Was the Unabomber right?

BEFORE CLASS ON THU MAY 28

Consider and mark up the assigned reading, using pen and/or
highlighter
Respond to the online prompt on Canvas
Is the Unabomber right?

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1. Thorstein Veblen and Technological Determinism (and others)

Niel Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993)
For centuries, historians and philosophers have traced, and debated, technologys role in
shaping civilization. Some have made the case for what the sociologist Thorstein Veblen dubbed
technological determinism. Theyve argued that technological progress, which they see as an
autonomous force outside mans control, has been the primary factor influencing the course of human
history. Karl Marx gave voice to this view when he wrote, The windmill gives you society with the feudal
lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it more crisply:
Things are in the saddle/And ride mankind. In the most extreme expression of the determinist view,
human beings become little more than the sex organs of the machine world. McLuhan memorably
wrote in the Gadget Love chapter of Understanding Media. Our essential role is to produce ever more
sophisticated tools to fecundate machines as bees fecundate plants until technology has developed
the capacity to reproduce itself on its own. At that point, we become dispensable.

2. What technology wants

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You (2011)
Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, wrote perhaps the boldest book articulating the
technodeterminist view, What Technology Wants, in which he posits that technology is a seventh
kingdom of life, a kind of meta-organism with desires and tendencies of its own. Kelly believes that the
technium, as he calls it, is more powerful than any of us mere humans. Ultimately, technologya force
that wants to eat power and expand choicewill get what it wants whether we want it to or not.
Technodeterminism is alluring and convenient for newly powerful entrepreneurs because it
absolves them of responsibility for what they do. Like priests at the altar, theyre mere vessels of a
much larger force that it would be futile to resist. They need not concern themselves with the effects of
the systems theyve created. But technology doesnt solve every problem of its own accord. If it did, we
wouldnt have millions of people starving to death in a world with an oversupply of food.
Technodeterminists like to suggest that technology is inherently good. But despite what Kevin
Kelly says, technology is no more benevolent than a wrench or a screwdriver. Its only good when
people make it do good things and use it in good ways. Melvin Kranzberg, a professor who studies the
history of technology, put it best nearly thirty years ago, and his statement is now known as
Kranzbergs first law: Technology is neither good or bad, nor is it neutral.

3. Technology has its own agenda

Kevin Kelly
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.

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4. Kaczynskis Argument, paraphrased by Kevin Kelly

The truth of Kaczynskis 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 Unabombers 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.

5. From the Unabomber's Manifesto

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines
that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be
done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of
two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without
human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as
to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out
that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the
human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are
suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the
machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit
itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice
but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and
more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of
their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than manmade ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system
running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that
stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off,
because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that
case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his
personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just
as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control
over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous,
a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass
of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological
techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the
elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds
to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all
children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to
keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his
"problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or
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psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them "sublimate"
their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such
a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic
animals.

6. From the Manifesto: Technology Is More Powerful Than Freedom

It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because
technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through
REPEATED compromises. 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.
When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as
he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes
society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.
7. Kevin Kellys response to Kaczynski
The problem is that Kaczynskis 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.
My family doesnt have TV, and while we have a car, I have plenty of city friends who do not. Avoiding
particular technologies is certainly possible. The Amish do it well. Many individuals do it well. However
the Unabomber is right that choices which begin as optional can over time become less so. First, there
are certain technologies (say sewage treatment, vaccinations, traffic lights) that were once matters of
choice but that are now mandated and enforced by the system. Then, there are other systematic
technologies, like automobiles, which are self-reinforcing. Thousands of other technologies are
intertwined into these systemic ones, making it hard for a human to avoid. The more that participate,
the more essential it becomes. Living without these embedded technologies requires more effort, or at
least more deliberate alternatives. This web of self-reinforcing technologies would be a type of noose if
the total gains in choices, possibilities and freedoms brought about by them did not exceed the losses. I
argue that our continued embrace of more technology is further proof that we have made the
calculation as we head for the greater good.
Anti-civilizationists would argue that we embrace more because we are brainwashed by the system
itself and we have no choice to but to say yes to more. We cant say no to more than a few individual
pieces, so we are imprisoned in this elaborate artificial lie. It is possible that the technium has
brainwashed us all, except for a few clear-eyed anarcho-primitivists who like to blow up stuff. I would be
inclined to believe in the anarchy if the Unabombers alternative to civilization was more clear. After we
destroy civilization, then what?

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8. Bill Joy and KMD

Bill Joy, WIRED magazine (2000)
The 21st-century technologies - genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) - are so powerful
that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time,
these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups. They will not
require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.Thus we have
the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction
(KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.
I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil
whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the
nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.

9. Survival of the fittest

Bill Joy, WIRED magazine (2000)
Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years
ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus. South America, like
Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including pouched equivalents of rats, deers,
and tigers. When the isthmus
connecting North and South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental
species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems, to displace
and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.
In a completely free marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American
placentals affected South American marsupials (and as humans have affected countless species).
Robotic industries would compete vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space,
incidentally driving their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life, biological
humans would be squeezed out of existence.

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