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I can't disagree strongly enough.
I don't know or care about Ellul, or Weil. I know and care about Kaczynski, and the reason I know and care about him is because he was willing to commit violence in service of his ideals. The very fact that he is willing to kill or
dielive in prison for his ideals gives them weight that simply writing never can.Ted was a man of both words and actions, where too many people are simply men of words. That engenders admiration, and rightly so. His "domestic terrorism" was him following his thoughts to their natural conclusions and then acting on them. It is that last part that is so rare, and it is the last part that gives the Unabomber the long shadow across history that Ellul can't ever match.
I don't care if he was wrong or right, not really. I admire him for being willing to risk his life and his freedom on ideals, so long as those ideals have the least bit of appeal to me.
Well this is kind of the point; despite his efforts all Kaczynski's 'legacy' consists of is occasional discussion of his ideas on various obscure internet fora. He himself may be remembered as a minor footnote in American history, but his ideas are already on the ash heap of history, which is of course where they belong.
His ideas were on the ash-heap of history when his manifesto was published. You can't get more fringe than an anti-tech screed by a murdering hermit published in the dawn of the internet era. Approximately no one took anything he said at all seriously.
Fast forward a few decades, and his name comes up more and more because it has become increasingly obvious that tech is a serious problem that can't be ignored. His solutions might not be the correct ones, but the problem he identified is both real and dire.
... among a small number of the terminally online, perhaps.
Just to check context here, you believe that tech advancement is not presenting us with serious problems, with the problems growing increasingly serious over time, to the point that they could plausibly rise to civilizational or existential threats?
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Are they really? The Western pro-technology crowd seem to be running into some kind of game-over screen as they came up with contraception pills or the washing machine before artificial wombs. The intellectual future of the West, if any, is Amish.
Voting machines and drones don't make a modern democracy, you still need meatbags somewhere in the system to operate a military or pretend that your elections have meaning.
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This is fallacious thinking. Anyone can kill for any ideal, so admiration for the willingness to go that far is a dubious reason to care about such a person or what they wrote. Imagine someone who wrote about and then killed for the preference for waffles over pancakes. Sure, they had the courage of they convictions - which might be inherently admirable to a degree - but its not a good reason to care about them, what they wrote, or their ideas. Jihadists routinely kill for their ideals, and they're full of bunk.
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The core issue is an intractable without resorting to tools that'd make Ted K vomit.
And personally I don't really think a bunch of hypocritical killer apes getting replaced as top dogs by some purely technological ecosystem is cosmically important, relevant or so on. We did better when we weren't masters of the planet, quite possibly we're going to be doing better once the efforts of a few pioneers created something that's superior to us.
A purely technological ecosystem sounds cool. It's a shame there won't be any conscious beings to experience it.
Since we have no idea about how that works, it's unreasonable to assert the intelligent systems that eventually win won't have conscious experience.
Watts, the sadistic* killjoy that he is wrote a whole book about it, but was forced to reconsider by new data.
*completists who read his lesser known work know.
I'm not completely sure that's a certainty, tbh. Certainly not know or in the next decades, any large scale death would disrupt the economy and leave the AIs with no spare parts or new hardware.
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I haven't read it for a long time, but my lasting impression of ISaiF was that the problem is not soluble -- if Kaczynski realized this, his actions make perfect sense.
This runs into a problem that if you tried doing someplace like in China, you'd end up with the police absolutely ruthlessly crushing any such movement, to the applause of most people.
There's brown coal and iron ore aplenty. With prior knowledge, it'd not be hard for a motivated state to bootstrap back to late 19th century level and be able to absolutely pwn any opposition.
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See, this comment is a perfect encapsulation of why I find vitalism and its offshoots so frustrating. No no no no, a million times no, the vast majority of people should not “fight for their ideals”, let alone “die for their ideals,” because their ideas suck ass. Ted K’s ideas sucked ass pretty much across the board, despite the fact that he was an evidently brilliant and cognitively-gifted man. If a guy that smart couldn’t manage to come up with ideas any better than those, what hope is there for the great mass of the rest of humanity?
Men should be willing to fight and die in defense of their specific people/nation/homeland, and it is even right and proper for them to be willing to fight and die for the betterment and glorification of the same - but absolutely not for something as bloodless and fallible as “ideals”. Absolutely nobody gained anything from Ted K’s actions, and nor could anyone even theoretically have gained anything from them, which demonstrates pretty conclusively as far as I’m concerned that the ideals motivating them probably weren’t worth much.
Respecting anyone committing violence is not moral but it is true that actually violence have accelerated the adoption of ideas and ideologies. When it comes to effectiveness it is simply false to pretend that it hasn't been effective.
Well if Ted's ideas were taken very seriously like with marxism, it would have been a fucking disaster. Although the norms of the 19th century were too oppressive for the working class for my taste.
But it is possible that Ted's ideas could lead to some more opposition to technological authoritarianism, or more recognition of society's and technology's trajectory of breaking community bonds.
I wouldn't say that people should be unwilling to die for any ideals. Hell even for opposing a totalitarian technological world goverment. But not to impose the more extreme ideological visions, even opposite ones.
The "don't die for ideals" argument has a certain problem. What if you live in a world were Communists, fascists, Primitivists, Transhumanist totalitarians, cultural marxists, or people who want to force you to decarbonize and restrict your consumption have ideals. Should you to oppose them be willing to fight for your ideals?
I am all for protecting one's people as being important, but it isn't the only thing important. Most ideologies including those promoted as respectable ones come in a package that usually if you stretch it and aren't careful can reach a point where you are fighting to impose something that is horrible and worse than the status quo.
But in that case its a case of people who are fanatical and have worse ideals than the status quo but are just mistaken about their own virtue. The reality is being the biggest fanatics around aint good but if you group aint willing to fight for your ideals others willing to fight for theirs will impose their vision on the world.
Great point. I am not so sure that smart people are that great at managing of not being insane about key important issues.
Still, there isn't an alternative to trying to have reasonable ideals dominate. It would probably help if people aren't too eager to fanatically promote super ambitious and radical visions for the world and die to impose them. But you still need people who have a strong ethos to dominate. This would result in less people like Ted from going to radical paths.
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Ted is the Man of La Mancha. He has the impossible dream, and yes he's a little crazy, but I can't help but see the glory behind the madness.
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Say what you will about Ted K, he at least had coherent and falsifiable ideas. "Vitalism" on the e-right is nothing but a haze of grievance and nostalgia for aesthetics disconnected from their original application, and it breeds intellectual carelessness in its adherents that rivals right-populists and 'woke's.
Concrete peoples, nations, and homelands are exactly as fallible as 'ideas'. Is the Azeri who dies to annex an unimportant province of Armenia glorious? Or soldiers in the 300th post-colonial African coup? Is the individual soldier still glorious if military success is granted entirely due to alliances and imported technology and not the military prowess of their soldiers? Does it matter that these globally insignificant squabbles only serve to dig holes of economic instability and irrelevance deeper? War is itself a technology, and the material cause of its glorification was spreading genes and then growing states. Is it still the most effective means of doing either of those?
Armenia is at least a real place, and Azeri a real people. They are both made up of matter, unlike ideas, which are not. Blood and soil, to borrow a phrase, are real and true things in a way that ideas are not and have never been.
The retort writes itself. The land Armenia sits on is real, sure, but the material importance it has is limited - drop the exact same population into Kansas or Nigeria and the ethnic Armenians would be able to farm and organize just as well. A communist who defends communism that happens to sit on a particular piece of land is different - how - from someone who holds an idea of a blood-and-soil tie to a particular piece of dirt that - in a literal sense - they'd be able to hold perfectly well on another piece of dirt? At best, the 'soil' is a metaphor for the people and their folkways. Unfortunately for Azerbaijan and Armenia, and every other country on the planet, material concerns have caused them to adopt the "folkways" of modern America and western Europe. Can you even name a concrete way of life or difference in genetic tendencies that differs between Armenians and Azerbaijanis? One that's worth killing over? And those are ... still differences in ideas. If Europeans are slightly more individualist than the Chinese, how is that more real than an entirely different political philosophy and strucure? And the difference in 'people' between Armenia and Azerbaijan are caused more by historical geopolitics between greater powers than they are anything else.
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