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What are lainchan's takes on Kaczynski and the views he stands for? For those unaware of it: Ted Kaczynski was a mathematician who left his successful career as a researcher to live a so-called-primitive lifestyle. He rejects technology and labels it as the ultimate weapon capitalism has to subdue humanity.

He said he got tired of teaching math to students who would only use it to become engineers and other jobs bent on destroying nature. That's why he retreated to the wilderness. He went a bit mad all by himself and then seeing that civilization he hated encroaching on the lands he loved drove him over the last edge, hence the bombings. I sympathize with his point of view to an extent but assassination just isn't effective when the enemy is the entirety of civilization. Someone else will always come in their place. I don't think his writing is all that good and there are better critiques of technology. This guy gives a pretty good talk about Ted and his shortcomings: https://primalanarchy.org/podcast/2019/6/11/primal-anarchy-podcast-20-ship-of-fools Also the book In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander gives a more coherent and convincing though in the end, less radical critique of technology. He sort of takes you only so far and leaves the last bit up to the reader.

Brilliant guy. Was attractive, well put together, intelligent, and had sights set on a higher purpose (ie. what are we doing to nature). Then he started bombing people, effectively squandering all his talents and gifts. Also, you should read about the experiments that were done on him while he was in college. Those might've effected his ability to express himself properly and pushed him more towards the lifestyle he ended up adopting.

>>12148 >bent on destroying nature No, his main goal wasn't to save nature or stop destruction of it but for humanity to go back to living with accordance to nature. He was disgusted with alienation technology and civilization brought to humanity.

>>12148 >but assassination just isn't effective when the enemy is the entirety of civilization He only did the killings to satisfy his anger and disgust but ultimately saw that it won't do anything. That is why he said that he would stop the bombings if newspapers post his manifesto.

>>12147 Since you didn't say this in the OP for some reason, he is most well-known for being an American domestic terrorist who sent people mail bombs. He was designated "the Unabomber." I feel that people should know this going into the discussion. I thought his points made much more sense than what I would have expected from a terrorist. Actually, he seems to be generally more reasonable than most writers I've read in Industrial Society and its Future, although I only read about half of it before moving on to other matters. The section on "leftist psychology" seems incredibly poorly developed, which is too bad since it's one of the introductory sections and the quality quickly improves. His critique of the right was, in my opinion, more reasonable and demonstrably more succinct. I think he made a classic mistake in taking an approach based on plausibility rather than data in his arguments, but his conclusions do actually seem to be plausible. At the end of the day, though, I think his values just differ from mine. I mostly came away with the impression that he was a real-life Metal Gear antagonist in that he was a fairly level-headed individual who reasoned himself into terrorism on the basis of fundamental principles rather than popular politics. I can't say I understand how sending mail bombs to people was supposed to improve things, though, and I suppose I'm really inclined to think that it amounts to irrational behavior no matter what his supposed justifications were. In any case, I found him more fascinating than most people, so at least I was entertained. I honestly hesitate to write more about my opinions because of the fact that his followers are apparently growing in power and number and have supposedly started killing in his name in some places.

Pretty sure his philosophy of neo-luditism goes directly against the themes of SLE

>>12157 *SEL

NICE TRY ATF/NSA/FBA/CIA/WHATEVER OTHER TLA I'M CURRENTLY FORGETTING ABOUT. Nah. Freedom Club had some ideas. Some were pretty unhinged. Some might have even been good ideas. Ted had a lot of rants about "leftism" which I'm not totally sure about. If you reinterpret that as neoliberalism (which our current conservatism strangely forms a yin-yang with) then I kind of see what he means. Neither of our current government factions represent either urban libertines, rural agriculturists, proletariat labor interests, or really any significantly large portion of modern society. They both almost solely benefit plutocrats and oligarchs and techno-barons. "Left" and "right" create a confusing whole, a self-sustaining spectacle broadcast at loud volume about certain hot, transient issues which are unimportant and non-threatening to the owning class. Corporate government is a united whole when it comes to ferociously pursuing consolidation of the world under oligarchs and atomizing society with different forms of irresistible technological progress. A lot of what we think of as our own culture is just psyop to keep another labor uprising or Bolshevik revolution from happening. The Bolsheviks got appropriated by yet more power-hungry goons and cronies, but they did try and actually posed a threat (for a moment) towards the people who own the vast majority of the world. They aren't interested in letting that happen anymore. Obviously. Ever since the American labor movement was murdered in its crib after a few important but incomplete rights were won for our people, technology actually hasn't reduced humanity's workload, increased their time for leisure and self-improvement or expression. We went from 16-hour days in factories and mills to relative dignity, but the creep has been back on with technology disguised as convenience which actually makes you always on call and always on the hustle. When technology isn't explicitly centered around productivity (tarted-up as convenience) it's a soma-like distraction which shatters attention and splinters the people's ideas and goals. Now the new robber barons of the valley are trying to bring back the exact same fiendish damned ideas. Tenement housing. Company scrip. Total non-ownership of essential tools and networks by the common classes. Everything for rent or on loan instead. City centers that price out all but the ultra-rich and the wretched urchins they get to pull their rickshaws/ubers and sometimes hunt and rape or kill for sport. Want a hot take? The world (nature included, not just humanity) would be almost 100% better off if the cold war went hot and a full-scale nuclear exchange happened. The estimations of nuclear winter or worldwide radiation poisoning were totally overestimated. Look at Chernobyl--way more dirty than a hundred actual nuclear weapons, yet now that area of Ukraine is even more verdant than the parts which weren't evacuated of people and industry--despite the rest of nature on this planet getting completely wrecked with industrialized mass extinction. Untethered nuclear war would have arrested our carbon emissions and pollution decades ago, and would have set us back technologically. It would have upset these power structures which have become an invincible steel fundament in the mean time, and are about to become eternal thanks to effective, ubiquitous, unmanned surveillance. Slightly related, a good tune about Kaczynski by a decent band: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qp9MCNRtdI >>12157 IMO you misunderstand cyberpunk. It's an illustration of the hell which unconstrained technological wildfire creates, smothering all common people. You also misunderstand Luddism. People nowadays use that word to represent anything against "progress" (which is a concept now fetishized beyond usefulness, much like our current use of the word "freedom"), but Luddites smashed specific machines for a specific purpose. You should look Ludd up one day. You probably benefit daily from the offshoots of movements created and channeled by that one. It's all ancient history now; history we apparently didn't learn well, because we're going right down the same path with all the same warning signs with our current second (or third? Depends how you think) industrial revolution, where automation is taking the place of mind as well as body. If you live long enough and civilization keeps going this direction you're going to understand uncomfortably well why Ludd swung his hammer--that's guaranteed.

>>12154 > a fairly level-headed individual who reasoned himself into terrorism on the basis of fundamental principles rather than popular politics This can happen easily in isolation. People form terror cells after they spend too much time talking to other people who reinforce their ideologies together. Ted spent an awful lot of time all by himself in Montana which put him at an even further remove. You can convince yourself of anything in a situation like that. > his followers are apparently growing in power and number and have supposedly started killing in his name in some places I don't know about that. If you mean in Mexico I'm not aware of any connection to Ted's writing but it wouldn't be a surprise either. That group renounced its previous ideology anyway and adopted some spiritual, esoteric, I don't even know what to call it. They called themselves ITS anyway.

Teddy made some really good points but some of it is straight up wrong. He went too far with the "back to nature" bullshit basically. He was too anti-technology and not enough anti-civilization.

Ted the beautiful mind of someone so smart yet so lonely. He imagined of the free person -- getting back to the hunter gatherer ways of our past. His views on leftism are so obvious -- look the whole alt-right movement as how many people got fed up with these bullshit. So many people shouting but doing nothing to change their lives, revolutionary gymnastics for the soul. But Ted didn't see one thing in my opinion. This culture has started providing us with the tools to destroy it. The machine got out of the factory, the software escaped the mainframe, the knowledge and tools have started to spread and then we can bring them back to nature by "bombing" what is taking us way from our mother. Ted, my big brother of the wild plains, live long enough to experience the techno-luddite ways.

Kaczynski was just another extremist who turned to violence, like thousands of others. It doesn't matter whether his ideology was wrong or right. Once he started sending mail-bombs he was just a madman that needed to be stopped. Ideological extremism is the greatest danger to mankind that exists today. It prevents people from finding rational, practical solutions to the serious problems we all face as inhabitants of this planet.

>>12207 I think much of the appeal is similar to what would accompany a talking dog. You'd be so impressed that a dog can talk at all that it wouldn't matter what it was saying. That's what goes through my mind when I read his stuff.

>>12207 How can you overturn a state of violence monopoly without demanding your share of violence. I don't agree with all ideology but should you not like the owner of violence how do you take for yourself? Shall you just wait for your turn or what?

>>12212 Then don't think about violence in ideological terms but rather strategic ones. The other side is a lot better at it, are much bigger and have effectively limitless resources.

>>12207 Pretty true in this case--a case of totally aimless, unhinged violence. But if you say that no movement should be taken seriously if it has to use violence you just have a terrible conception of history. There are certain times when violence was necessary and warranted, and indeed true reform would have been impossible using strict pacifism. MLK wouldn't have succeeded without Malcom X, the Black Panthers, and other civil rights movements who used their strength to make credible threats and force society to pay attention to them. You need a peaceful, principled icon for the movement to follow and give the people ideals, but there will always have to be something to back that up when the icon is inevitably smeared or ignored by the far more entrenched status quo. Even Gandhi had muscle, although it's been very de-emphasized in modern propagandized accounts. You think Britain would have just let go of its most lucrative colony at the time just because some guy starved himself? Absolutely not. People were constantly starving in India. In the end, there had to be credible threat of armed insurrection if they didn't leave that region of the world alone. But Gandhi was a powerful individual figure to draw inspiration from, and his message of pacifism gave credibility and respectability to the movement despite the fact that everyone knew they would have to make the threat of insurrection clear and apparent to the world for Britain to take things seriously and loosen its grip. Hard-line pacifism is an extremely recent invention, mostly used as propaganda to safeguard the status quo from most seriously motivated yet principled would-be revolutionaries and activists. Only recent generations of first-world people have been sheltered enough from the danger of conflict and real civil battles for essential rights to think such a thing was plausible or even ethical. A good movement has peaceful action accompanied by an undeniable and credible threat that they could fight if needed--on the other hand, a terrible movement just goes straight to futile violence which never had the capacity to enforce real change, such as one guy randomly mailing bombs to people. Never would have really changed anything, and Ted knew that. He was just a little nuts and very frustrated. He settled for spreading awareness, but if awareness is spread with maniacal, senseless violence then it only hurts the movement. But EVERY one of our rights and EVERY bit of progress in the world was won with implicit promises of violence should demands not be met, if not actual fighting. You can't look at history and think that every successful and just revolution was peaceful without being totally revisionist. At least the clear ability to do considerable violence will always be necessary to get the very powerful few to stop exploiting the individually weak yet numerous. It has to be managed correctly. And remember our everyday life is already filled with violence; we are undeniably complicit in horrible atrocities just by taking part in the upper strata of modern civilization, which if you live in the US is just about every single citizen except the most destitute among us. It's just outsourced and exported to people in other parts of the world. Your way of life is always supported by violence, but we've contrived a way of not having to look at it up close. Trying to shun the existence and necessity of violence in our entire civilization is a kind of gauche form of ignorance. You can try to keep yourself principled and pure and unsullied, but in the end all you're doing is refusing to face reality and enforcing the status quo by insisting on an impossible route for future civil movements. We are already standing upon the throats of the global poor; simply standing there motionless and refusing to shove each other off balance so we stop crushing their trachea doesn't constitute nonviolence. Inaction can be a most insidious form of violence.

>>12214 Beautiful words, violence is the first idea that needs to be freed in the first world. We have so much power but so little understanding.

>>12207 this plus Industrial Society and its Future is more of a rant than an essay It does seem that civilization will inevitably render the planet uninhabitable, but I see that as more of a result of our choices about how to distribute power than the result of technology itself.

>>12231 I mean what choices could have been made? We didn't know what was up with CO2 at all when these power structures set down roots during the first industrial revolution. From then on it's been just human nature and inertia. Maybe it could have been different, but looking upon the past it's hard to deny a hard causal chain of events that brought us here with our machines. At the end of the day, humans+technology apparently equals mass extinction. I mean we still have hope for climate change in some places, but there's eventually gonna be a point where you pull your ripcord and a giant cartoon anvil comes out instead of a parachute--at that point, hope isn't really useful in any way. Are we past the point of no return? Maybe not for the most heartbreakingly grim predictions, but we've already caused ridiculous loss of biodiversity and habitat. The effects of which will continue to unravel for centuries to come. Even if we go full renewable tomorrow. If we somehow miraculously evade this, we should very seriously reconsider our privilege of having technology as a species. This is life or death. Maybe we can figure out a way to use it more wisely--but how much do you want to gamble that this is fundamental to the entire relationship? Haven't heard from many aliens up there recently. Maybe this is what got 'em.

>>12213 Ted just used his violence as bargaining chip on the world stage. He said he would stop the violence if newspapers publish his manifesto in the news and he was really popular before it. He spread his ideology strategically.

I think anyone who makes such broad statements is automatically dumb.

>>12233 There's not going to be a revolution. Much of the population is fine with things the way they are, and the people who do have a problem can't agree on what that problem is. Like it or not, a revolution needs consensus if it's going to happen.

>>12240 historically, revolutions happen kind of "all at once" when everyone gets really pissed. Literally nobody saw the first French Revolution coming.

>>12240 Climate change will fuarrrk society up. Consensus won't be that hard once hunger strikes third world countries. And then it will be our turn to flip the coin.

>>12243 Third world revolutions won't be enough to affect society as a whole. Most of the people living in the more powerful and influential countries like the US and Japan have it good enough that they'll be perfectly willing to maintain the status quo, which will then trickle down to the less powerful nations.

Maybe he is mad or something, but I think that he is a genius. We need technology but not in a way we make it - it will destroy us and our humanity.

>>12147 Actually, he's still alive, and incarcerated in a supermax prison in Colorado. I think it'd be absolutely hilarious to sit down with him and explain modern smartphones, app telemetry, and the fact that practically everyone over the age of six is effectively broadcasting their entire lives to every tech company on the planet 24/7. It'd be quite entertaining to see his reaction. >>12148 >He went a bit mad all by himself and then seeing that civilization he hated encroaching on the lands he loved drove him over the last edge, hence the bombings. Terry Pratchett had a great paragraph in one of his books (Men At Arms). “Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings.”

>>12245 It's our faults for using the technology, not the technology for existing. Throw away your phone and be the change you want to see

>>12575 Exactly right. Technophobes are the epitome of blame everything except yourself

>>12575 No, Lucifer, it's not our fault, you seduced us and it's your fault. As long as there are people interested in technology being addictive, making it as addictive as technically possible, to make money out of it - it's not our fault.

>>12577 They aren't forcing you to buy their products. You are not a slave to anyone but your own week will. Don't drive to the store. Don't buy the phone. Don't spend your money. Sitting on your ass and doing nothing is the easiest thing on earth, yet you somehow failed at it. You failed at doing literally nothing. fuarrrk you

>>12575 >>12576 >bottom-up, demand-side revolution that depends on billions of people just changing their ways spontaneously despite existing habits and incentives instead of affecting structural change This is the most boneheaded way to wish for a better world. It's the same as shaking your fist at the sky when it rains. If we depended on each individual consumer to choose non-tetraethyl lead gasoline and fix the knocks in their engines at significant cost to themselves, would we still be choking on incredibly toxic lead-filled air? You bet. It wouldn't matter how much you blamed powerless individuals or portrayed them as unprincipled or lazy. We'd still be steeping in poison. It had to be derezzed from the top. Some things are just like that.

>>12578 >Don't participate in society, it's so easy Why don't you try then? Idiocy. You should think about your views for more than like five seconds.

>>12578 Thanks for the incredibly woke tip. But, unless you're planning to go insane alone in your cabin in the woods, you'll have to buy their products and would have to deal with their manipulations on the software level.

>>12582 >>12581 >only choice is hermit life or phone addict Fake binary choice. Friends&Family continue to exist regardless of phone or not. If you're one of those cases that killed their landline and substituted it with a smartphone you gotta have it somewhere on at home but you don't need to carry it around and be always available everywhere. And all the useful apps run also easy on 5 year old smartphone. Literally no reason to buy new model every year outside of playing games or showing off to others which aren't exactly good reasons.

>>12581 >>12582 fuarrrk off. All of the supposed 'necessities' for living in society aren't actually nessesary at all. I don't drive a car and I never have, the only phone I have is one from the 2011 that I use exclusively as a phone and never leaves my house, and I don't have a single social media account Does it make things inconvenient? Sure. But convenience isn't nessesary and if you think it is you're a chump who bought into the system.

>>12583 >Friends&Family continue to exist In their phones and social networks, with you sitting alone outside.

>>12584 You're still stuck in this fallacious idea that the circumstances of the individual can be reliably replicated across all society. You have managed to sidestep a lot of the cruft of modernity, but have you considered that perhaps you have special circumstances that make it easier for yourself? When I was younger I worked as a delivery boy for a while. There were lots of other workers up into their late thirties there, barely scraping by at a dead-end job even in middle age, no prospects. They were required to have cell phones, location data turned on for GPS, reachable at all times. And this is just an example I personally can attest to; there's plenty of livelihoods in the world where being on-grid and on-call is not optional, it's mandatory. I was able to secure a more upper-middle class job in media, but I'm the exception, not the rule. There are whole countries in SE Asia where all employers basically only accept resumes over Facebook. Which is pretty harrowing if you think about it. You're required to have at least some skeleton of a Facebook account or you can't get a job. If you're fortunate enough to have a job (or fortunate enough to be unemployed with no consequences) that lets you abstain from modern contrivances that society now takes for granted, then have you considered you might be more privileged than most? That a sizeable amount of people couldn't realistically live the spartan life you are able to choose? Hell, these days even being homeless usually requires a cell. I've worked at a shelter, and it's amazing how vulnerable they are without one nowadays. It's not the 90s anymore; this is the cyberpunk reality that has taken shape around us. Most people can't afford to abstain from the significant margin of productivity made available by modern communications tech. Most people have to compete for barely livable jobs on a vicious playing field. That's the reality of capitalism for the common person. We've upped the ante across society, tightened the thumb-screws, and only the most fortunate can still play the old game.

>>12585 people who actually care will go to the effort of making contact and seeing you in person. Other people are not worth the time or effort. Personally, I am planning to ditch my phone, get a google voice account(or something), and change all my email addresses once I leave college. Might get some cheapy phone that I never take out of my house. The hardest thing to ditch will probably be discord, because it is the only reliable way I have of contacting some of my friends. They're good friends though so I think they will make the effort to contact me. My reasons for doing this: I don't want to be tracked, and I have (foolishly) built a normal person social life in college.

>>12586 if you are able bodied and not utterly retarded, you can get a job in construction with next to no background. I have gotten all of my jobs from craigslist, and have never even needed to prove my identity. For precarious minimum wage jobs. Generally, in the US, the more "upper echelon" jobs are where you need social media like linkedin or whatever.

>>12585 They aren't friends.

>>12587 >people who actually care will go to the effort of making contact and seeing you in person. I hope you'll never find out that nobody cares enough to go through this hassle. Going against the society, even in such menial ways, is walking on thin ice. Not being a few lines in anonymized analytics is not really worth losing all the modern means of communication. I've been unhappy about being tracked, too, until I had to implement analytics on my job. It's literally which button is used the most so it would be put higher in menus, nobody cares about your person, and every developer is actually afraid to accidentally send any kind of user data, as small as file paths, everything is stripped and reviewed.

>>12592 *your* job was that. I just don't want the gubbermint to know where I am >nobody cares enough they do, I guarantee. I have never had a facebook account or an instagram or anything and it has never mattered.

I don't get why he's so popular with computer programmers and guys who on their computer all day.

>>12601 because we know how soykafty computers are.

>>12587 I have basically done what you want (switched to a dumbphone and mostly disconnected), with the same ideas in mind. Ditched the most widely used instant messenger of my contact circle, as it enforces smartphone use. I even offered an easy, simple alternative that is meant to be cryptographically secure that I can use from within a desktop. > Other people are not worth the time or effort. Most will simply not bother. It's a real struggle to get people on other platforms. Waiting for people to make some switch in order to reach you, as a filter mechanism to detect who cares enough to contact you, was precisely my motivation. If you play it completely passive, everyone will take it as an attempt of yours to isolate yourself, so you need to at least play some active role. If you try too hard, it defeats the purpose of being a filter mechanism and you will probably piss everyone off. But the sad reality is that you need everyone to either - understand your view and reasoning AND get them on some other platform - convince them otherwise The first is a ridiculous amount of effort, impossible if done for everyone within your friends/family circle individually (try making a convincing argument for your mom). The second will probably leave them dumbfounded, making them question your purpose for making them go through the trouble. Some might even be irritated, regardless which path you took. The result is still just that, a filter mechanism to see who truly cares to at least hear you out. Meaning, you lose a lot of contacts. I know I did. I don't mean to say you shouldn't. In a sense, it makes conversation more focused (you reduce your total active contacts as well as the time you are available, eliminating a lot of idle chatter). Convincing others might be seen as a fun sort of social challenge. Arguing about means of communication is an added topic of discussion. Just my two cents, maybe this helps you figure out what you are in for.

>>12601 The only anti-tech activists I ever met who could actually win arguments about it were ex-programmers who were freaked out by what they saw emerging and had quit their jobs. They knew better than anyone where this was all going.

>>12607 Yeah that makes sense, but the accelerationist/pine tree crossover is dumb.

>>12601 The people building the systems know where they are moving.

>>12242 >Literally nobody saw the first French Revolution coming Wrong, shortage of food is what snowballed the french revolution, accompanied with newspapers that conspired together to slander the monarchy into "let them eat cake" which was completely a lie. Shortages of resources are what usually cause revolutions.

Naturally, I don't agree with him, not even one bit. I'm a nerd boy who loves technology and anime and the internet. I wouldn't survive a second living under a primitive life. I see primitivism as something that should be done voluntarily. I'm saying this because there are primitivist activist groups who try to get the world to live the way they want them to, and that is where I step my foot down.

>>12231 >plus Industrial Society and its Future is more of a rant than an essay but his critique was mostly right, you know >>12232 >CO2 there are other things that will ruin the environment far faster than the climate change and temperature will.

>>12613 The easy counter argument they could make here is that they are the ones forced to live in technological society whether they like it or not. You can't actually live as a paleolithic hunter/gatherer, there is simply no place to do so anymore.

>>12635 >You can't actually live as a paleolithic hunter/gatherer, there is simply no place to do so anymore. It doesn't mean you ought to just give up on more autonomous living and submit to overcrowded city. There are other means to produce food other than gathering, also Russia has plenty of land in Siberia where you can hunt.

>>12636 You're suggesting that all those guys with roadkill necklaces and raccoons on their heads in Portland and Eugene could move to Russia and the government there would let them hunt with flint tipped arrows and spears?

>>12637 Having been in (western) siberia staying with the nenets during my finno-ugric studies practicum i can say that there really isnt much of a russian government presence east of the ural mountains, unless you go wandering in oilfields or some military area.

>>12650 You should share this with the people starting the Lain commune, it sounds like the perfect place.

>>12653 I'm sure the inhabitants of some Siberian towns would love an influx of young people to help them do things. Generally they were settled in the early days of the USSR and died out quickly thereafter. Worth noting that life in Siberia is *hard*. There's a reason no major civilization has risen there, there is by no means an abundance of food or a forgiving climate.

>>12656 >Worth noting that life in Siberia is *hard* Good. Keeps city folks away, only strongest will survive and conquer. Exactly how it should be, a perfect balance.

Today, I'm going to spend a part of my day reading his Manifesto. I am surprised he is so on the mark about a lot of our common discourse, despite having spent several decades living in isolation. He clearly was a head of his time.

>>12742 This is just eerie. The fact that he wrote this document between the 70s and mid-90s shows that nothing has really changed, and nothing will probably changed. Someone I listen to references this as the stalled century. It feels like we live in a bubble, that despite knowing all of these things, we refuse to make any real change against them.

>>12743 lmao, he wouldn't be out of place posting on 8chan. I hope that's what you mean when saying he was ahead of his time

>>12658 >only strongest will survive and conquer. survive, yes. Conquering is out of the question. Also: fuarrrk social darwinism

>>12742 >>12743 I think that what he terms 'leftism' is what we would call neoliberalism today. Don't know if that word was commonplace during his time, likely not. In any case, old-style leftist class consciousness is a far cry more productive and effective than current neoliberal identity neurosis. And not nearly so condescending. Neoliberalism has been a co-opting of leftist ideals, channeling the desire for significant improvement of life for the masses into this consumer culture which people can wear on their sleeves as tokens and trinkets and show each other how very woke they are, accomplishing very little actual policy. It's a spectacle-style celebration of well-meaning ideas, yet it merely acts as a heat sink for political activation and burns people out against real revolutionary praxis. These kinds of emotions are finite. In the end it's a supremely capitalist, bourgeois affair. A hobby of the upper-middle class who have guilty consciences over their obvious participation and profit in an unjust and unsustainable civilization which stands on the throats of the poor, both brown and white, both at home and abroad. They don't understand that the only way to truly help their protected classes in the long run is to help the lower class as a whole. Or else they cynically understand that and use this confusion as a way of preventing significant downward flow of capital. The last thing neoliberal politicians want is to actually win control and have to enact legislation. They're career panderers, and if they ever had full control of the branches of government they know they'd be seen as charlatans. They'd rather be publicly seen fighting and losing than have to define their ideals in a concrete way and get down to business.

>>12746 That's not what Ted was talking about though. When he says "leftists" he means what the chantards of today would call SJWs and I think the Lain above who said he'd fit right in on 8ch today was probably referring to that. Neoliberalism has nothing to do with political liberalism or leftism. It means economic liberalism. Basically it touches base with classical liberalism and injects it with a syringe full of meth. It's just hypercapitalism and globalization; laissez-faire wired to the instantaneous mass communication network of today which allows massive transactions to occur worldwide at light speed. Ted was primarily against that, and was denouncing left activism as being an ineffectual and meaningless resistance to it.

>>12747 It gets better. Kaczynski basically gets to the point where he states that leftism is a cop-out for their own insecurities, and that people are leftist (which you are correct, we would identify as SJW) because they lack meaning/purpose in life. What amazes me is that this was written in 1995, before widespread internet adoption, social media, or the mass manipulation by them. I wonder if he knows of/understands what is going on from Jail, or if he's even lucid at all at this point. Technology has basically ruined our lives, and we cannot "think correctly" anymore due to the oversocialization of our society. Our wires are basically crossed and we have no idea how to think unless we're told how to think. I've only read around 1/3 of the manifest so far.

>>12747 Yeah, the primary goal of neoliberalism is economic in nature, but I believe a lot of our current identity politics is a divisional tactic cooked up by capitalists in order to redirect unrest away from their own activities—which are the root of the problem. Of course an economic agenda like this would be interested in re-making leftism in a way that ignores the core of economics in favor of a hundred thousand splintered issues.

>>12748 > What amazes me is that this was written in 1995 Why? It's not like any of the political tendencies he describes were invented by Twitter or Reddit. I really wonder what he'd have to say about the alt-retards of the internet because there really wasn't any equivalent of that. There were militia LARPers and drunken skinheads, and Birchers and the like but nothing like the sheer critical mass of nonsense we have now. It's just more distractions and diversions from the real problem, just from the other side of the political rainbow.

>>12748 If you think the mentality you call SJW is due to "oversocialization" and social media, you really need to chat more with older adults There aren't many difference between the get off my lawn components on blaming millenials and SJW, it's the same empty and sad fetish for pretending everything was alright and holding on to proven ineffective solutions.

>>12748 I kind of resent that term sometimes because if you look around with an honest eye, strawmen and fakers and people loudly complaining about 'sjw' types vastly outnumber actual people who fit that description by like a hundred to one. The real annoyance derives from people griping about them. Don't think I've ever even encountered one in reality, and I've lived all over the coasts in large cities and college towns in my travels, as well as in the heartland. I think some people got upset at a few literal children talking about extreme wokery on tumblr and have been frothing at the mouth about it ever since, using it as a kind of totem to advance an agenda. But really it's almost nonexistent.

>>12592 Jesus what a sad life you must live. If the only reason you have friends is due to Californian social media... I hate to break it to you but you don't actually have friends who care about you. I'm not saying there are many of those people that you'll meet in your life but those are friends - the ones who value your presence and input.

>>12150 >Then he started bombing people, effectively squandering all his talents and gifts. Sadly the content of your message doesn't matter if you don't get attention first, but the greater the means by which you gain attention the more easily discredited your message will be. You can't win.

>>14296 >the message Which was what? What was the average person supposed to do with that information.

>>14298 Well, his primitivist manifesto in that case

>>14296 >>12150 Yeah, we wouldn't be talking about his ideas right now if he hadn't bombed people. Crude but still highly effective. >>14298 The average person does nothing with any message. But an undying idea still gets put into practice by a small minority of activists and lunatics for a very long time. Most movements are not the spontaneous, simultaneous activation of a majority or even plurality of average people; they are motivated by a small vanguard and eventually pick up populist steam once they gain some traction and power in the public realm.

>>14301 Yeah but sensationalism will prevent the vanguard from doing anything with their message. If you want to get any idea through to the masses you need to dumb it down to "this thing is bad" and this means that someone will immediately capitalize on it and distort it until it's unrecognizable (but marketable). Just look at how Snowden devolved into a couple memes about encryption and as a result people unironically use WhatsApp thinking it's private. Look at how environmentalism turned into a market for premium products that got mixed into gluten free and ogm. Whatever you say, whatever you do, if there's a dollar in it they'll be there to take it. And if there's no dollar your idea will never see the light.

>>14302 That's fair, good points. I definitely don't want to advocate that Ted's method was the only or even the ideal method of revolutionary praxis—far from it—but it is a method that sometimes takes off, at least for a while. I want to attempt being neutral or preferably unapproving of it, but there are historical examples of movements starting with direct and horrifying violence that later spread in popularity, shifted messaging, and overcame the (well-deserved) stigma of bloodshed and went on to be successful revolutions. In fact it's hard to think of many revolutions that did not at some point incorporate aggressive violence. There are examples of a small number of successful pacifist revolutions, but those examples are famous for being exceptional in exactly that aspect. They usually require force.

>>14305 ...Actually, to be more accurate, they might not usually require force, but they did incorporate it. In a way that might arguably have increased their chances of success or viability, but on the other hand perhaps not! It could be that they all would have gone better without violence at all. I wish there was some way to test it, but without a time machine I can't prove to myself that an alternative would have been better or worse. I'd be interested to hear any ideas on how to demonstrate that, though.

>>12575 You meant to say "we should use technology moderately", right?

>>14307 As Ted put it, "Man with technology is like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine."

>>14305 >>14306 I don't think anything would have changed if he did something like a protest suicide. You know like those people who set themselves on fire. Because people's attention spans now are so low that they will focus entirely on the act. Guy killed himself, said technology is bad. If you do it in 2020 the best you'll get is memes. Guy douses themselves in gasoline with a caption "time to quit Twitter". Har har. You get trivialized. Everything is trivialized, every ideal that's is actually unpopular turns into a joke. Look at ethical vegetarians, they're the joke of the century and nobody even thinks one second about factory farms. We live in an age where if a fact is uncomfortable you can just laugh about it and find another source that says the opposite and agrees with your world view. As it is right now there are 0 chances to start a movement unless that movement is engineered from the top.

>>14311 ...and "the top" doesn't want that as things are going their way just fine as it is. So do we just give up? I know I have.

>>14312 I think the best you can do is revert to action on a smaller scale. The world has become too large to influence, so you have to influence a smaller cluster of society, both online and in meatspace. This is why I'm spending more time with my family, buying from local shops instead of Amazon, and why I found Lainchan in the first place. It's better to solve issues with, have a positive influence and make an impact on 10 people than 100 or 1000 or 10000. I'm not saying you should ignore the world and unplug from technology like Ted says, which only makes you more vulnerable to the big players who will never drop technology and propaganda, but he had a point somewhere in his primitivist ideas. People are worrying about battles that happen on the other side of the world while ignoring what's going on in their neighborhoods and their own private lives. Young people protest about wars and the environment - which is all great and noble - but they do that while ignoring their rights in the workplace, the decay in their city and the issues with their families because these things are somehow too insignificant to worry about. They ignore that the further away your efforts are broadcast, the weaker they will be when they reach the destination. Did protests stop anything from happening in the last few decades? We still fought all the wars, the environment is dying, and generally nothing has changed. All people got was merchandise packaged as token efforts, yay the processed garbage I eat doesn't have palm oil in it, I'm saving the orangutans. Or maybe they just found a cheaper oil. You're being lead by the nose as long as your action is directed by things you can't see and sources you can't prove. Looking at your reality is different because it's much easier to understand the actual situation.

>>14313 >Did protests stop anything from happening in the last few decades? Well... we just had the 20th anniversary of Seattle a couple of days ago. People thought that would make a difference because that summit (and most of the city) was shut down. Then there was the IMF in DC a few months later, and the FTAA in Quebec which were both even bigger. The authorities learned quicker than the protesters though. Then there was the G8 in Genoa where 200k people showed up and at least one kid died but it didn't slow the process of globalization at all. I'm rambling but it's been on my mind because people have been talking about the anniversary. PIC IS RELATED... if you think about it.

>>12147 Truly a man ahead of his time an no short of a savior

>>14311 Yeah, I definitely see the kind of comedization going on everywhere, where everything is basically a joke on some level and if you aren't always giggling and chuckling at everything then you're not an important thinker; not worthy of listening to. Sardonic comedy has eaten public discourse in a fairly real way. It's one of the most nihilistic and pathologically nervous things I can imagine. There's got to be a way to counter it. People still have hearts that can be moved, but they're all too cowed and frightened and addicted to non-stop stimulation to open them.

>>14301 Just as long as everyone's clear on that. People are trying to academically debate Kant regurgitated by a mad bomber, and the only reason the manifesto is out here in common spaces is because they published it on purpose to catch him. Meanwhile, that handful of preppers and other fringe actors who read all that nonsense only read it because it was the work of a mad bomber, and they lack the background to interpret it in any meaningful way.

>>14321 Yeah, sounds about right. All checks out.

>>12147 When he wrote Industrial Society and Its Future in the 90s, it seemed that either he's a visionary of what's happened to us today or that such bullshit had already started back then.

>>14313 this. Hegemonies always collapse under their own weight, there is nothing you can do and nothing to be done about them. What is important is having resilient communities that can survive the end of the hegemony without total social collapse. Possible, but hard work. Not work I'm personally cut out for, unfortunately.

>>12147 100% right on everything, but he could've spared himself jail and just killed himself instead. Nothing but a more convenient and hedonistic way of life will ever steer the murdermonkeys.

>>14314 I remember the Iraq war protests, largest protests in history and it went ahead anyway, utter soykaf.

>>18613 I wrote that post and I no longer believe in it. People are fuarrrked from the inside out. There is no way we can revert to a narrower society because people have been irremediably compromised. The only way is forward into a hivemind where the individual cannot lament its lack of individuality. Right now we're in a phase of eugenics where all the people who see through are given thought suppressants / brain poisons that actually increase your chances of suicide and told they are defective for not conforming

>>18621 my friend, have a look around. Does any of this look like a government have has control of its populace?

>>18614 I don't think his personal philosophy would allow him to take the coward's way out. >>18625 If you don't think governments have a pretty significant control over popular thought and psychology, you just have an unsophisticated conception of what form that control might take. You should learn the history and activities of the CIA. It illuminates a lot of these supposed revolts and revolutions that come from dubious, nowhere sources and never really amount to anything other than blowing off some popular steam and then getting re-integrated into the main systems of control by the end. Maybe start with Gladio and work your way out from there. Or, y'know, stay on topic and start with Ted's involvement with the CIA. Some simulated unrest actually helps maintain equilibrium. At least that's their theory. Hegemony does collapse, but a strand of power survives through. The people holding it are fierce, determined, have enormous resources, and are very experienced at all forms of statecraft both overt and covert. They absolutely exist and are not playing around.

>>18635 The points about the CIA are true, but it can't be overlooked that the CIA's power is derived from the US government's power, particularly financial power. Take away the latter, and the threat of the former is greatly diminished. And let's not forget that the US government is not a hivemind. It's a collection of individuals with their own agendas and egos. In the modern era, we've seen what happens when a superpower collapses - the USSR. The various aparatus' of state were looted by newly-freelance government officials, and they were anything but cooperative with each other in the aftermath. I would expect a USA breakdown to make the USSR breakdown look downright organized in comparison. Americans are even more fiercely competitive, cultural diverse, and willing to take independent self-interested action than citizens of the USSR were.

>>18649 That's all very true. But imho it's mostly academic, because the wealthy interests who they represent would be of the very last reserves of wealth that might be drained. And as the nation becomes destitute, their stash of old money would only increase in influence. Kind of like during the great depression, but that's another story. As you say, it's kind of like post-Soviet Russia; I see it a different way, though. The oligarchs who had the most were part of the carve-up, and despite their bickering they still hold plenty of power to this day. They will for some time to come. They don't cooperate with each other, but they all follow some select agendas which belie a flawless upper-class solidarity, off-limits from rivalries or petty power-struggles. They might fight for the top position, but it's unspoken that as a group one of them must have it and the others must keep all remaining power. It's a strictly internal fight, more like a game to those who have gone crazy with wealth and power. From having cheat codes for reality. They'd close ranks ruthlessly if some exogenous threat tried to take even a third of it outside their circle. Even if it was their own citizenry. Especially among the ex-Soviets, where it has happened before. They are no hive-mind. I'm not simple enough to think there's some grand conspiracy that is perfectly orchestrated among all actors. It's more like a scheme that happens outside of the minds of powerful men—it's a system of incentives that pre-date all our nations, perhaps our species. Primal things. Closer to a law of nature than a plot. The US will collapse (possibly sooner than we are all comfortable with) and there will be a lot of sectarian struggle. But they will have—as all ruling classes have had throughout history—an almost medieval, aristocratic instinct to keep power amongst some part of their little incestuous system. They'll be at each other's throat for that head spot, but always one eye will be focused on the door, keeping watch for a new actor entering the scene. You're right and wrong at the same time. They're very disorganized, vain, petty, shortsighted, they devolve into infighting... but they're not fools. Even the most decadent late emperors of Rome had a form of sharp political instinct as they devoured themselves. They all buy insurance, even when it's futile. They keep power in the same general line and will slaughter millions to ensure it, even as they stab their own cousin in the back to usurp it. They'll eventually lose it, but it will likely only happen a couple nations after the one that replaces this. They won't just evaporate with the morning dew. Not unless they're soundly and deliberately defeated, hunted down, and rooted out. For a generation or two. It's going to be an ugly business, an atrocious one that people with good ideals probably won't be willing to undertake. I think that's a big part of why even if a new power is not re-cast from old corruption, it's still vicious. It has to be. It almost certainly would have to be genocidal, at least from history's point of view. And from there we get into really convoluted territory; I'm not trying to imply all instances of this have been just usurpations of unjust regimes by strong actors. The opposite. I don't think it's a solved problem—how to pull up the roots without making a mess of any further system, either through naive weakness or far too much tyrannical strength.

>>18635 I am aware of the CIA's efforts. >Hegemony does collapse, but a strand of power survives through. The people holding it are fierce, determined, have enormous resources, and are very experienced at all forms of statecraft both overt and covert. They absolutely exist and are not playing around. The CIA is not an example of that. They rely on the US's economic and military superiority which was won during WW2. Without those, the CIA is just a bunch of old spooks. An example of a "strand of power surviving through" is the Catholic church. It has survived in one form or another for over 1000 years, compared to which the US is just a bunch of upstarts. They'll probably survive this too, because religion is generally more resilient than state. It is of course true that the rich and powerful are likely to remain rich and powerful. But that is *not at all* the same as an organization or state surviving, and without an effective state structure the rich and powerful are in a much more vulnerable position. They are more directly responsible for upholding cultural norms and a social contract. When American hegemony falls apart it will involve these notions naturally re-establishing themselves, and since most people in the US have not truly believed in such things for their entire life it is likely to be very clumsy at first. I would expect it to involve quite a lot of senseless executions.

>>18625 >Does any of this look like a government have has control of its populace? I have never talked about "the government" or any kind of top-down control. People are just getting what they want and they won't listen to reason. Even if there were a bunch of evil hook-nosed Jews or the fuarrrking Reptilians at the helm of a global social change, it's very transparent that every single thing about the Western lifestyle is completely retarded. Why are people consuming without thinking why, how, who? Why do they just accept to have their things taken from them, over and over and over, and they spit on people who try to talk some sense into them? Because it's convenient, and it gives immediate rewards for a long term cost. If people are too stupid or too indolent to do anything about this very transparent push, this is their fault. It's not the mystery elite's fault. I fuarrrking hate that people refer to themselves as helpless toddlers without agency. And when Americans do it it's doubly infuriating. You have your stupid 2nd Amendment and you just use it to shoot other morons like you and stray cats in your backyard. Consumerism has made you into a bunch of spineless babies

>>12147 >He rejects technology and labels it as the ultimate weapon capitalism has to subdue humanity. I hope no one thinks he was a competent anti-capitalist, he's against capitalism in the sense that he wants to /regress/ to /pre-capitalism/ he's not a post-capitalist which is what people usually mean by anti-capitalist >>12207 >Kaczynski was just another extremist who turned to violence, like thousands of others. It doesn't matter whether his ideology was wrong or right Completely agree, that and the fact that he was good at math are the only reason people discuss his ideology

Ted Kacizinksy is/was seriously mentally ill

>>18677 Well he's not really anti-capitalist, in the economical sense of the way. Kaczynski mainly attacks the centralized way of industrial production. He supports that it creates the psychological and economical situations for large scale human exploit. That's why marxists can't bother him, since they think that centralized production can be made fair for the proletariat. In my views that's a fallacy, but whatever. So he just supports that communities can only have the technology that they can produce on their own. If anything he's against industrialization.

People think fascism is the most inhumane ideology but its primitivism that requires a rapid decrease of the human population down to at least 1 billion.

>>18691 Thing is. Facist somewhat succeeded in their ways. Primitivism continues to be a critique of modernity and not a real system.

Excuse my ignorance but I honestly find anprim larps to be some of the most cringe people, especially when I see them online. You are using the internet on a computer with wifi provided by a large company and living on a house that was built with electric industrial tools. >yet you participate in society xDDD Yes, actually, yet you do. It's entirely possible to move to the countryside in some boring pass over state like IOWA and live by yourself in the wilderness. Now I will admit, I don't completely disagree with him. I personally wouldn't even consider moving to a gigantic major city like LA or NYC, but living in a small urban town beats living in a cave as a hunter-gatherer any day of the week, and unlike him, I actually like technology and I wanna see it advance.

>>19303 >Yes, actually, yet you do. It's entirely possible to move to the countryside in some boring pass over state like IOWA and live by yourself in the wilderness. You know, there were millions of people who used to do just this. They were all murdered.

>>19305 but I thought based anprims didn't fear death cause it's natural and people shouldn't live more than 30 years?

>>19306 jesus christ are you retarded? Life expectency at birth is different from life expectency at age 5 is different from life expectency at age 15. It is/was not unusual for people to live to age 60 or older in pre-industrial society. Plus, anprims generally don't view genocide by industrial nation-states to be particularly good.

>>19307 >It is/was not unusual for people to live to age 60 or older in pre-industrial society. I highly doubt that desu >Plus, anprims generally don't view genocide by industrial nation-states to be particularly good. I'm not really sure what you're talking about here. I've never heard of people going out of their way to kill people living a primitive life style. Unless of course the reason they were killed was that the anprim in question was doing something immoral like trespassing on private property (in which case he had it coming to him), I don't know why anyone would go out of their way to hunt anprims. I personally don't give a fuarrrk how you live your life as long as you don't bother me, and that's one of the reasons why I don't like anarcho-primitivism. It's an ideology that advocates for "the destruction of the industrial world", in other words, forcing everyone to live like fuarrrking caveman, disregarding all the millions of people that would fuarrrking die if such a thing happened, but it's ok cause hunting-gathering is based right?

>>19308 >I highly doubt that desu then maybe you should actually look it up instead of talking out of your ass. Most of the reason why life expectancy was so low was because of high infant mortality rates. Almost half of all infants died within a year of birth. This is why it was not uncommon for parents to put off naming a child for a few days until they were reasonably sure it would survive. https://gurven.anth.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.anth.d7_gurven/files/sitefiles/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf you can also look at data for modern primitives such as the San. >I've never heard of people going out of their way to kill people living a primitive life style. Genocide of native americans. Look it up.

He's obviously insane

>>19310 >Almost half of all infants died within a year of birth. I misspoke; it is within 15 years of birth. Although I'm sure most of that was around infancy.

>>19311 Why?

>>19310 >Genocide of native americans. Look it up. Different time, different place. I am talking about the now, not what happened 300 years ago.

why do we have so many threads on Ted here? What does everyone see in this guy? it's just the "Humanz r teh viruz" meme but 80's

>>19323 Not 80's, but with bombs. Modernity bad is a mainstream view actually, this guy just did some terrorism marketing on the side, nothing else.

The Kaczynski Law of Career Satisfaction states that for-profit careers drive those who know the pleasure of academia mad.

I have ordered his manifesto in my local bookshop. Still waiting for it since months. I'm afraid it have been blocked somewhere and they put me on a list...

>>19321 it happens to this very day. Natives living on reservations are much more likely to die of murder or drug overdose than others.

>>18690 And what do you propose instead? We need centralised technology to move from this planet (which we will have to eventually) unless we are planning to stay on Earth until Sun goes dim.

>>19323 >neurosuggesting he wasn't completely right

>>19461 >unless we are planning to stay on Earth until Sun goes dim. by the time that happens humans will no longer exist, one way or another.

Here is a lighter reading from a man who had first hand knowledge of surrounding nature (ornithologist and traditional fisherman) and not just larping in a cardboard shed like Ted did. Of all places on Earth, even Finland looks like an industrial resource extracting dystopian wasteland from this perspective, he explains nuances not spotted by a layman's eye of a casual foreigner, tourist or economic migrant.

>>19487 fundamentally he thinks that a state is necessary or desirable, which to me is nonsense. The modern notion of a state, especially a global one, could not exist without modern industry. Any sensible way of managing human society will involve no states, and will instead be decentralized. There is no need for a state if people are brought up with a way of life respectful of the land. This is why European settlers in North America saw the land as "untouched" despite there being no central authority of Indians, it was because the land was well-kept.

>>19488 Finland in no way is a global state, not like United States or even Germany. It's very compact and small, it's regarded as model for social and communal development by many people, that's why some risk their lives to move there even from Africa despite no one from Africa wanting to move to neighboring Russia with similar climate. Smaller states are definitely preferred for cooperation in managing, fake "federations" should be decentralized into respective smaller entities. He even uses term "fascism" as to describe such relations because in part he believes that heaviest industries should be managed by state to avoid crucial mistakes when they are given to greedy privately owned corporations who start seeking ways to raise production for the sake of getting marginal profits which eventually leads to ecological problems if not locally, but oftentimes somewhere abroad where cheaper workforce and extractable resources reside. Land in America was untouched because indigenous populations were small and they didn't have human resources to spoil it.

Does anyone know where I can find esoteric information about explorers going to different worlds ?

>>19486 Why do you think so?

>>19490 CIA documents

>>19490 >>19493 i.e. : https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001900760001-9.pdf their entire STARGATE section is x-files tier

>>19489 >Land in America was untouched because indigenous populations were small and they didn't have human resources to spoil it. this has been proven not to be true, the population of the current US was in the millions in 1500 and there were definite ecological effects, the Indians had used fire and spreading seeds to create the "paradise" that settlers raped.

>>19492 I am not >>19493 humans will either be extinct or will have evolved into something else by that time. We're talking billions of years in the future, by then even basic things like photosynthesis will necessarily either change or die out.

>>19500 I misread; please disregard the first line

>>unless we are planning to stay on Earth until Sun goes dim. >by the time that happens humans will no longer exist, one way or another. That doesn't matter. Will sapients exist?

The genius who chose idiotic methods for solving modern problems.

>>12246 >over the age of six Kids these days start even earlier than that

>>12246 I'd argue that's exactly what he's talking about with his ideas about oversocialization. There's a minimum amount of bouncing around in society people need to do to become human. But there's also an upper range. People are driven to strange neuroses these days because technology mediates far too much of that bouncing around. Guy was a little crazy (he got MKULTRA'd) but he don't miss

>>19552 There's no way in hell he expected his bombing campaign to "solve modern problems." He did it to spread the message through the magic of terrorism. Which he succeeded in marvelously. We're talking about him and his ideas right now, aren't we? And people should absolutely want to destroy academia. There's nothing crazy about that.

>And people should absolutely want to destroy academia. There's nothing crazy about that. Nothing crazy at all about wanting to destroy the principle benefactor of knowledge and technique.

>People are driven to strange neuroses these days because technology mediates far too much of that bouncing around. I wholly agree. A century ago, persons' neuroses had local or religious significance. Now they've been perverted by crass consumerism. The answer is to purge the institutions that foster curiosity, because without curiosity, we can't create new technology, and without new technology, there cannot be new gadgets for us to want to buy. Destroying academia solves the problem at the source, the way an above-the-knee leg amputation would cure a cancer that is a malignant tumor on the toe.

>>19595 Lack of curiosity is the cause not too much of it. Why do people consoom the trash that makes the mass market? Cause they never bother to look elsewhere on their own. The whole marketing sector would be dead overnight if people actually had the curiosity to look for things on their own.

>>19596 You think bömers even know imageboard exists? Even if they were curious how would they find this soykaf? The problem is the market doesn't allow people to be curious. It takes their attention and hooks them in, the internet as a profit making tool needs to be destroyed, of course the only way to do this is to remove capitalism from the equation. Just imagine the internet, on all our modern technology without ads, without thousands of subsidies of Google and Fedbook begging for your attention all the time, without having to worry about being tracked. A tool to raise all of humanity.

>>19594 Yep. That's not really the whole story, though. >>19595 Alright, I guess we'll just wait for a more targeted medicine. Still waiting. Still just getting worse. You know there's a point of no return involved here, right? Sometimes field medicine is unfortunately brutal but better than dying, to stick too long with your analogy. We might not make it back to the hospital. >>19596 As you said, there's a massive industry whose entire existence is predicated on manipulating people's psychology and suppressing that. You're not helping by trying to blame it on individualist laziness among the proles. How do we solve that? Just scold them and hope they learn to do better? Going to be waiting a long time on that and it'll never happen. It's a gripe, not a strategy. >>19597 They invented obscure anonymous net forums, so yes they are amongst us. You'd be surprised. They also invented the utopian lie about the internet being a tool to raise all humanity. That's impossible. Reject the utopian delusions, this ain't ever gonna be Star Trek. It'll be Neuromancer and it'll stay Neuromancer.

>>19598 >Reject wanting to improve humanity No

>>19599 It's not improving humanity. Look at the environment around us since the first industrial revolution. It's like we threw gasoline on the whole thing and threw a match. You're mistaking your ideology for objective reality here Sometimes improvement involves changing direction

>>19599 But to elaborate it's quite telling you can only think of societies in reference to pop culture. The internet has improved my life massively, the bad parts can be culled by the removal of profit incentive. It's really not hard to imagine what I described in my previous post. If you don't care about improving society and moving it forward then this problem solving can't even be debated since you have already admitted defeat to a completely human made invention

>>19600 The Neolithic revolution which saw us create the first form of society was a insanely large tank of gas on the flames of history. It's arguably infinite the difference between us and your average animal, was that bad? If you think it is bad, and all the medical advances that have came with it, why are you on the internet now?

>>19601 I would argue that the bad parts cannot be culled. This is far too simplistic. They'd come back. It's not so easy to just "remove profit incentive." Could we remove the profit incentive of petroleum and solve polution that way? lol good luck, somebody's going to bring it back because it's still latently there and it's lucrative beyond comprehension. >>19602 One can use a medium to advocate against that medium, please don't try to do that "but you have an iphone lol" nonsense. And be careful about declaring victory before you've reached the finish line. I'd say all that stuff is absolutely bad if we end up collapsing harder than we came up. The long game is important. I know there's a lot of STEMlords on here and I get how you people tend to feel about it... but dark future is real. We need to learn more from our history and take seriously all of our options.

>>19603 >Profit incentive Really quite easily actually, you make such a business not profitable. You claim they come back, but if we successfully evolve past this societal period then we will have destroyed the ability for private individuals to do such things. Why would you make Facebook and all the server costs it entails you if you could never make any money from it? There would be some free open source communications service. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making an "le iphone" argument, my point is I am pointing out another revolution that is a far more basic one but one that is the root cause of all other revolutions. The point being is that if you wish to tackle this problem why would you be anywhere near an organised society? I partake in this society because I wish to move it forward, you wish to destroy large society as a concept. And I wouldn't use any history arguments, we cannot turn back the sands of time lain, technology is here to stay unless natural disaster or nuclear war. There is literally zero chance of people surrendering these things. You want every hospital to surrender their computers? The only solution is to move forward in the best possible way, your quables with modern life are just as arbitrary as the peasants problems serving under a king hundreds of years ago. They are miniscule, and have no impact on the course of history and progress. I have no blind hope, in fact I'm well aware of how much of a difficult situation we are in. However to reside oneself to pessimism, to let go of all humanity has achieved, for what? Because we got some rap on TV and capitalism is really bad at the moment? No, the fight must continue. All this petty cultural nonsense will be lost when the next revolution occurs. This is the bigger picture.

>>19601 >>19603 And I'd be more skeptical about whether the internet improved your life. You don't have any way to realistically view that counterfactual. It more likely has alienated you and caused much of the pain that you now think it's helping to assuage. They injured you and sold you the cure.

>>19604 lol why do you think this is a workable method of removing the profit motive? How do you make such a business not profitable? I don't think there's any way to reverse the sands of time either. It's going to collapse, though. We know it will. The idea is to position some kind of move or ideology at that point and grasp the fulcrum. Keep in mind the next revolution could be the last one if we keep building this pile of kindling.

>>19605 Efficient planning. Resource allocation. Moving soykaf across the globe. Medicine research. Hospital equipment. Mathematics research. Anything that involves a satellite. Shit man coding is a hobby in the most basic sense, but I wouldn't count that as a strong argument obviously. Oh but Facebook is like kicking dead whales down the beach? I am constantly exploited by my boss? Ruled by a class I don't belong to? Well I better just give that all up then...

>>19607 Once again, careful about declaring victory before the finish line. And remember to watch where you're driving in your enthusiasm. All that stuff can and will be used to immiserate you and billions of others as well. Hell, it's probably already happened to you and you just don't know where the blow came from.

>>19606 For someone wishing to destroy everything since the industrial revolution you're really bad at thinking outside the current paradigms of our society. Property wouldn't exist as we know it. You realise peasants would have no comprehension of the capitalist society we have today right? Everything we have is arbitrary and subject to change. The only thing holding it together is the every day acts of normal people. All we have to do tomorrow is decide that no one deserves private ownership of the fruits of a society and we could move forward. But that's not how history works of course. There is a famous quote >There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

>>19608 Yeah okay keep whining, I write out these posts and you give me a sentence back. Pessimism is a choice. I have told you, I feel it intensely, we are in a dark place, it is not debatable. But the force of will is what is keeps history moving, and what will keep society moving until every human is wiped from this Earth. You achieve nothing by just saying "soykaf could be bad", no soykaf. But there is zero hope in turning back to a point before industrial society. To use your same argument, what's to stop someone from just inventing the steam engine again?

>>19608 >Medical research is bad, actually Honestly if you can't acknowledge these things as successes then you're too stupid, or too blinded by ideology to debate your position. I am open to beliefs that tech causes a net negative, but to say the things I listed are bad is clearly bad faith arguing.

>>19609 I understand that fine, I'm just appropriately skeptical about all that utopian horseshit because it's never worked out as planned before. And we are teetering on the precipice here. We need to use the precautionary principle. We know ways that have protected us for hundreds of thousands of years, and we have a very crazy wild-eyed chance to take that might obliterate us. And as I said, the point of no return is like right here. We've already passed a couple. We can't do it this way. It's hubris. We don't have even close to enough time to radically reorganize society in the ways you're proposing. That's more fantasy, more Star Trek utopianism. It's going to fuсk us all. There are weeks where decades happen, sure. That doesn't specify what kind of decades those might be, though. We need to be extremely careful when we're accelerating our society to these levels. We could make a mistake and ruin everything in the blink of an eye. This modern society seems more advanced than old ways, but it's orders of magnitude less stable. We're going six hundred miles per hour and we're about six feet away from a brick wall here. Might be a good idea to slow down. I understand your techno-fetishism might technically work, but I think it's important to moderate that and take the long view at a time when we're blinding ourselves with ideology and close to the end.

>>19610 Pessimism is different from merely addressing the fact that the next few decades are extremely dangerous for us if we don't make careful choices. You're indulging in inappropriate optimism, edging on adventurism.

>>19612 Red herring, you're misrepresenting me in a flagrantly cynical way. You are clearly in bad faith here, stop with the preemptive projection.

>>19613 well yes, but at this point literally anything is going to be too little too late. Eco-fascism isn't gonna happen until everything is far too fuarrrked for it to be viable anyway. At this point I view it as blind luck whether I personally will live to age thirty. I prefer to stay an ethical person which means that e.g. participating in realpolitik or killing without just cause are not open to me, and unfortunately those are great ways to guarantee survival. And that's fine by me.

>>19613 Thanks for the more effortful post >Ways that have protected us Throughout 99% of human history we have lived in soykaf and filth, at the mercy of nature, not much better from animals. From the only thing that separates us from animals, the ability to form societies, labour, then shape those societies more. We are in a great position, we weren't protected, we were barely surviving. We are reaching a point of no return. Either we pull through and create what you call a "utopia" (I simple call it an actual democracy, a society created by the people who create the value in said society) or we will be forced back to barbarism by the oppression of nature, something your kind praise. I spit on nature. It is pathetic, everything a human does is to subjugate nature, we build huts to destroy the wind and the damp. We farm to bend the properties of crops to our will. This is how society exists, to present a society that goes back in this concept is hopeless. Even through the piss and the soykaf of the last 99.99% of human history we have pulled through to the place we are today. There is nothing to say the same thing won't happen again. Not every request for a better society is utopian. Utopian would be to say we need to all live on Mars or something. I'm setting very basic fundamentals of how we can escape the ills of modern life. These ills have produced you, in all your emotions and all your dissatisfaction with the world. Which is why this society needs to be dismantled and turned into one more efficient and more just. No more shall a human suffer the wrath of nature, to force us to hunger, to force us to shiver in the cold. What is the sake of politics if not the organised goal of dismantling these most basic human issues? Your petty problems with technology are nothing compared to these grander issues, Facebook will fall, wage slavery will fall, and a new society will be born. It is utopian to say exactly what this will look like in any precise manner. I can guarantee though it will involve a change in property relations since that is the driving force behind what we know as society. Sadly we have no time to slow down, history is very much in motion, and we all know capitalism cannot sustain it much longer. Stuck between climate collapse and the fall of the US global power will cause nothing but opportunities. If these opportunities aren't seized by those who wish to create a better world then we will be in a dire state, but only by the will of those who desire a bettet world can it be built. If a disaster happens and as a result we go back to pre industrial society, so be it. But this cannot be a goal in any way, it is a simple rejection to capitalist society in every form, you wish to wash your hands with it completely. My point is that technology isn't actually negotiable, in the same way a hammer isn't negotiable. Only a fool would not use a tool thousands of years ago, and he would be removed by natural selection. No one would surrender the technologicsl advances made in the field of medicine, it would quite literally be suicide. This mustnt be confused with techno fetishism, tech is just the tool used to bend nature to our will, to acknowledge this isn't a fetish. To ignore this would simply be going against all of human history. Replies to other comments: True we are in a dangerous position, like I have said. To give up and desire a pre industrial life is pessimistic, and rather cowardly at its core. I'm suggesting the only logical way out. You're merely suggesting what happens if we don't try. Why plan to fail? I'm not misrepresenting you. You said medical advancements and efficient distribution networks will be used to hurt me and make my life miserable. I call you blinded by ideology. If I accuse you of bad faith you can't just go "no that's you actually...", It's a weak point.

>>19617 >We are in a great position, we weren't protected, we were barely surviving. human population fairly consistently grew worldwide for thousands of years before the first cities arose, so I don't know what you mean by this. Additionally if you interview most people in hunter-gatherer type societies they tend to be fairly happy individuals. Their problems are mostly immediate and easy to solve rather than vague and unsolvable like ours. >I spit on nature. It is pathetic, everything a human does is to subjugate nature, we build huts to destroy the wind and the damp. If nature is so pathetic then why can it destroy you so easily? Why do you rely on it so much, even in a technological society? Why does subjugating it too much always seem to have catastrophic effects on human societies down the line? If you want to build a society that is technologically advanced, humanly satisfying, and sustainable, you will need to recognize that it is better to adapt to nature than it is to adapt nature to us. It is important to have humility; we are not the masters of the world. I think it is possible and desirable to have advanced technology, warm safe housing, and reliable nutritious food while also living life in harmony with nature. In fact I think long term, it is the only way to retain advanced technology.

>>19616 Eco-fascism is kind of what Ted's all about, so yeah. That's the idea—strategize about what industrial society means to us today, decide what we want the world to look like, network with like-minded people, and wait for the turn of history. I don't see any other way of effecting change that isn't fantasy, myself. I recognize that there are people with very different ideological takes, but some faction has to be ready to be the backup. The default. What happens if we keep rolling these dice and we botch it all up? We got through the brinksmanship of the cold war. We're missing deadlines left and right for climate collapse. Somebody has to be holding up the rear. It's not so much that I want or need to go back—I just think there might be a point where we have to. And how do we structure the mindset at that transition? >>19617 I do actually want to apologize for some of the rapid-fire or low-effort blurbs, actually. I owe you that. I am currently working and can only peek in every now and then, so sometimes I'm replying to parts I feel strongly about and composing more detailed and comprehensive responses in the background. That might be poor etiquette—maybe I should just save up and reply at once. But also the conversation seems to be moving along and I care so I didn't want to get stuck necroposting later today. I hope that's understandable. Like even now, I am reading the rest of this post and forming my thoughts about it. I do intend to stand up for my closely held beliefs, but respectfully if possible.

>>19617 And it was bad faith to single out medical advancements when that is not something I singled out. Sorry, that's just not beneficial to discussion. I referred to a mass of factors you listed out, a gallop of different subjects. I didn't pull single parts out and refer to them as being evil like that. The whole is synergistically different from the specific. It's perfectly possible for modern industrial society to be harmful on average as a whole even if small, zoomed-in aspects of it are good for certain populations.

>>19617 To address some other points... It is a myth that we existed in ѕһіt and filth throughout 99% of human history. Pre-agrarian societies have been called "the first affluent society" by anthropologists and historians. I recommend reading Ishmael. There's this persistent, haunting vision that we have as a species that our history was spent shivering in the cold, wilting in the heat, running from predators on all sides while simultaneously chasing prey. That's a cartoon vision of what most of human history was like. Our societies and cultures were advanced, people had on average greater mental development than they have today because they relied more on centralized intelligence rather than social intelligence. The way you see primitive live is a kind of propaganda. I, too, obviously enjoy some parts of industrialized life. But I recognize that primitivity is not nearly as terrorizing as it's made out to be. And this comes from a pragmatic point of view. I think we may be cast back despite ourselves. We may as well endeavor to understand it. You're right that not every request is utopian, but the idea that we can shift gears into an optimized society as quickly as you implied earlier is most definitely utopian. There's no mechanism or historical precedent for that. And I know that there's a first time for everything. It's just unwise to gamble with the whole of humanity like that—to rely on the first time it succeeds being this time. It's more likely that it won't. And we don't have many tries or time left. There are good times when great plans and blue-sky thinking should be indulged in. And there are times when we should be sharply and mercilessly strategic. Because it's our only way to ensure that there are more good times to try again in the future. I think both of our methods may be different paths to the same goal, but with different risk assessments. You say it would be foolish to slow down now, but please try and look at it from other perspectives. Maybe we need to burn through to get out. Maybe there's tech on the other side that will fix what tech has destroyed around us. But maybe there isn't. This reminds me of watching my friend trying over and over again to crank his car, spraying starter fluid into the carbs until it's visibly flooded, leaning on the starter until the battery starts to sag, turning the dead motor over so many times that unburnt gas starts pooling in the pipes and backfiring. Maybe the way out is more of the same, but all of this so far has contributed to this crises in the first place. Is it not the definition of insanity to keep trying the same thing and expecting a different result? There needs to be a plan B. But as I said, I think we both want the same general things. Well, there are parts of it I don't want. But we mainly disagree about the amount of caution needed and the speed at which we should be moving. I would say that as long as we have our base ecology and instinctual society, we still have chances. We can approach the great filter slowly a few times, sniff it out. See what its dimensions are. We don't have to ram our head into it right away. That's probably why we don't see any aliens anywhere lol

>>19621 It's like we have a species-wide terminal case of go fever. That is technocracy. We've got a kind of industrial messianism, and it occludes the credit that we should realize goes to events that came before. The sweetness of life comes from things that these technicians would love to take credit for (and indeed they are all constantly striving to capture it and privatize it and destroy the old way, much the way Microsoft does with all software suites it buys up). But what makes life profound and great is from before. Maybe it can coexist with more, but first we've got to aggressively stop this current emanation of industrial technology and informational hyper-community from capturing it and stamping it out. It needs to be introduced in a way that ensures coexistence, not this haphazard mess of almost psychotic avarice. It's going to happen very soon, and then it will be too late.

>>12147 I know there are people who write to him. I wish I could mail him a landscape, but I doubt he'd ever receive it in a supermax. >>19617 >From the only thing that separates us from animals, the ability to form societies, labour, then shape those societies more. Ants or honeybees are better than us at it. Ants have implemented communism in a way that for us is beyond utopian. All that separates us from animals is the complexity of our deceitful communication. Our entire society is built on deceitful communication. Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom already exhibit deceitful communication such as misleading other apes about the location of food, but only humans can write intricate contracts made for no other purpose than cheat whoever is reading it out of something. >>19617 >No more shall a human suffer the wrath of nature, to force us to hunger, to force us to shiver in the cold. Yet people become hollow husks when grief is taken away from them. This world is Hell, and no attempt to make it not Hell will ever work. Technology seems to be the ultimate Monkey's Paw. It's fixing all our problems, but our entire experience on this Earth is made of exactly that. Life on Earth exists because of this essential struggle that every creature is enduring, this struggle is the very purpose of this life. Eliminate the struggle and you remove all reason for being.