Ted Kaczynski's Warnings About Big Tech, Centers of Power & More

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Next question is from Eddonk77, who says this,

I remember you once said that you agreed with parts of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, the Unabomber Manifesto.

Would you care to elaborate on what you found persuasive about it, particularly in the current era of AI, social media, and fentanyl addiction? While I completely disagree with the use of terrorism for political ends, I too found the core ideas extremely persuasive and also depressing, namely that technology can gradually and imperceptibly make life less fulfilling and miserable in ways that are impossible to predict.

While I consider myself part of the left politically, I also found the criticism of leftism somewhat prophetic with the left's current aggressive focus on identity politics.

Kind regards,

Martin.

All right, the quick Ted Kaczynski story, just for anyone who doesn't know, out of nowhere in the '90s in the Clinton administration, Bombs started being sent to mailboxes and people opened it.

They were pretty sophisticated bombs and they injured and even killed people.

And it was taking place across the country.

And they had no idea who was doing it.

The FBI, the attorney general, who at the time was Janet Reno.

And the person who was doing it wrote a letter, believed to the New York Times and the Washington Post saying, I will stop if you publish my essay.

about my ideas and what's motivating me.

And obviously, the instinct of the government is to say, I'm going to give in to your terrorist tactics, which, you know, in classic terrorism is kind of what it was.

It was violence directed at civilians in order to induce political and social change.

But it got to the point where the Justice Department was so desperate, they didn't have the first lead, the first clue about who was doing this.

It was like really the perfect crime that they agreed, you know what, I think we should publish this essay because doing so is maybe the way that we can find out who's actually doing this.

Maybe someone will recognize the writing or the form of writing or the ideas and help us find the person.

And so the Washington Post, I believe, is who did it.

The Washington Post, maybe the New York Times too, published this essay by Ted Kaczynski.

And the reason the Just Farm is willing to do it, aside from the fact that they thought it would lead to someone coming forward and helping identify who it was, was because they thought what he had written was so kind of just such lunacy, such like madness that nobody would really read it and even think it deserved attention.

And also, you know, they were obviously made it known that the person who wrote that was the person who was sending these violent acts, these terrorist bombs, to people and killing civilians or injuring civilians, that they just assumed the hatred for him would overwhelm any interest in what he had to say.

And on one of those views, on one of those bets, they actually turned out to be right.

Because publishing this essay caused eventually his brother, Ted Kaczynski's brother, to come forward and say, I think this was my...

This thing is my brother, his writing seems familiar, his ideas are familiar.

And that's how they were able to eventually track Ted Kaczynski down.

And just the quick background, Ted Kaczynski, he was a prodigy, recognized by everybody.

He was very brilliant, graduated high school at the age of 15, went to Harvard, completed a degree in mathematics.

He then went to a PhD program, I think, at the University of Chicago, but a top school, and then he ended up teaching at Berkeley.

And he was one of the he was on the path of being the youngest ever tenured professors.

So nobody I mean, he was a genuinely brilliant person, not like brilliant in the sense that, you know, like David Frum gets called brilliant or Anne Applebaum or whatever, like genuinely brilliant.

And so they were right about that.

They did it.

That did end up helping them find him.

But what they were very wrong about was the fact that nobody would have any interest in his essay.

Nobody would connect to any of his ideas.

They were lunatic.

It was rambling.

It was radical.

It was way out there.

And that the hatred for Ted Kaczynski, even if people were willing to be open-minded, the ideas would make people, I'm not going to read a terrorist essay and take it seriously.

And at first, that was true.

But over time, when people started taking more and more look at what Ted Kaczynski had written and this essay that was published, People started turning to it and saying, you know what? This seems like actually quite important.

There's a lot of ideas here that are very, very relevant and seem prophetic and that seem like they explain a lot of what previously had been inexplicable.

I can't do a good job paraphrasing or summarizing the essay.

It's very complex.

It's highly worth reading.

You can find it free online.

It actually ended up, the essay ended up being published in a longer form book format.

So you can read the essay or in its long form or the book.

But the basic theme of it was that technology was destroying humanity and the ability for human beings to live happy and fulfilled lives.

And he traced it back to the Industrial Revolution, but then how technology has advanced more and more.

And it is true, like just to take the Industrial Revolution, before the Industrial Revolution, people were living in small towns, in villages, in nature, like they had always lived on farms, had churches, had communities, they were very closely connected to their neighbors, to their extended family.

And they were living as human beings had lived for thousands of years.

They were political and social animals, we need connection, connection, without connection, human beings are going to go crazy.

And the Industrial Revolution made it so that people had to start to move to these gigantic cities.

Eventually, we got to the point where, you know, Charles Dickens was talking about the hideous realities of living in gigantic cities as a factory worker, completely exploited, working extremely long days for little pay.

It was breaking people physically, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally.

And that is definitely one of the costs, as we've even gone further down this road, is, you know, huge numbers of people go to work in these gigantic buildings.

I mean, I love New York, but if you go to New York, I'll actually be there next week.

I'm doing a debate on Tuesday night that we'll post information about President Trump's deportation policies.

I'm doing debate in New York City.

So I'll be there in a little bit.

But I lived in New York for a long time.

I loved it.

But if you go to New York City and you walk on the street, it does feel dehumanizing.

These buildings are 120 stories or 90 stories.

And they feel as though they're not quite on a human dimension.

You go to European cities where there's still all that zoning that keeps buildings less than five stories.

You go to Paris, you go to Amsterdam, you go to Florence.

And especially in the center part of the town, of the city, to this day, even though it would be very profitable to tear these buildings down and build gigantic skyscrapers, everything is at a very human dimension like they were in the 18th century.

Nothing taller than four stories, which feels like something human beings should live in.

But a metal skyscraper, a glass skyscraper that's 104 floors, it just doesn't...

You feel so like it's kind of dystopic society where humanity is almost being lost.

And as we turn more and more into a society less dependent on physical labor and more and more on paper shifting and informational and digital eras, people go to work in their big, gigantic office buildings, and they sit in their cubicles or their small offices, and they just stare at a computer screen all day.

And then they go back to their apartment or back to their suburban home.

And there's very little community.

There's very little connection.

People don't have churches anymore.

They don't have, obviously a lot of people do, but huge numbers of people don't.

They don't have community.

They don't have labor unions or labor halls.

They don't have any of the kind of, people barely know their neighbors if they know them at all.

And you look at the West.

And all the data, all the indicators say that people are becoming much less happy and much more mentally unwell and maladjusted.

Higher suicide, addiction, you know, all the data.

Depression of all kinds, mental illness is skyrocketing, and then along with it, physical ailments that probably come from this sort of mental depression.

And I think it's what Ted Kaczynski predicted, which is that the more technologically we become, the less human, the less fulfilled our natural human needs are.

And what it means to be human will basically be consumed by technology and will just be turned into, even more so, exploited tools and objects that barely look at us as human.

and arrange our lives so that everything that gives us pleasure and is necessary for happiness is deprived from us, is taken away.

And just quickly on this, there's a Netflix documentary, I've mentioned this before, called Happiness, which is a documentary designed to ask, what is human happiness? How do humans acquire happiness? What is necessary for it, what isn't? And what they found is a lot of what data reflects is that In many societies where people are economically deprived and without a lot of technology, they're much happier than much wealthier Western countries.

Those Western countries are secular.

They have two people in a marriage working careers and prioritizing careers.

They don't even get married until their 30s.

They may have one kid, two kids, but they're always off at their jobs.

Everybody's going in separate directions.

Your parents get old, you don't...

Keep them in your house and care for them.

You send them off to some institution.

You have a baby.

You send it off to some daycare to be taken care of.

Because that's what modern society demands.

Whereas in poorer places, in less technologically advanced places, people are having large numbers of children.

They spend a lot more time with their family.

They live in small villages where there's connection.

I don't want to romanticize poverty.

But I'm saying this is what comes from a less technologically dominated place.

And this documentary makes a very good case using science, not just pop psychology, about why oftentimes technological expansion, wealth expansion undermines human happiness.

And at the end of the day, what is more important than human fulfillment, human happiness, human spiritual fulfillment, like giving human beings what they're constructed to crave in order to be fulfilled and happy and lead happy and fulfilled lives? Really nothing.

These should be, everything we do should be means to that end.

And what Ted Kaczynski was warning about was that as technology evolved further and further, our societies will be less human, less humane, less fulfilling, less connected.

And clearly, all of that is true.

That is exactly what has happened.

I'm not saying we need to be Luddite about it and dismantle it, but he actually lived those words.

He dropped out of the whole matrix, basically, when he was, I think, 24, left his job as a faculty member and just went into the woods, lived a self-sufficient life off the grid.

Red wrote and did not much else other than working on his writing and his development and thought.

And the more he did that, the more he became convinced that being in the middle of this matrix was uniquely devastating to the ability for humans to be free and happy.

And of course, that started resonating, resonating in America and in Europe and throughout the Western world as people became less and less happy.

and all the things he was describing as to why and the role technology plays in that would...

We're obviously exacerbating all that.

Remember, this was 1995.

This was before the real...

I mean, the internet was just starting, but it was nowhere as dominant in our lives.

And obviously with the internet, so often, instead of being in person, we talk to people on phones or on screens.

We have our phones everywhere.

So a lot of the...

the human connection and interactivity you once had just walking on the street is now taken away from you because everybody's staring at their phones.

You go to dinner, you go to restaurants, any restaurant anywhere in the world now in the Western world, and you have people who are related, people who are friends who talk a little and then they both pull out their phones and before you know it, they're both staring at their phones.

And especially with COVID, which forcibly segregated everybody and kept everybody at home, where people even developed a greater dependence on the internet to do everything, including interacting with other humans, this isolation has become far worse and far worse.

And all of the predictable pathologies that come with it that he predicted are also worsening very rapidly in a very dangerous way.

I mean, to me, this is the West's greatest problem, is spiritual decay that comes from lack of connection.

Obviously, there are benefits from technology.

We have cures to diseases that otherwise we would die from.

The internet makes the world easier, gives you access to things, including reading and information that you otherwise, et cetera, et cetera.

There's a lot of benefits.

But for me, one of the things I think I've learned is that the only real law of the universe is balance, by which I mean for everything that you drive a benefit, there's an equal cost, at least that offsets it and keeps it in balance.

Whatever, fame, wealth, career success, it all comes with a cost.

And I definitely think that's the case of technology.

And Ted Kaczynski was one of the first people to lay out this case in the way he laid it out.

So even though he was a terrorist, even though he killed people, a lot of people began to think, you know what? I think there's a lot of validity here.

Now, you might ask, like, why did he go to need Steve to kill people? He had an academic pedigree.

He probably could have gotten this published.

I don't really know.

I haven't paid much attention lately to that whole, you know, this whole episode.

So I forget what the rationale was for that.

But in any event, you know, maybe he was also a little imbalanced himself.

That probably was true.

And But that sometimes being mentally imbalanced is, in a way, or at least mentally alienated, in a way is necessary to produce insights.

Even going back to that last question we talked about, you remove yourself from a certain society or sector of society, it gives you a much greater clarity of thought because you're no longer connected to it or in it, and you can see it much clearly.

I'm sure that's what happens if you just remove yourself from the grid completely.

Now, one of the things the question asks about is left-wing politics and You know, the person said, who just asked this question, I'm on the political left, but I have to admit, a lot of his critiques of what left-wing politics is about and the flaws in it, I have to admit, have validity.

And basically what Ted Kaczynski's warning was, and this definitely proved prophetic, was that Nothing, the idea would be to make this system of technology and the capitalism that emerged from it invulnerable, so nobody blamed it, nobody wants to undermine it, nobody wants to subvert it, no matter what it's doing to us.

We're all propagandized to revere it, to believe it's all good, to believe it's invulnerable, to believe that we benefit from it.

And he said one of the ways that that's going to succeed is that people are going to be given kind of like culture war, fights or social justice causes, which are going to make them feel like they're doing something subversive or radical, when in reality, nothing that they're doing is a threat remotely to any real power center.

Compact Magazine, which is, I think, a really interesting magazine.

It kind of explores the intersection between left and right populism.

had an article in June of 2023, June 16, 2023, which I really recommend.

The headline of it was Ted Kaczynski, anti-left leftist, anti-left leftist.

I mean, obviously this vision he's presenting in some ways is left wing.

It's a denunciation of capitalism and its excesses, the Industrial Revolution, technology.

That has a left wing ethos for sure.

But he was also scornful of modern day leftist political expression.

And this is what he said.

This is how Compact Magazine describes his view.

And it's about a different essay called The Systems Need as Tricks.

And it says, quote, In an essay collected in the Technological Society titled The Systems Need as Trick, Ted Kaczynski observed that there is widespread frustration in society, and many have an impulse to rebel against the conditions and constraints they are forced to operate in.

However, they don't know exactly who or what they should be fighting to solve their malaise.

The system, the Unabomber argued, that was his nickname, the Unabomber, is able to fulfill their need by providing them with a list of standard and stereotyped grievances in the name of which they should rebel.

Racism, homophobia, women's issues, poverty, sweatshop, the whole laundry bag of, quote, activist issues.

Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait.

In embracing these causes, activists end up working to entrench and reinforce the system, even while they mistakenly view their behaviors and commitments as dangerous and subversive.

In the past, Kaczynski wrote, quote, the system was not yet committed to equality for black people, women, and homosexuals.

So that action in favor of these causes really was a form of rebellion.

This makes it possible to conceptualize anti-racism, feminism, gay rights, and environmentalism as, quote, radical, despite the reality that the Pentagon, the CIA, multinational corporations, and almost all prominent cultural and knowledge-producing institutions aggressively embrace those causes today.

I forget who said it.

Actually, it was Ryan Grimm who said it when he was on the show a week or two ago.

And we were talking about the kind of fraudulent branding of Barry Weiss and the free press, how they're supposedly heterodox and dissident, when in reality, like, you know, it really grew from objecting to a lot of the excesses of the woke movement.

And Ryan basically said, if you're talking about kids with blue hair or whatever color hair someone has, or if they're trans or not or whatever, you're actually not talking about anything that is about the real structure and dissemination of power.

It's like catnip.

They're happy to have you fight about racism.

Yeah, they love racism.

They love feminism.

Remember the CIA did that whole video, super woke video.

They sent her like a, what was she? She was, I think, a non-binary Latina who had some sort of neurodivergence.

And, you know, she was just like, I stand proud and tall and occupy space unapologetically as a Latino, non-binary immigrant woman, whatever.

They're so happy to have that.

Hey, look at our black generals. We're going to celebrate our, you know, black military officials, we're the Pentagon.

"Hey, we're the FBI, look at our all our cool fucking women agents. Or fighter pilots. Look, they're women now."

It's like, oh, wow, that's so awesome. We've done so much to change society.

It's that famous cartoon where people in Yemen, like a Muslim family, are looking up at the sky and kind of smiling and saying, I hear the next bomb is going to be sent, is going to be dropped by a woman pilot.

It's like, here's Hillary Clinton, she's so radical and such a wild departure from everything before because she's going to be the first female president when there's like nobody more representative of status quo politics than her.

So you vote for her, you feel like you're doing something really, really like a big blow against the power center and the patriarchy because now there's a woman and you put her in office and she's going to be the best possible protector of status quo prerogatives and power centers everywhere because she presents this illusion that you've done something, you know, historic or subversive When in reality, you're just working as hard as you can to entrench the status quo that you think you're working against.

Ted Kaczynski was incredibly prescient about that as well.

There's a lot more to him than what I've gone over. There's a lot more to the essay. I obviously can't do that justice in the time we have, or even though I took another hour.

So I did want to give my thoughts on it, but I also highly, highly encourage you to go find the essay, even just start with the essay. And I think you'll be amazed if you just sit down and read it, forget about he's the Unabomber, all that. Just read it as kind...

And remember, it was written in the early to mid 1990s. And so even if some of it seems more familiar now, at the time it was very prescient, but also the way he described it, the historical framework he employed to shed light on how it works, that it's not just some brand new thing, it's gone back, basically traced it back to the Industrial Revolution.

There's not very many way better ways to spend your time in terms of your brain and your critical thinking than to go read that essay.