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Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski— the Unabomber– died yesterday in a federal prison. It’s an occasion to revisit Kevin Kelly‘s thoughts on Kaczynski and his manifesto…

Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism.  It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims. In his own words the Unabomber says: “The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”

I too argue that the technium is guided by “technical necessity.” [See Kevin’s What Technology Wants.] That is, baked into the nature of this vast complex of technological systems are self-serving aspects – technologies that enable more technology, and systems that preserve themselves — and also inherent biases that lead the technium in certain directions, outside of human desire. Kaczynski writes “modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the ‘good’ parts.”

The truth of Kaczynski’s observations does not absolve him of his murders, or justify his insane hatred. Kaczynski saw something in technology that caused him to lash out with violence, but despite his mental imbalance, he was able to articulate that view with surprising clarity his sprawling, infamous 35,000-word manifesto. Kaczynski murdered three people (and injured 23 more) in order to get this manifesto published. His despicable desperation and crimes hide a critique that has gained a minority following by other luddites. The center section of his argument is clear, remarkably so, given his cranky personal grievances against leftists that bookend his rant. Here, in meticulous, scholarly precision, Kaczynski makes his primary claim that  “freedom and technological progress are incompatible,” and that therefore technological progress must be undone.

As best I understand, the Unabomber’s argument goes like this:

• Personal freedoms are constrained by society, as they must be.
• The stronger that technology makes society, the less freedoms.
• Technology destroys nature, which strengthens technology further.
• This ratchet of technological self-amplification is stronger than politics.
• Any attempt to use technology or politics to tame the system only strengthens it.
• Therefore technological civilization must be destroyed, rather than reformed.
• Since it cannot be destroyed by tech or politics, humans must push industrial society towards its inevitable end of self-collapse.
• Then pounce on it when it is down and kill it before it rises again.

In short, Kaczynski claims that civilization is the disease and not the cure. He wasn’t the first to make this claim. Rants against the machine of civilization go back as far as Freud and beyond. But the assaults against industrial society speed up as industry sped up. Edward Abbey, the legendary wilderness activist, considered industrial civilization to be a “destroying juggernaut” wrecking both the planet and humans. Abbey did all he could personally to stop the juggernaut with monkey wrenching maneuvers – sabotaging logging equipment and so forth. Abbey was the iconic Earth Firster who inspired many fire throwing followers. The luddite theorist, Kirkpatrick Sale, who unlike Abbey, railed against the machine while living in a brownstone in Manhattan, refined the idea of “civilization as disease.”…

[Kevin unpacks Kaczynski’s argument…]

The problem is that Kaczynski’s most basic premise, the first axiom in his argument, is not true. The Unabomber claims that technology robs people of freedom. But most people of the world find the opposite. They gravitate towards venues of increasing technology because they recognize they have more freedoms when they are empowered with it. They (that is we) realistically weigh the fact that yes, indeed, some options are closed off when adopting new technology, but many others are opened, so that the net gain is a plus of freedom, choices, and possibilities.

Consider Kaczynski himself. For 25 years he lived in a type of self-enforced solitary confinement in a dirty (see the photos and video) smoky shack without electricity, running water, or a toilet – he cut a hole in the floor for late night pissing. In terms of material standards the cell he now occupies in the Colorado Admax prison is a four-star upgrade: larger, cleaner, warmer, with the running water, electricity and the toilet he did not have, plus free food, and a much better library. In his Montana hermitage he was free to move about as much as the snow and weather permitted him. He could freely choose among a limited set of choices of what to do in the evenings. He may have personally been content with his limited world, but overall his choices were very constrained, although he had unshackled freedom within those limited choices. Sort of like, “you are free to hoe the potatoes any hour of the day you want.” Kaczynski confused great latitude within limited choices as superior over modest latitude in an expanding number of choices…

This is the chief reason billions of people migrate from mountain shacks – very much like Kaczynski’s – all around the world. A smart kid living in a smoky one-room shack in the hills of Laos, or Cameroon, or Bolivia will do all he/she can to make their way against all odds to the city where there are – so obvious to them – vastly more freedom and choices. They would find Kaczynski’s argument that there is more freedom back in the stifling hut they just escaped from plain crazy.

The young are not under some kind of technological spell that warps their mind into believing civilization is better. Sitting in the mountains they are under no spell but poverty’s. They clearly know what they give up when they leave. They understand the comfort and support of family, the priceless value of community acquired in a small village, the blessings of clean air and the soothing wholeness of the natural world. They feel the loss of immediate access to these, but they come to the city anyway because in the end, the tally favors the freedoms created by civilization. They can (and will) return to the hills to be rejuvenated…

[Kevin considers the “green anarchist” and anti-civilizationists…]

The ultimate problem is that the paradise the Kaczynski is offering, the solution to civilization so to speak, is the tiny, smoky, dingy, smelly wooden prison cell that absolutely nobody else wants to dwell in. It is a paradise billions are fleeing from. Civilization has its problems but in almost every way it is better than the Unabomber’s shack.

The Unabomber is right that technology is a holistic, self-perpetuating machine. He is wrong to bomb it for many reasons, not the least is that the machine of civilization offers us more actual freedoms than the alternative. There is a cost to run this machine, a cost we are only beginning to reckon with, but so far the gains from this ever enlarging technium outweigh the alternative of no machine at all…

For all of the ways in which Ted Kaczynski was misguided, @kevin2kelly argues, “The Unabomber Was Right” about one big thing. Eminently worth reading in full.

* Frequently attributed to Marshall McLuhan, but actually written by Father John Culkin, SJ, a Professor of Communication at Fordham University in New York and friend of McLuhan.

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As we ponder the prices we pay, we might recall that it was on this date in 1976 that Texas Instruments Inc. introduced Speak & Spell, a talking learning aid for ages 7 and up. Its debut marked the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. Earlier “speaking toys” (like Mattel’s See ‘n Say line or the even earlier Chatty Cathy dolls) had relied on tape or phonograph recordings.

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