I suppose there are some readers who were children when over the course of seventeen years beginning in 1978 there were a series of bombs, almost one a year, sent through the mails to victims around the country. Finally there was a breakthrough, when this person, called the Unabomber, surfaced with an offer to stop his killings if two major papers would publish his manifesto.
You can read more about the story of this twisted genius, Theodore John Kaczynski, in this excellent Wikipedia article. Published in 1995 by the NY Times and the Washington Post, his 35,000 word essay eventually led to his capture.
I never got around to reading Industrial Society and Its Future until just now, and want to share some of my thoughts, and point out some amazing prescience.
If you have an hour or so to spare, I would recommend reading his essay, for many reasons. First there is his take on the difference between a reform and a revolutionary agenda. While there are logical defects, and even a few (very few) typos, no one has ever called TK stupid. As an aside I happened to be attending a meeting with perhaps the one person who overlapped his student years at Harvard and as a Professor at Berkley, Victor Niederhoffer, VN.
Two brilliant men with quite different paths. Kaczynski a Luddite revolutionary who lived in a rustic cabin and now in solitary confinement; and Niederhoffer, an original--who made a fortune as a hedge fund manager and now lives in his 25,000 square foot "cabin" in Connecticut.
Actually the lives of these two men are an apt point of departure in considering TK's manifesto, his brilliance and the vicissitudes of life that shape us all. It is widely thought that TK's being an unwitting subject in brutal psychological research at Harvard, something that could never happen now, had a searing effect on his perception of what he saw as a faceless cruel "power structure." He was powerless then, and the feeling never left him.
I want to focus on what TK said that has meaning, and not on how his answers were distorted by the life that he lived. He urged a revolution that would return the world to that of his primitive cabin deep in the woods. While his solution is flawed, his description of the problem of mass technology, the kind that requires dehumanizing government, giant corporations and interconnected globalism is strangely prescient.
From his essay:
- The system is currently engaged in a desperate struggle to overcome certain problems that threaten its survival, among which the problems of human behavior are the most important. If the system succeeds
in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We think the issue will most likely be resolved within the next several decades, say 40 to
100 years.
- Suppose the system survives the crisis of the next several decades. By that time it will have to have solved, or at least brought under control, the principal problems that confront it, in particular that of
"socializing" human beings; that is, making people sufficiently docile so that their behavior no longer threatens the system. That being accomplished, it does not appear that there would be any further
obstacle to the development of technology, and it would presumably advance toward its logical conclusion, which is complete control over everything on Earth, including human beings and all other important
organisms.
The system may become a unitary, monolithic organization, or it may be more or less fragmented and consist of a number of organizations coexisting in a relationship that includes elements of both cooperation and competition, just as today the government, the corporations and other large organizations both cooperate and compete with one another. Human freedom mostly will have vanished, because individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large organizations armed with supertechnology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion.
Only a small number of people will have any real power, and even these probably will have only very limited freedom, because their behavior too
will be regulated; just as today our politicians and corporation executives can retain their positions of power only as long as their behavior remains within certain fairly narrow limits.
TK wrote the following fifteen years ago, when it was still possible to do your banking at a local branch. And if someone had a home computer it operated on DOS-3.1, with 120 files that you put in yourself-and it never crashed, yet he envisioned the word of internet commerce that was only then an infant:
129 Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of
technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only one
direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back -- short of the overthrow of the whole technological system.
We are all shaped by our culture, actually by many cultures that form concentric circles around our experience. So for me Dailykos is a part of who I am, just as my friends, the New York Times (especially since they published my recent letter) and all who I know and interact with shape what I see as possible.
While Niederhoffer, one of the few as brilliant as TK took the same information and became both a staunch libertarian, as well as a multi millionaire, while continuing to engage intellectual challenges of all kinds, Kacsynki, by a quirk of fate, became an isolate. Ironically he spent twenty years in a solitary existence of his own making, and will live out his life as the ultimate victim of the power structure that he chose to take this route to warn the world against.
None could be more alienated than TK, hating his amalgam of "leftists" as well as those who controlled the power that leftists railed against. His dream was for a return to a world that only existed in the dark matter of the antithesis to his brilliantly articulated dystopia of modern life.
I read his manifesto now as the danger that he foretold, that the incomprehensibly interconnected world that has only existed in a moment of time, may be about to fail. I read it in hope that out of his tortured mind he may have gleaned a solution that has been missed by the best minds of our times.
But his answer for the economic crisis 2009 is no better than the answer that he found for his own personal demons. But while his solution is fatally flawed, his description of the problem, the insidious pathologies of large scale industrialization-computerization is provocative.