/polarchive/ - polarchive

Ted Kaczynski

>Full text of Uncle Ted's Manifesto, "INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE"

http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt

>Interviews with Ted

http://www.wildism.org/lib/item/6a5b11c7/

http://www.primitivism.com/kaczynski.htm

http://www.wildism.org/lib/item/5e5bd567/

>>1021

>Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber"

>The ideas and views expressed by Kaczynski before and after his capture raise crucial issues concerning the evolution and future of our society. For the first time, the reader will have access to an uncensored personal account of his anti-technology philosophy, which goes far beyond Unabomber pop culture mythology.

https://ia600300.us.archive.org/21/items/tk-Technological-Slavery/tk-Technological-Slavery.pdf

>>1022

>Many people do not understand the roots of their own frustration, hence their rebellion is directionless. They know that they want to rebel, but they don’t know what they want to rebel against. Luckily, the System is able to fill their need by providing them with a list of standard and stereotyped grievances in the name of which to rebel: racism, homophobia, women’s issues, poverty, sweatshops… the whole laundry-bag of “activist” issues.

>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System’s work for it. In spite of this, they imagine that they are rebelling against the System. How is this possible?

The System’s Neatest Trick

>So, in a nutshell, the System’s neatest trick is this:

-For the sake of its own efficiency and security, the System needs to bring about deep and radical social changes to match the changed conditions resulting from technological progress.

-The frustration of life under the circumstances imposed by the System leads to rebellious impulses.

-Rebellious impulses are co-opted by the System in the service of the social changes it requires; activists “rebel” against the old and outmoded values that are no longer of use to the System and in favor of the new values that the System needs us to accept.

-In this way rebellious impulses, which otherwise might have been dangerous to the System, are given an outlet that is not only harmless to the System, but useful to it.

-Much of the public resentment resulting from the imposition of social changes is drawn away from the System and its institutions and is directed instead at the radicals who spearhead the social changes.

>Of course, this trick was not planned in advance by the System’s leaders, who are not conscious of having played a trick at all. The way it works is something like this:

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-system-s-neatest-trick

Jacques Ellul

>The astonishing cultural ignorance of the technocrats leads them into disastrous errors of judgement regarding human nature.

>Technology enables society to change very rapidly. But we are unable to say exactly what our goal is or through what stages we shall pass.

>To go back is unthinkable. We have to obey technology’s first law: if something can be done, it must be done.

>Technology makes possible the production of all kinds of things. Consumer capitalism is dedicated to the proposition that production is good in itself, no matter what is produced. The net effect is the massive production of absurd, empty and useless items which are nevertheless utterly serious since we earn our living from them, and dedicate our leisure time to them.

>Having created the problem of unemployment advanced technology is hardly likely to solve it. Politicians and economists who believe in a radiant technological future are dreamers.

>>1024

>The media extols every gain in speed as a success, and the public accepts it as such. But experience shows that the more time we save, the less we have. The faster we go, the more harassed we are. I know that I will be told that we need to have all these means at our disposal and to go as fast as we can because modern life is harried. But modern life is harried because we have the telephone, the fax, the jet plane, etc. Without these devices it would be no more harried than it was a century ago when we could all walk at the same pace. “You are denying progress then?” Not at all; what I am denying is that this is progress.

>Modern gadgets speed up society and make it more fragile, but they do not truly better the individual lot.

>The state is the prisoner of the technology that it thinks it directs.

>The true gods today are not economic but technical. To compensate themselves for losses of autonomy and individuality people deify the technical device. It is universal and spectacular; it defies my attempts to master it; it performs what once would have been called miracles; to a large extent it is incomprehensible. It is thus God.

>Where there is no doubt there is no intellectual life.

>>1025

>The Technological Society

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/AoS/TheTechnologicalSociety.pdf

>The Technological Bluff

http://rekveld.home.xs4all.nl/tech/Ellul_TechnologicalBluff.pdf

>Some notes from a reading of "The Technological Bluff"

http://www.basicincome.com/bp/thetechnologicalbluff.htm

Oswald Spengler

>Man and Technics

http://ir.nmu.org.ua/bitstream/handle/123456789/133405/80f1c5239c5f8111cfa1916976bbcc53.pdf?sequence=1

>In place of the honest religion of earlier times there was a shallow enthusiasm for the “achievements of humanity,” by which nothing more was meant than progress in the technics of labour-saving and amusement-making. Of the soul, not one word.

Samuel Butler

>Darwin Among the Machines — [To the Editor of the Press, Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863.]

http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html

>Firstly, man is committed hopelessly to the machines. He cannot stop. If he would… bring up his children with a fair prospect of their thriving, he must go on improving the machines.

>Secondly, man's interest may not be really opposed by his becoming the lower creature; the insensate mass [of people] will readily acquiesce in any arrangement which gives them cheaper comforts without yielding to unreasonable jealously.

>Thirdly, the change will be so slow and subtle that man's sense of what is due to himself will never be rudely violated at any given moment; and custom will deaden our sense to the noiseless and imperceptible aggression of our own creations.

____

>Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply page a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

Martin Heidegger

>The Question Concerning Technology (German: Die Frage nach der Technik) is a work by Martin Heidegger seeking to derive the essence of technology and humanity’s role.

http://simondon.ocular-witness.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/question_concerning_technology.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology

Francis Parker Yockey

>Technics-worship is completely inappropriate to the soul of Europe. The formative impulse of human life does not come from matter now any more than it ever did.

>The attitude of the 20th century toward science and technics is clear. It does not ask them to furnish a world-outlook–this it derives elsewhere–and it positively rejects any attempt to make a religion or a philosophy out of materialism or atom-worship.

–Francis Parker Yockey, Imperium

http://www.jrbooksonline.com/pdf_books/imperium103.pdf

http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Imperium_%28book%29

Thorstein Veblen

>The Place of Science in Modern Civilization

>What will become of a society so engrossed with facts that it neglects other aspects of life, like art? Readers may find themselves amazed at the degree to which the scientific point of view has colored Western life, while students of sociology and anthropology will be fascinated by this reflexive look at scientific culture by a man of science.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39949

The following introductory passage is from Dr David Skrbina's The Metaphysics of Technology.

>In his 1906 essay, "The Place of Science in Modern Civilization," he spoke of the "cult of science" that had taken hold in America and throughout the Western world.

>Science's emphasis on materialism and factual knowledge has led to a condition of "race deterioration" and "discomfort on the whole." Technology–defined in instrumental terms as "the employment of scientific knowledge for useful ends"–has come to assume a primary role in both economic and cultural life.

In modern culture, industry, industrial process, and industrial products have progressively gained on humanity, until these creations of man's ingenuity have latterly come to take the dominant place in the cultural scheme; and it is not too much to say that they have become the chief force in shaping men's daily life, and therefore the chief factor in shaping men's habits of though.

George Orwell

>The Road to Wigan Pier

http://www.limpidsoft.com/a5/wiganpier.pdf

>In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness. But softness is repulsive; and thus all progress is seen to be a frantic struggle toward an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached…

>Life has got to be lived largely in terms of effort … The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation.

_____

>I want a civilization in which "progress" is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men

>[S]cience and [modern technology] now often function as forces independent of human goals.

>In many cases… knowledge creates concepts that man cannot restate in terms of his own experience… All too often, knowledge and technology pursue a course which is not guided by per-determined social philosophy

———————-

>Biological man remains fundamentally the same as he was when he merged from his animal past.

>Outwardly, man makes adjustments to the new conditions of life; inwardly, however, he has so far failed to make true adaptations to them, and this discrepancy creates physiological and psychological conflicts which threaten to become increasingly traumatic

-Rene Dubos, biologist, So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped By Surroundings and Events

>Technology, as developed in the West, is not neutral….

>When woven into the tapestry of the secular worldview, which in its development emptied out man of his inner life–particularly his ethical and spiritual life–technology cannot but be destructive of man's higher values.

>No way has yet been found to prevent that, which means that the detrimental consequences of technology are not incidental but endemic; they lie in the very nature of the phenomenon, as it is functioning within a certain worldview

-Henryk Skolimowski Technological Alienation

>>1037

>The more protected we are against elements, that is, the more elaborate our artificial [i.e., technological] environment becomes, the more thoroughly it conditions our behavior.

>In the Stone Age, we were at the mercy of the elements; now we are at the mercy of the shield which protects us against these elements

-Henryk Skolimowski, Human Space in the Technological Age

>Technology will irretrievably empty the lives of those who are resolved to stake everything on their faith in it and it alone. Just because of its promise of unlimited possibility, technology is an empty form… That is why our time, being the most intensely technical, is also the emptiest in all human history.

–José Ortega y Gasset, Toward a Philosophy of History

>The spirit of modern civilization does not constitute "progress," but a decline in the evolution of mankind.

>It represents the rule of the weak over the strong, of the intelligent over the noble, the rule of mere quantity over quality. It is a phenomenon of decadence.

-Max Scheler, Ressentiment

>Our predecessors mistakenly coupled their particular mode of mechanical progress with an unjustifiable sense of increasing moral superiority.

>But our own contemporaries, who have reason to reject this smug Victorian belief in the inevitable improvement of all other human institutions through command of the machine, nevertheless concentrate, with manic fervor, upon the continued expansion of science and technology, as if they alone magically would provide the only means of human salvation.

______

>Only as a religion can one explain the compulsive nature of the urge toward mechanical development without regard for the actual outcome of the development in human relations themselves:

>even in departments where the results of mechanization were plainly disastrous, the most reasonable apologists nevertheless held that "the machine was here to stay"–by which they meant, not that history was irreversible, but that the machine itself was modifiable

Lewis Mumford

>One of the great dangers of the modern technocratic-commercial society, at least in its present Western form, is that it neglects the formation of character and tends to produce narrowly educated human beings with superficial interests and tastes.

>Western society has drifted far from the old Greek notion of schole, the classical discipline that aimed to form and refine the whole person and to prepare the person for the higher life of the good, the true. and the beautiful. To pursue education and self-education, most especially in the moral life, in order achieve a more deeply satisfying existence has come to seem intolerably onerous as well as archaic.

Claes Ryn, A Common Human Ground

>>1048

>Thus, trust in science has been yet another way of diverting attention from the need for personal self-discipline

Claes Ryn, A Common Human Ground

Friedrich Georg Juenger - "The Failure of Technology" (Die Perfektion der Technik)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0iF1-RtFOgBMjVhNmU0ZWUtMWRlNS00NzM3LTk0NzMtNTQ1ODRhMmU3YWU4/view?pli=1

Ernst Juenger's brother and subsequent influence on his work.

>>1081

Poetry is gay. I'm voting for fire!

https://archive.org/details/MightIsRightByRagnarRedbeard