinions has the effect of radicalising those who hold them, thereby turning boring neoliberals with one or two unremarkable ideological unorthodoxies into scared and defensive far-right nutters. Pretty sure this is what happened to Count Dankula, for example. The dynamic arguably describes a significant proportion of users on this website, and perhaps even the site's own raison d'être.
Reddit, for all its numerous flaws and heavy-handed censoriousness, does recognise that you need the occasional containment sub. The misfits aren't going to magically become better at fitting in just because you've banned all the spaces in which they can be misfits together to their heart's content. Users post and comment things on /r/4chan which would never fly on a non-grandfathered subreddit. It's plausible that the release of this pressure valve may have helped to prevent a few suicides and/or mass shootings. See also /u/TracingWoodgrains's wonderful article about the gentrification of online communities.
I'm still working on reading through the whole manifesto (has anyone else on this thread actually read the whole thing?), but I just found a paragraph that changes my views a bit (bolding is my own, but the whole paragraph is lifted from the manifesto unchanged):
Ah, so the internet did exist at the time, though not as a society-dominating force, and he decided to do violence because he thought he wasn't getting enough attention. Yeah that's a hard no from me. You don't get to do violence because nobody cares about your viewpoint. If he worked as hard at improving his communication and spreading his views though normal methods as he did at bombing random people and evading law enforcement, he probably would have had a lot more influence. Instead, he did what he did and he got exactly what he deserved.
Honestly, the more I read the less I care for his overall viewpoint. I'm starting to think I could do an effortpost going against his actual viewpoint.
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he could have used his smarts and math cred to get a good position at a university and then that would have increased his visibility. gone on a campus speaking tour, gone on TV
Inadvisable given his analysis of the system. The academics that do this he saw as pawns that just get used to further the goals of industrial society.
Given the way the green movement has been used to get free money for solar panels we don't know how to recycle, I can't really say he's wrong.
Gaming ways of him not having to kill people is pointless anyways.
Ted, like most terrorists, didn't have the feminine disposition or respect for the status quo that would make him see killing as an unacceptable price to further his goals. From his vantage point the system was and is constantly doing much worse things to others and himself anyways.
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If Ted had just self-published his manifesto, probably nobody would have read it, but he wasn't the only person with such ideas. In terms of ideas seen by the public rather than personal fame and glory, his ideas would be read; even if what gets read is one of the zillions of people with the same ideas as him and not him personally. If they fail anyway, it will be because of lack of merit, not lack of exposure.
I'm not persuaded that any sufficiently good idea will eventually be adopted by society at large - I have a lot of faith in the marketplace of ideas, but not that much faith. There are plenty of historical examples of bad ideas spreading and being implemented while good ideas die on the vine.
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For what its worth we should be reading Jacques Ellul to find the basis of Ted Kaczynski manifesto. The core of the idea is that our existance isn't to "serve the machine". We shouldn't obediently consume products that doesn't benefit us, the planet or even society as a whole. Sadly we don't discuss it enough. We don't discuss that it is the same capital owners that push body positivity that own the producers of shit food that makes people fat and make people sick so they can sell drugs for Type 2 Diabetes and high blood pressure from the drug companies they own. This is what the Ted Kaczynski manifesto was all about derived from Ellul who didn't send bombs to people.
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In the interests of drawing a line to contemporary culture war from the 30 year old news story that Uncle Ted is, I just want to highlight the extent to which reporting on his death is desperately trying to prosecute said culture war by smashing a square peg into a round hole:
From the BBC report:
"Seemed" is doing a tremendous amount of work here. To me it SEEMED like his crimes began when he saw machines tearing up the forest. Who is it exactly, to whom there seemed to be an incel agenda?
Reading that paragraph, the words that reach my eyes are as printed, but the words that I think they're trying to get to reach my prefrontal cortex are
"Doing anything that a women doesn't like makes you a terrorist. All bad people are incels and all incels are bad people. Anyone who complains about globohomo only does so in bad faith because they're sexually frustrated."
Being too lazy to look up dates on Wikipedia is doing even more work. His first acts of ecoterrorism (arson, spiking trees) were in 1975. His first bombing was May 25, 1978. The incident with the limericks happened in Aug 1978.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Initial_bombings
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Ted Kaczynski was one of the most brilliant writers I have ever had the privilege of reading. May he rest in peace.
I must have missed the segment of the Pauline letters that commanded blowing up your enemies.
To my knowledge Ted Kaczynski was not a Christian. If I am wrong, someone please correct me. Nonetheless, he fought the fight he believed in, he finished his race, and to the best of my knowledge he kept the faith (a faith of his own invention, with it's holy text being Industrial Society and Its Future) until the end.
So, presumably, did many Islamic State fighters. I don't think it makes them worthy of respect if their fight was conducted abhorrently and directed towards awful ends.
It should, because if you don't respect someone you're likely to underestimate them, or otherwise misunderstand them, and so be more likely to fail when combatting them (or when trying to reach a peaceful modus vivendi).
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He was a paranoid schitzophrenic who murdered innocent people. He's hardly worth lionizing.
Having read his manifesto, I find it hard to imagine a schizophrenic could write that lucidly, and express his points so clearly and concisely. I find him much more lucid, direct and less prone to digression than e.g. Curtis Yarvin or Eliezer Yudkowsky. His defense attorney thought that pleading insanity was his best chance, but he refused to do so, despite knowing full well he'd probably be treated better in an institution than in a prison. You think he shouldn't be lionized, fair enough, but I don't think there's good evidence to suggest he was a madman.
Paranoid schitzophrenia was the official diagnosis of the psychiatrist who interviewed him post-arrest.
ETA Sourcing: https://harbor.klnpa.org/california/islandora/object/cali%3A1205
Fair enough, but see also Wikipedia:
It seems like a controversial diagnosis even within the psychiatric community. I'd say either he wasn't schizophrenic, or he's the most lucid and clear-minded schizophrenic in the history of the diagnosis.
Doesn’t he have an IQ of like 183? Seems like a relevant variable to that last bit.
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As so often happens, you're both right.
Bingo,
There's nothing inherently contradictory about being a brilliant writer and also being a paranoid schitzophrenic or murderer.
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What? No. He thought the tech made people unhappy and destroyed the planet, and leftism to him is just an example of psychological suffering. "What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type".
I think his argument was a bit more nuanced than that, but it's been a long time since I read his manifesto. His issue as I understood it, was that modern technology acted as an artificial surrogate that distorted 'healthy' and normal human behavior. I think you could make a compelling argument for that, even today. Jaron Lanier's (who's basically a techie Ted Kaczynski without a life sentence) made a fairly strong case for the dangers of social media. I've increasingly come aboard to that same conclusion.
WRT leftism, I think he was striking at the ideological foundations that sit at the core of the philosophy. Some interesting studies in political psychology, also indicate that our sociopolitical and philosophical viewpoints are inextricably linked to our early childhood experience and psychology.
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Ted was born in 1942, so his parents must have immigrated from Poland well before that. It was common practice back then to anglicize names in order to help with assimilation.
In the New York City people hear about him all the time on traffic reports. Whether they pronounce the name correctly I don't know.
The NYC traffic report I hear has three syllables -- roughly Koz-kyewz-koh or Kos-kyew-skoh.
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Well I'm from Australia, where we also know nothing about him and can't pronounce his name. But we mispronounce it often, and with awe, because we have a fucking mountain named after him. Thus his name even reverberates in our greatest heroic poem:
The word appears twice in the poem:
2:10 https://youtube.com/watch?v=nBBGbp5zO4Q&t=130s
5:42 https://youtube.com/watch?v=nBBGbp5zO4Q&t=342s
I don't know if that's what you consider a heavy Australian accent. The speaker is the real deal, though not what I would call ocker. His voice is well matched to the poem.
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For me, he's a classic example of someone for whom it was a ridiculous, comical injustice and indictment of modern sensibilities that he wasn't executed within a few weeks of being captured. Despite my sympathies for his political points, the murder and maiming and completely innocent people should always be met with the swift application of the death penalty in the public square. That such a man died peacefully, as an octogenarian, but only after being caged for decades is a sick injustice that seems ironically fitting with his critique of hypersocialization.
I think Ted himself (pbuh) might even agree with this.
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You are ok with innocent people occasionally getting executed by the government? That is what happens with capital punishment.
Not that necessarily that is my core emotional reason to dislike the death penalty, mind you. I find the whole idea of the government having the right to execute people to be grotesque.
i'm ok with some innocent people dying if it means a net positive for society that people who impose a cost are removed. the question is what is the allowable margin of error? i think it should be higher. keeping all these people on death row for so long is a drain on resources and even inhumane too. innocent people die all the time from things yet that doesn't mean they are discontinued . air travel for example has a non-zero risk of dying.
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I am totally fine with innocent people occasionally being killed by justice system, yes. Fortunately, this is extremely rare. Justice system almost never snatches and imprisons totally innocent people for violent crimes. When people are released from prison or death row, it is almost always a case of prosecution screwing up some procedural stuff, or defender being deemed lousy years later, or activists pressuring critical witnesses to recant the testimony years after.
You’ll find it extremely hard to find a case where a person without prior criminal record being imprisoned for many decades or put on death row, who simply had absolutely nothing to do with the crime they have been accused of. On the other hand, for every person like this, I will find you ten people who should have been put to death for their crimes, but haven’t, and killed more people after being released.
The issue of what proportion of people who are innocently convicted is the issue at question, and I'd prefer some stats or research to guide my opinion. Also having 'something to do' with a crime is a low bar.
What about the unknown unknowns, where you don't hear about it but it happened. Looking to the past shows definitively that quite a number of innocent people were put to death essentially by corruption - you think that corruption has now been fixed aside from a few outliers, who you are 'fine with' them dying.
You may not really be arguing for it and more of an aside but utilitarianism is such an ugly morality isn't it, a moral system where you are fine with innocent people dying seems to lack something. In this case I think it's because it claims a morality but is often argued from a shit happens view, which is just fatalism. I may be weak-manning it though.
Yes, you missed the argument I make, though to be fair, I did not put it at the front and center:
It's not that I'm fine with "innocent people dying". What I said is that I am "fine with innocent people occasionally being killed by justice system", because the alternative is that we let people who are know are bad go out and commit more crimes. I am not arguing for knowingly killing innocent people for some sort of utilitarian purposes. What I am arguing is that, occasionally, mistakes will be made despite adequate efforts, and this should not prevent us from achieving greater good, which is protecting totally innocent people from becoming victims of crime. Think of it like, say, doctors making a treatment decision, following all the appropriate procedures and standard, but which nevertheless is incorrect in the particular patient's case, leading to his death. Should we prevent doctors from practicing medicine, just because some people will die from wrong, but reasonable decisions? No.
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Well if you struck a false positive 1/3 times I'd say the policy in question needs to be revisited.
But isn't it a primary defense of the Utilitarian to prefer that, precisely because the alternative is worse?
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Isn't having a monopoly over the use of deadly force the whole point of a government?
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I'd certainly want to avoid it where feasible, but I accept it as a price of justice.
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Are you ok with innocent people occasionally getting locked up for 40 years by the government?
It's not that it's okay if innocent people get locked up by the government, but what other way is there govern, without the risk of that happening? People wouldn't accept the proposition in virtually any other domain of social life. Nobody would accept a system, where a million people should starve, in order to guarantee one person with a car that's completely safe, and has no risk of putting you in danger.
As a society, we make that rational calculation and tradeoff, because the cost-benefit calculations we run tend to justify it. We know that by legalizing alcohol for instance, that is 'guaranteed' to result in the death of thousands of people every year, who choose to drive drunk despite there being laws against it.
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I personally am not, but I'd argue that at least the false prison sentence has a chance of being proven as such and ended early. You can't really take back a false execution.
You can't take back decades of false imprisonment, either. No amount of money can make up for that.
But being alive and exonerated instead of going to the grave with the pain of knowing it was false seems like a benefit. Sure you don’t get those years back but at least you know your name was cleared.
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Agreed, which is why I tend to be against both capital punishment and long prison sentences. I'd really like to see the US move away from a retributive model of justice to something more restorative. Less prison, more wage garnishment, and community service.
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Well honestly, I don't know what this would do for the justice system as a whole, or how it would affect the rate of conviction. But what if you could insert a legal incentive, which says every wrongful conviction overturned within a category of some criminal tier (e.g. falsely convicted of murder, not petty crime for instance), would result in a $1 million dollar payout for every year they spent in prison? Or a substantial, life-long government pension?
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