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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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From what I remember, another big issue with Industrial Society and Its Future is that, while Kaczynski's analysis of our current situation is interesting and in many ways on point, as soon as he starts to talk about what to do about it the whole thing becomes laughably stupid. Granted it's been a while but from what I remember, he has no better suggestions than to organize small cells of resistance fighters and hope for the best. How these revolutionaries would gain support from the masses, given that the success of the revolution would clearly mean the death of most of those same masses on a scale that would make the Khmer Rouge seem trivial, is not explained. Nor is it explained how the revolutionaries would overcome other armed, organized forces that do not have any distaste of technology.

Then again, the fundamental problem is that there is, really, little in the way to any potential solutions for what Kaczynski considers a problem, since one of the features of the technological society by definition in comparison to anti-technologists is its ability to use technology to stave off any potential threats (through force, intelligence ops, propaganda etc.) The only thing one might imagine possible would be to work from the inside as an accelerationist and hoping that will eventually lead to a collapse, but Kaczynski doesn't seem to believe in that either, believing it will just lead to a wholesale technocratic dystopia.

Modern society isn't immune from violent disruption. It skirts by only on the grace of people not being sadistic and maniacal enough to go for the really hard to replace infrastructure. If one really wanted to hurt people, targeting the electric grid and drinking water supply could really, really do some damage and doesn't require nation state actor level of sophistication or weapons.

If this is done at anything less than world-ending scale, technological society will hormetically adapt to prevent future instances. It is all but hopeless.