The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society & Its Future

Not so surprisingly this was pretty mad, I think I expected something a bit more clever regarding the aura pop culture set around Unabomber.

This was published in 1995 and while it might look like the ravings of a madman, this contains all the moral panic the right / far right and republicans have been playing on during the last few years:

• A will to return to the "good old past" and natural selection
• Society created deviants "looks those damn homosexuals and transsexuals!"
• Society makes men weak
• "We can't even spank our children anymore"
• "The government is trying to edit your genes to make you comply"
• Sex Education shouldn't be taught in school!
• Schools have become terrible places

It's filled with a deep hate of the left, while trying to present a malformed "ecological" society (based on the most violent natural selection), with all the fears you could imagine around AI, gene editing, mass control, ... While it might have looked crazy in 1995, this is the exact same discourse that is going on in the Trump & consorts circles nowadays.

Sure there are some (very) rare observations about the impact of work on our well being, but those small observations are drowned inside a maelstrom of unfinished thoughts tackling society as a whole without really any understanding. This book has the pretense of intellectualism but doesn't hold in the details.

I think I'll close by one of the rare quote that hit me as containing a semblance of truth:

"It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions.

As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently."

Thought provoking book, altough there are some weird takes in it. It is still refreshing to read anti-industrial literature as it is uncommon.

3 stars mostly because of the amount of anti-leftist ranting that was unnecessary and frankly irrelevant in critiquing industrial society. The author seems to hate facets of leftist political beliefs which advocate equality and minority rights (for example he seems to personally hate the gay-rights, feminist and political-correctness movements) and continues to randomly bring them up.

Begrudgingly, I can admit the book does raise some valid concerns and criticisms of modern day industrial society and some thoughtful projections of its future. Kaczynski argues that modern industrial society is unsustainable and that technological progress has led to a loss of individual freedom and a degradation of the environment. He presents his own philosophy, which he calls “primitivism” or “anarcho-primitivism,” which advocates for a return to a simpler, pre-industrial way of life. He argues that humans are fundamentally unhappy in modern society and that technology has created a sense of alienation and powerlessness in individuals. He also warns of the dangers of technological advancement, arguing that it will eventually lead to the complete loss of individual freedom and autonomy. The Unabomber Manifesto raises some important questions about the trade-offs between progress and freedom.