Industrial Society and Its Future, perhaps better known as the Unabomber Manifesto, is an anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski. It was published in 1995 in The Washington Post. I watched the Netflix documentary on Kaczynski and thought I would give the essay a read.
Kaczynski argues that technology is the source of most of our problems. Industrial society is a system and human autonomy (which he calls the power progress) has to be limited in service of the system. If you are going to have a factory production line, you have to have workers there, at a time that suits the factory, working on the line.
Technology then becomes pervasive. For example, when cars were invented, you could live just fine and have a car or not have a car. It was good. But now, owning a car involves a driving licence, insurance, MOTs. And because people have cars, cities spread out and so now you have to have a car. Or rely on public transport, which limits your freedom even further.
It’s not correct that humans did not have an affect on the world before the Industrial Revolution. Yuval Noah Harari talks about how early humans eliminated most of the large mammals in Sapiens. But we are doing exponentially more damage now, as well as increasingly making ourselves miserable.
So it is arguably a good critique of the problems of our technological society.
He is wrong about everything else, though. Starting with the fact that he killed a bunch of people to get the thing published, which, it goes without saying, is morally wrong. Maybe things would have been different if social media had existed back then, allowing him to spread his message without violence.
Kaczynski would have hated me. The work starts and ends with an attack of “leftism” which is ill-defined but generally the political left including socialists, communists, and any group gammons would call “woke” these days such as LGBTQ advocacy groups or feminists. He argues that a lot of the people complaining are well educated white people. Which is true, because we are the people who have a voice. That’s how oppression theory works and I don’t see any understanding of oppression theory in the text.
Finally, he doesn’t offer any real solution. His solution is “nature”. But what does this look like? How does it work? Even if we wanted to live without all of our modern technology (such as a antibiotics, for example), how would we stop people just reinventing technology?
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2025 at 11:00 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.