To all the people in the comments being like “Ted had some good points.” Judi Bari, Peter Kropotkin, and Murray Bookchin are all people who have written about environmentalism and the problems of technology, industrialization, and such and better than the reactionary psychopath did. Fascists love the unabomber and use him to normalize eco-fascism. Stop fucking saying he had good points cause there are better authors who have made those same points without all the fucking reactionary and eco-fascism tied to it.
Uhhhhh
Stop fucking saying he had good points cause there are better authors who have made those same points
Doesn’t this inherently imply he does in fact have good points if they’re making the same points… you also make a good point that there’s better sources that don’t come with a ton of ideology baggage but what your saying here is yes he does have good points but read someone else saying his points instead
Did you know that Northrup Grumman developed the standard USPS mail truck? They also developed the B2 stealth bomber. Northrup never intended for their truck to also be a stealth bomber, but Ted said “I’m about to do what’s called a ‘pro gamer’ move.”
Technology is cool
It’s probably better to read the philosophers Uncle Ted was pulling from (and ultimately failed to understand).
Ellul especially.
Might be a matter of taste, but ISAIF is worth a read on the basis of its wild mix of sociological brilliance and unhingedness IMO. That’s not to say I endorse blowing people up in the slightest, but the work stands taller than the sum of its influences.
E.g. I think he synthesized and added to quite a few different authors in presenting his concept of oversocialization. (Please do correct me if I’m off-base — I love philosophy but it’s not my main wheelhouse).
ISAIF?
Industrialized Society and Its Future (name of the manifesto)
You enjoy doing extra work? Why not explain the gibberish acronym in the first comment?
Oh! I’m soooo sorry! I thought everyone wrote their dissertation on Ted “My First Love” Kaczynski?
Listen to yourself, you sound ridiculous.
It’s just off-the-cuff writing without copyediting. Tad sloppy, but weird hate, homie.
E: To squarely address my view of Teddy K, he’s in the same bucket as Karl Marx, Otto Von Bismark, Rasputin, etc. Not someone whose core values I share, or think is a good person — but a historically interesting character who has cultural symbolic importance for the role they played in their respective time and place.
It was pretty clear from context.
The longer I work in tech, the more I want to move to a farm 50km from neighbours with just me, my partner, a couple dogs, chickens, and cows.
you should look at open land out in deep rural areas.
you’re more likely to kill yourself than get a farm these days.
not since the corporations bought up all the farm land.
The longer I
work in techexist, the more I want to move to a farm 50km from neighbours with just me, my partner, a couple dogs, chickens, and cows.
Haven’t read unobomber’s manifesto and probably never will because fuck anyone who seeks attention this way.
i will use that term whenever someone hits me with a few +4 in a game
Damn you’re so brave for condemning the unybomber.
Onionbomber always brings a tear to the eye.
Dead people can’t do much with attention
I don’t approve of his methods, either.
Then again, I don’t approve of the Church’s methods, but there’s some pretty good stuff buried in the Christian bible, too.
Reading something doesn’t mean you need to agree with the author. It’s not like people are financially supporting the Unibomber, or excusing his actions, when they read his manifesto. They’re just studying history.
The comment was half just an excuse to mispell the name after OP set it up like that.
But from what I’ve heard, I’m not missing much of value, so I’d only be reading ramblings of a madman.
“We give up a piece of ourselves whenever we adjust to conform to society’s standards. That, and we’re too plugged in. We’re letting technology take over our lives, willingly.”
Absolute insanity. Obviously a madman.
Well I didn’t need Ted to figure that out. How does the rest hold up?
It’s been 30 years and people are still talking about it. He’d probably consider that a win.
He predicted that technological advances would lead to extensive and ultimately oppressive forms of human control, including genetic engineering, and that human beings would be adjusted to meet the needs of social systems rather than vice versa.
Kaczynski stated that technological progress can be stopped, in contrast to the viewpoint of people who he said understand technology’s negative effects yet passively accept technology as inevitable. He called for a revolution to force the collapse of the worldwide technological system, and held a life close to nature, in particular primitivist lifestyles, as an ultimate ideal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
He hated leftist views, he hated fascism. He seemed to advocate a technological level somewhere between Native American and Amish. Call him an isolationist libertarian, I suppose. His solution to the problem is like something out of Fight Club - a one man “Project Mayhem.”
tl;dr: His methodology was pointlessly cruel and ineffective. But his assessment of the human condition wasn’t too far off the mark.
Just gonna rip from Wikipedia
With its initial publication in 1995, the manifesto was received as intellectually deep and sane. Writers described the manifesto’s sentiment as familiar. To Kirkpatrick Sale, the Unabomber was “a rational man” with reasonable beliefs about technology. He recommended the manifesto’s opening sentence for the forefront of American politics. Cynthia Ozick likened the work to an American Raskolnikov (of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment), as a “philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose … driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism”.
Unebomber had some valid complaints
That have been made by much better people who weren’t also eco-fascists.
UNObomber? Is that the Mexican knockoff version?
No his letter just got returned to sender
spoiler
Yeah, damn that unåbomber guy
unobomber was crazy but have you seen the duobomber?
Not dos?
Ted had some good ideas, it’s just how we went about doing what he did I take issue with.
Great taste but awful execution.
but if he was just a peaceful crank on the street corner holding a sign people would have ignored him. Nobody listened till the bombs went off. And when he was caught all they did was make fun of his cabin. Personally I thought it was a nice cabin in a nice location.
Unabomer is how the news wrote it.
Wasn’t he mixed up in the white supremacy movement?
Nah, you’re likely thinking of McVeigh, who cited The Turner Diaries.
Yeah probably.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Manifesto per the wiki he thinks of the facists as a “kook ideology” but he was also anti-left guy so its really just him hating on everyone for the most part
I don’t think so? I’ve read a decent bit about him and never heard this.
