Technology is making our lives mundane, unfulfilling, and unnatural. Our spiritual and psychological health is in the gutter thanks to big tech and industrialized society. Our planet is equally doomed. These issues do not know left or right, conservative or liberal. The problems brought upon us by technology will only get worse. So let’s just blow it all up. It’s time to start over.
This was the philosophy listed out in The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future, a series of essays written by Ted Kacynzski, an individual better known as “The Unabomber.”
Bent on his message, Kacynzski anonymously mailed home-made bombs to leaders he felt were “critical in increasing industrial growth.” His victims included advertising executives, timber lobbyists, and computer scientists. From 1978-1985, his efforts killed 3 members and injured over 20 bystanders. Kacynzski’s crimes lead to the longest, most expensive manhunt in American history. Then, in 1993, the bomber wrote to the New York Times, identifying himself as a member of an anarchist group called the Freedom Club, and in 1995, he prevailed upon the Washington Post and the Times to publish a thirty-five-thousand-word essay, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” by promising to stop the killings.
His ideology can best be described as Eco-terrorism, and as violent as his methods were, it’s hard to not notice the eerie predictions he made concerning the world around us.
Kacynzski outlines the draining aspect of living in an industrialized society through the prominence of “surrogate activities.” His argument considers the case of a hypothetical person that can have anything they want by just wishing it to be so. At first, the person can experience extreme happiness, and be able to drown in their greatest desires. But after a short period of time, the person will become bored, demoralized, and eventually depressed.
Kacynzski argues that in our modern society technology is making this more and more of a problem. Instant gratification has made fulfilling basic biological needs for humans far easier compared to 200 or even 100 years ago. Thus, humans take to “surrogate activities”—the action of creating goals for oneself in order to instill a sense of meaning in our lives. No longer will the natural gratification of nature or human connection allow us to feel any sense of purpose; machines are in the rapid process of eventually fulfilling our own basic biological needs.
Technology has forced us to find new ways to meddle with our time, and create completely artificial ideas of purpose. Thus, we are forced to unnaturally adapt to tolerate unnatural conditions we unnaturally find intolerable.
Though Kazynski ushers a movement of impractical deindustrialization and overall return to primitivism, the instant gratification of an Industrial Society has led to an impatient society. It sounds stupid to simply say that society has “become soft” but it’s true. For the most part, my biological needs can be best satisfied through the click of a button, taking away the natural gratification satisfying my biological needs would usually lead to. We make up versions of purpose for ourselves not because some people have God-given gifts and journeys they are meant to go on, but because we’re bored. Because we have everything else we could possibly need.