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Industrial Society and its Future has a far more interesting take on this topic, and one that I haven't seen effectively refuted. (If you have examples, please comment!)

> > Technological progress doesn't necessarily have to work against privacy.

> I honestly see this as unavoidable.

You might be interested in reading "Industrial Society and Its Future". It has a lot of well-argued points along these lines. Highly recommended.

The article mentioned the group praises Ted Kaczynski, so most likely good to read this essay if you want to see their POV.

Industrial Society and Its Future  (1995) 
by Theodore Kaczynski

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/ethics/Unabomber.pdf

Industrial Society and its Future is a great piece of analysis and writing marred by its psychopathic author. Although, I agree with the author that his terrorism helped get the essay read more widely, and that sickens me, because of course I wouldn't have read it if he hadn't murdered those people.

Industrial Society and Its Future isn't a good moral justification for mailing bombs to people, but it's still an interesting set of ideas that's difficult to refute.

I'm not necessarily against this but I don't think it goes deep enough. I think a better societal/psychological explanation can be found in the first third of Industrial Society and its Future. [0]

[0] Free read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...

A much better piece of writing on this topic is “Industrial Society and its Future,” also known as the Unabomber’s Manifesto. You have to forget who wrote it and also ignore the worst 20% of it to get the most out of it though.

"Industrial Society and its Future", "Ride the Tiger". Good night.

"Industrial Society and Its Future" came out 25 years ago and predicted and described lots of dark stuff that came true. Why didn't people listen?!

For a fascinating take on the subject, I recommend "Industrial Society and its Future" by Ted Kaczynski.

There's a monograph called "Industrial Society and Its Future" which you may find interesting.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/225468.Industrial_Societ...

How well did these cultures fare against the imperialist Europeans, exactly? How well do they fare against their more technologically advanced neighbors?

Incidentally, you may also wish to read "Industrial Society and Its Future" by former Berkeley mathematics professor Theodore Kaczynski.

Or at least a clearer rant. I was surprised at how well written Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and its Future" was. I don't like that he got it published by mailing people bombs until the New York Times promised to publish it, but it's still worth reading.

This reminds me of Ted Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future, which oddly struck me as a pro-poverty manifesto when I read it a long time ago.

Infamous is probably the right word. His writings aren't something that everybody owns or that's taught in school. I don't believe a majority would know the author if you asked them who wrote "Industrial Society and its Future".

I also don't believe that a majority considers it worthwhile, it's a minority that this line of thought speaks to, and I'm relatively sure that they'd find it appealing even if he hadn't ever done anything but write books.

I was intrigued by "Industrial Society and its Future" by Ted Kaczynski after watching the "Manhunt" series on Netflix. As a techno-optimist it helped me put my feet on the ground. If you're like me, I can recommend the book. Not a fan of books? Read my blog post.

I consider whether to buy 'the industrial society and its future' from amazon, along with 'The communist manifesto', to read for myself, but the irony in this keeps stopping me.

The Hacker Manifesto

The Anarchist's Cookbook

Industrial Society and Its Future (the Unabomber Manifesto)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Interesting, while I have known about it, I haven't really read Ted Kaczynski (aka Unabomber) essay "Industrial Society and Its Future" [1] (aka The Unabomber Manifesto) before until your comment. I absolutely abhor his actions and what he had done, but the essay is a brilliant read.

Especially interesting is paragraph 171, as it pertains to the recent concerns about AI and our increasing technological dependence. Note that he wrote this essay way back in 1995:

"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 as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made 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."

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...

Professor Ted Kaczynski is laughing in his prison cell.

Industrial Society and Its Future
http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf

You may want to read "the industrial society and its future". As a philosopher, underrated.

If you want to read it, you can Google its title "Industrial Society and Its Future" [1].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Industrial+Society+and+Its+F...

This article reminded me a lot of stuff written by Mumford, Jacques Ellul, and even Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber). Their stuff is worth reading.

Industrial Society and Its Future http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13

Also Ellul's The Technological Society

This post parallels Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial society and its future"

1. Industrial Society and Its Future. Ted Kaczynski, 1995 (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fc-industrial-societ...).

I second this. What Kaczynski did was terrible, but he was obviously very intelligent and highly observant. Upon reading Industrial Society and its Future, it was hard for me to deny the validity(note the difference between validity and soundness) of many of his arguments. I would say it's worth reading if the reader can mentally-divorce ideas from their thinkers, and it's a fascinating read at that.

I hate to say this but.. There will never be autonomous cars. Human psychology, and unpredictability, will doom it all. We can build amazing AI technology, but we will never be able to account for Jenny after six mudslides in a Geo Tracker, or the random decision making of even the most well intention human driver.

Furthermore, if you haven't read "Industrial Society and Its Future"[0] you should. It makes a very good point that society as we know it today cannot and will not support a car-less reality.

[0]. http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf

Unabomber not Unibomber, not that it matters. Ted Kaczynski, the man you are referring to is a fascinating man, try to ignore all of the recent hype and delusion following that Netflix series. I encourage everyone to read his book "Industrial Society and Its Future", he is without a doubt a luddite but presents some very compelling reasons in the book, if nothing else it will give you some insight into a rather notorious but perhaps unfairly represented character.

You're really stuck on this desire to expose my fraudulent underlying motivations for not wanting homeless people to die in the streets. You'll be happy to learn far smarter people than you have taken a crack at this problem! Go read the first few sections of Industrial Society and its Future and you'll have all the ammo you need to attack leftist motivations. Its analysis is quite a bit more robust than your (frankly, extremely basic) idea that everyone must have a financial stake in policy to desire its realization. Happy to help.

Likewise, I'm not interested in debating leftism in $CURRENT_YEAR. I'll just leave this quote from Industrial Society and Its Future:

>The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve every one’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.

Armchair psychology, ad hominem, I'll let you decide. Bye.

If you don't feel called to marriage, that's absolutely fine. It's not for everybody. Priests take vows of celibacy, and that is a high calling, to give one example.

As an aside, I see you have a very deep view into the past and are unmoved by mere thousands of years of culture and tradition. You might find Dr. Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future interesting and enjoyable.

The loss of authenticity most definitely has something to do with modern life itself (i.e. since the Industrial Revolution) though arguably goes back to the dawn of the practice of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. You ought to read, I hesitate to suggest, the Unabomber Manifesto a.k.a. "Industrial Society and its Future" by Ted Kaczynski. No shortage there of ideas on how modern man has lost his authenticity. (He also calls for violent revolution, which is just ADORABLE.)

We evolved to be hunter-gatherers in small social groups. As such, being on high alert for a faint sound, a movement in your peripheral vision, or some sign from your friends, comes naturally to us because these are traits that were naturally selected and could mean the difference between having a meal and going hungry, or between life and death. "Distraction" wasn't an issue either, because the distraction was usually the more important/urgent thing to be paying attention to, and because there weren't as many of them. We didn't have the situation we have today, where these entire natural cycles of stimulus/response/reward have been studied, and where people have figured out through years of trial-and-error, how to replicate the stimuli, and replace the rewards, in order to substitute a different response that just so happens to make them money. To the degree that you are susceptible to these stimuli you are actually being an authentic human being. It's the environment you're in that is completely inauthentic. We're all swimming in an ocean of bullshit. Being born into a world already mostly built and made for us, it's easy to forget that somebody (humans) had to come along and construct it all. Once you realize humans built it all, you then realize they had to have a reason, an incentive, maybe even an agenda. Being authentic requires reclaiming your own agenda and rejecting others' agendas where they differ from yours.

So I gather. Not gonna lie, I heard "manifesto" and immediately thought back to Industrial Society and its Future, which is a much more substantial document; I would not have time for something of similar heft just now. I should've taken a closer look straight away. But as I said before, it's been a busy week.

Having now read it, I can immediately conclude that James Damore is very new at this, approached it under the assumption that the social and political context around the matter was susceptible to mere reasoned discourse, and really had no idea of the minefield into which he so blithely strolled.

Someone a bit more seasoned, for example, would not have included the "Possible non-bias causes..." section at all. On the one hand, it's not as well supported as it might be and "evolutionary psychology" in particular is a great big pile of unfalsifiable hypotheses. On the other and much larger hand, that section is just chock-full of material for the kind of tendentious, misrepresentative quote-mining that's a go-to tactic for those who so believe in the righteousness of themselves and their cause that they find no dishonesty too mean to deploy against someone with the temerity to dissent.

I can also immediately conclude that I did indeed perpetuate a misrepresentation from a secondary source, and I greatly appreciate 'abnry and 'beaconstudios bringing my attention to the error. In future I'll try not to make the same mistake again.

It says "Against Civilization" is "spreading versions of his message", meaning Kaczynski. But "Against Civilization" was written by John Zerzan, and Zerzan was saying these things before "Industrial Society and Its Future" was published.

In fact, while Kaczynski was more militant, Zerzan is more radical, he sees the problems not starting with industrial capitalism, but with the original agricultural slave empires of the Middle East.

Defining primitivism by Kaczynski is like defining Zionism by Baruch Goldstein, or the anti-abortion cause by Scott Roeder or so forth. Or US patriotism by the torture in Abu Ghraib.

Have you actually read "Industrial Society and Its Future" without going out of your way to be dismissive about it? If so, why haven't you asked the man himself to answer those criticisms? OK, I don't expect you to do all the legwork, of course, but it's not completely terrible that one out of the thousands of philosophers in this country actually has done that legwork.

This only makes sense if you place a limited and arbitrary timeframe on when "success" must be achieved, and what the "success" should be. Remember, the communist manifesto was published in 1848, and by your standard of "success" things more or less remained unchanged until the ideas in that manifesto culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917--nearly 70 years later. Kaczynski understands this lag, and is quite sober and realistic about the long-term effect of ideas. This is adumbrated by the manifesto:

"If the system succeeds
in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it
will probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We think the issue
will most likely be resolved within the next several decades, say forty to a
hundred years." --Industrial Society and Its Future, paragraph 162.

Further, your statement implies an assumption which is not correct. The implication you're making is that because things have so far remain unchanged, Kaczynski's actions were therefore unjustified and/or his writings were not true. This does not follow. Just because an anti-tech revolutionary movement has not (yet) materialized and the industrial system is not (yet) under serious revolutionary threat does not invalidate the truth of Kaczynski's ideas or the validity of Kaczynski's actions. You would not be justified in implying this any more than you would be justified in claiming Galileo had no effect or was wrong because he was placed under house arrest and almost nobody believed him (at the time).

Kaczynski addresses this possibility explicitly in his 1995 essay "Industrial Society and its Future":

"Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. ... Even [if] these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people." [1]

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...

>How can we practice diligence if doing a full day's worth of work takes about 20 minutes

We re-evaluate what a 'full day's worth of work' is. And, hopefully, become more productive.

I don't disagree with (what seems to be) your central point.

Labour-replacement technology reduces the extrinsic value of human industriousness, increasing laziness as a result. That is, assuming we don't compensate by demanding more economic output. But we do demand more... I guess it's not enough to compensate.

I'm reminded of the idea of the 'power process' in the essay The industrial society and its future.

Also, the bit about 'the industrial revolution and its consequences that have been a disaster for the human race' slightly paraphrases the opening of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, which is quite popular with accelerationists and eco-fascists due to his relative success as the 'Unabomber'.

Most people would think the government is responsible for all these drug epidemics: the DEA jailing minorities on minor infractions or the CIA hustling cocaine between countries (look it up).

But really the true culprit is just the youth, and always has been. Ever since the early 1900s traditional family values and social community/cohesion has been seriously on decline. Say what you will about Ted Kaczynski, but his essay/book Industrial Society and its Future is a wealth of knowledge on this subject (strange I know coming from a Christian woman).

But look at it this way: people resort to drugs because reality sucks. Why does reality suck? Well, we live in a society, and this very society (and its implicit social network) causes our youth to suffer.

Just look at how much the new Joker movie resonated with kids, teenagers and young adults! Heck, my niece of 12 years was itching to put on a mask and march in the street after she walked out of the theater. It was terrifying.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human being to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries.

- Industrial Society and its future, by Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski

"When a math ABD starts telling me about how she really likes her work but is sick of the slow pace and the fact that only six people in the world understand her work, I get to take a nice minute alone with my thoughts: I've heard it over and over again, in the same words and the same weary, beaten-down tone."

It's interesting to keep this in mind when reading Kaczynski's "Industrial Society And Its Future". He spills a lot of ink on how humans in industrial societies waste a lot of time and energy on "surrogate activities" rather than focusing on their own survival (which is no longer a challenge). It sounds a lot like the frustration of an academic who sees no use for his increasingly arcane work.

my reading has taken a dark turn this year. I blame it on Thomas Ligotti (first book on my list) ;)

- The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Thomas Ligotti) ... fun fact: S01 of 'True Detectives' has ripped part of the dialogue straight from this book without giving credit

- The Trouble with being born (Emil Cioran)

- The Industrial Society and its Future (Ted Kaczynski)

- The Technological Society (Jaques Ellul)

- Propaganda (Jaques Ellul)

- McMafia - A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld (Misha Glenny)

- The Doors Of Perception (Aldous Huxley)

- The Manipulation of Human Behavior (Albert D. Biderman)

I’m currently reading Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (really a must-read these days, like Mumford’s Pentagon of Power and Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future) and I underlined this summary of Homans:

“‘Formerly, when a New England family convoked a ‘bee’ (that is, a meeting for working in common), it was for all concerned one of the most pleasurable times of the year. The work was scarcely more than a pretext for coming together.’ The activity of sustaining social relations and human contacts predominated over the technical scheme of things and the obligation to work, which were secondary causes.”