[DyslexicAtheist]

thanks for posting and sorry for your loss.

I've heard the name TK first when reading Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us".

15 years later I was burnt out and increasingly aware that Tech was not a force of good. I went on a 3 year journey trying to understand what made TK chose violence. It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly, however hard that is. I started by studying his manifest. I dissected it like a surgeon, then read every book/reference that he gave. What would happen if I read every book he read. How does a bright young man go from reading philosophy and science conclude that men can't be saved.

How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse. TK was an accelerationist who believed the means justifies the end. TK felt that it was a necessary evil to collaborate with those he disagrees with (fascists, neo-nazis etc) as long as they can help bring down the current world order.

One dominat figure that kept popping up repeatedly when going through TK ramblings was Jaques Ellul, a French philosopher, not too well known outside France[1][2]. Ellul must have left quite the impact because even his manifesto is a homage on Ellul's biggest work: The Technological Society (La Technique)[1].

Ellul doesn't just talk about Technology but the whole domain of what we today call Systems Thinking. And he opens your eyes about edge cases and the victims of this thinking in ways even heavyweights like Nassim Taleb will seem like a rookies in comparison.

Ca 2018 I've read everything Ellul wrote and also read multiple times what TK wrote. I was depressed, like really really bad. There is no way out. I still wasn't criminally insane though. There had to be more than just "self-radicalization by information". Something was missing. It was isolation!

So I went on to teach myself bushcraft living off grid for a year in a similar way as TK. "Living off the land" as we call it in infosec (only it's the literal land :)). And this made me understand why TK had so much hate for civilization. It's the same hate the Sentinelese people must have for those visiting their shores[3].

Although I had no guns to feed myself with game meat as TK did. And I did not spend the same time out there. But after a few months without human contact I did understand what humanity has lost and how our connection to mother Earth has been severed.

While I never turned criminally insane and always disagreed with violence, I managed to understand what radicalized TK. It was being isolated. It happens in less severe ways to all of humanity via algorithm and screen time.

If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?

Jacques Ellul is not an easy read when you're vulnerable and searching for answers. Ellul will push you off the cliff of society and do something that today is unthinkable: to question technology and technological progress itself.

TK is not comprehensible to anyone functioning and depending within society because he hated society and he believed it needed to be destroyed. It's pretty hard to have any empathy with this. Because he caused a lot of pain and suffering he robbed himself of leaving a legacy or a lesson.

[1] The technological society https://archive.org/details/TheBetrayalByTechnologyAPortrait...

[2] https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Ellul%2C+Jacqu...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2019/08/01/747368557/the-story-behind-jo...

Edit: yes heavily edited, lots of typos, lots of context cleared up. It still has potential to be misunderstood ofc

[sam2426679]

> How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse

Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system.

'In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing psychological experiment" led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition. Electrodes monitored the subject's physiological reactions. These encounters were filmed, and subjects' expressions of anger and rage were later played back to them repeatedly. The experiment lasted three years, with someone verbally abusing and humiliating Kaczynski each week. Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.'

^ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_st...

(He was 17 years old during his second year at Harvard).

[themaninthedark]

I find it very interesting that the news covering his life neglects to mention the MKULTRA part...

[sbuk]

It boggles the mind how a psychologist could have thought that the experiments were even remotely ethical. TK was an evil man, no doubt, but Henry Murray is equally as evil IMHO, and somewhat culpable for the outcome.

[lelanthran]

>> How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse

> Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system.

"Because Mkultra" is not a valid mitigation or explanation of TK's mental health or lack of it. After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

Sometimes a sausage is just a sausage, and sometimes an evil murderer is just an evil murderer.

There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil.

[hutzlibu]

"There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil. "

You mean it is easier to just jail or execute them?

Short term, sure, but if we want to solve murder in the long term, or just enjoy a stable society, held together by free choice and not fear or domination - then there is really no other choice in trying to understand what makes people go boom, so we can prevent that.

The alternative would be living in fortresses and going out only heavily armed.

Also, do you have a clear definition of "evil" at all?

I don't and I think it is kind of complicated. Starting with the old paradoxon: murder many people while you are in a army and you are a hero. Murder them on the street and you are a villain. So some say, all soldiers are evil murderers (and leave open the question on how to deal with the situation when they come for them or their children). Some say states are the evil. Others say stateless is the root of evil, etc.

And the Unabomber believed he did god, as he tried to end suffering. From a pure philosophical point of view, I can accept that there is a hypothetical chance, that he might be right. But in all practical matters he was a crazy, dangerous fanatic (something I translate to "evil").

But the thing is, many people think actually like him, even though most don't act on it. But they might soon. So now is a time, when one can still reach them. But that only works, when you try to understand their motivations.

And understand why they got there.

[lelanthran]

>> "There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil. "

> You mean it is easier to just jail or execute them?

No, I did not. That's you reading something that was never said.

My point is that you cannot say, as you are saying right now, that there is always an environmental reason for why someone is the way they are.

That certainly isn't true. What I've found is that people who go looking for an environmental reason always find one!

What these people don't explain is why all those other people with a virtually identical environment didn't become mass murderers!

[hutzlibu]

"What these people don't explain is why all those other people with a virtually identical environment didn't become mass murderers!"

I am curious how you conclude that their environment is "virtually identical". I seriously doubt that. What is a paradise for someone can be hell for someone else and to the observer it looks the same.

So this would rather be an indication that the modelling is flawed.

And in the Unabombers case we have among ideological things the actual MKUltra experiment(I think no participant enjoyed it). A experiment designed to break someones mind. But to me it sounds you just concluded that he is evil and this wasn't a factor because other participants did not became mass murderers?

Side question, do you consider the designers of MKUltra as evil?

[kergonath]

> “Because Mkultra" is not a valid mitigation or explanation of TK's mental health or lack of it. After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

Cigarettes cause cancer, and someone’s cancer can be directly linked to smoking even if not everyone who smokes gets cancer. There is no point diagnosing a dead person we don’t know personally, but dismissing the effect of an organised and long period of psychological torture just because not every participant ended up a terrorist sounds a bit myopic. For example, we don’t know about the raving lunatics that don’t make headlines.

[lelanthran]

> but dismissing the effect of an organised and long period of psychological torture just because not every participant ended up a terrorist sounds a bit myopic.

And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic?

There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment". All the participants in that environment had the same agency, but it was only TK that went down this particular path.

TBH, if the sample size was small (a dozen or two mkultra subjects), then there's not enough data to tell if it was the environment or the individual.

If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.

Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.

[kergonath]

> And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic?

That’s just his statistics work… Making a rare event more common does not make it a certainty. Again, we don’t know about any possible other people who might have been seriously disturbed in other, less attention-grabbing ways.

Nobody said that it was the only reason, but let’s be honest: if you take unstable people and condition them that way, such outcomes are not inconceivable. Saying that the experiment (weekly hours of psychological torture) did not affect this is not really believable.

> There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment".

It’s a good thing nobody said that, then…

> If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.

Regardless of sample size, people who go full rogue that way are exceedingly rare in the first place. You’d need thousands upon thousands of subjects to detect increases over a baseline chance of 1:10000000.

> Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.

Again, nobody said that. In any case, I certainly did not. I think we can have a rational discourse between “he was inhuman and absolutely evil” (he was not) and “he was actually right” (he was not either). In the end, he was just a human. His nature, upbringing, and environment all played roles.

[bondarchuk]

>After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

I've seen this argument a few times in this thread, and I hope I can explain my disagreement here. Even if not everyone subjected to this experiment becomes a terrorist, and even if there is something specific to Ted K.'s psychological makeup that made him become a terrorist after undergoing the experiment, that does not mean we can totally shift the blame away from the experimenters. Suppose that in the parallel world where he did not get experimented on, he would not have become a terrorist, we can still blame Murray (and/or the CIA) for taking (abnormal and extreme) actions that turned him into a terrorist.

[nine_k]

Thank you; this elucidates a lot.

So it boils down to a question: would you exchange the life of a lone top predator (in a forest with a firearm) to any other kind of life?

For some people the answer would be in favor of the top predator life. To choose the life of a tiger, one just should stop loving anyone. After this, killing becomes mere killing (predators do not "murder"), and the whole idea of destroying everyone else, or at least reducing them to a comparable state of a worthy adversary, becomes pretty natural. Of course technology becomes an enemy, because it gives the rest of humans an unfair advantage; first of all, the key human technology, the society. Certainly a city is an uninhabitable place for a lone tiger, and of course it limits the tiger's freedom in uncomfortable ways.

Some people just really want to see the world burn.

[jaredhallen]

I think characterizing the contempt for technology only in terms of the advantage it conveys to the "adversary" is kind of an incomplete analysis. There are true and valid reasons outside that. I'm in the camp that it (technology) is a double edged sword. It's hard to argue with the improvements in medicine, reduction in basic suffering, etc. But it wreaks a lot of havoc in its own right. The question is whether the good outweighs the bad. At one point that was a resounding yes. Currently? Harder to say. And if the answer to that question is no longer yes, then is there any meaningful way for a group of billions to coordinate conscious decisions and limitations about how technology should be approached, developed, and applied? Heavy stuff. Especially for a bunch of tech geeks.

[goatlover]

Are there any human groups in history which were not technological? Where do you draw the line? Where the Amish did? Earlier? Was writing bad? Architecture, math, running water, clothing, fire?

[jaredhallen]

I suppose ideally you don't draw a hard line, but look at each specific technology separately. Get out your crystal ball and do your best to anticipate downstream impacts. Or at least be willing to backpedal or adjust when something doesn't work out like we thought.

[nine_k]

Is there anything in the world which is not a double-edged sword, something completely devoid of downsides? AFAIK only certain transcendent entities are declared to have this property.

[Eisenstein]

Do you mean personal downside or societal downside? It could be argued that a well developed persona covering up innate sociopathy would be highly beneficial to a person and have no personal downsides, as long they as truly didn't care about others.

[pyrale]

Just because anything has drawbacks if you look hard enough doesn't mean that it's impossible to differentiate innovations on that criterion. Surely you can see how aspirin is not as concerning as leaded gasoline.

[natmaka]

Each and every parameter (even "population size") has an interval of 'adequate' values. Too few of anything, or too much of it, leads to major downsides.

[natmaka]

> To choose the life of a tiger, one just should stop loving anyone

Tigers live lonely and avoid fighting other tigers to death (even the extreme case of males both courting the same female rarely leads to such an issue), probably in order to preserve their genus.

Lions live in 'societies' (well-structured prides) and routinely kill other lions (even cubs).

The average lion, albeit way less physically formidable than a tiger, is a very dangerous contender against a tiger: he hits to kill.

[nine_k]

This is correct. I only chose the tiger as a metaphor because tigers are top predators and are solitary. They rarely meet other tigers.

If we need an example of a highly social predator species that rarely kill each other in conflicts, that'd be wolves.

[pixl97]

I expect we'll see more people take up TK's manifesto if generational AI starts taking over jobs and causing displacement in the next few years. Technology won't even give other people the power to become the enemy, it will be the direct enemy.

[nine_k]

I'd take a Butlerian Jihad over Unabomber's activity any day.

[Thorrez]

>If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?

There's a name for people who go into the woods and live all alone: hermits. They don't tend to lose all empathy for others.

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

[tsimionescu]

> If you really want the full TK experience I implore you to live in the woods for a decade and see how you feel about humanity. No laptop instagram or electricity. Will you have any empathy left for the rest of society upon your return?

It's important to remember that living alone for any significant period of time is not natural for human beings. It's not something that brings you closer to yourself, it is a stress on your mind that distorts your real, social self into something else.

Some people will be able to stay healthy after such an experience, some will not - just like any other stressor on our bodies. But losing empathy is a mental illness in itself, not some rediscovery of a bond with nature.

[MisterTea]

> Ellul will push you off the cliff of society and do something that today is unthinkable: to question technology and technological progress itself.

I don't think this is as radical of an idea as you think as I think about this quite often. Basically the grim realizations of the harm I bring upon the earth in pursuit of my career, hobbies, and other lifestyle choices. It honestly bothers me regularly enough to make me question myself and my identity.

As for trying to understand TK - Did at any point you acknowledge - "I neither have his unique psyche and the lifetime of unique input that shaped it?" You didn't turn to criminality because you aren't TK. No amount of cosplaying will make you think like TK.

[ZeroGravitas]

I think the detail that he was financially supported by his family while "escaping society" is relevant.

Don't want to be that meme guy who criticizes the person complaining about modern society via an iPhone, but it feel a touch hypocritical to be a genius planning to actively destroy modern society while living on handouts from that society while cosplaying at being an independent self-made man.

[always2slow]

How did you do all that research into TK and not realize his mind was broken by MKUltra? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Psychological_st...

[armitron]

His manifesto is anything but the product of a broken mind. Go ahead and read it, maybe you'll reconsider the MKUltra superficialities that in all likelihood had no connection whatsoever to TK's philosophy and later actions.

[sizzle]

This is incredible, do you have a blog documenting this journey? You must be one of the few people on earth, if not only person, to have done this.

What are you up to nowadays after this profound experience? Ever tried psilocybin?

[xorbax]

> This is incredible, do you have a blog documenting

This feels like a joke. Even more than "I lived in the woods for years so I could figure out a mailbomber"

TK was mentally ill. Cutting himself off from society was a symptom, not the cause. Being a mimic doesn't give insight into the original aside from the act.

[DyslexicAtheist]

thanks. I try not to spend too much time online anymore and no longer have a blog.

As TK complained himself (paraphrasing) "you can not learn from academic papers or books about how to thrive in the wilderness. it's something you need to pick up out there.", and I too think it is pointless to put this in a blog.

Never tried psilocybin but once ate some shit mushrooms by accident that gave me the runs and resulted in some pretty bad dehydration. No fun when you need to go every 15 minutes and it's 3 AM and all you have for a toilet is a shovel to dig a ditch and leaves from a tree to wipe :D

never tied psilocybin and generally don't experiment with drugs when in nature. always wanted to try it though. but I'm too old for such things now

[natmaka]

Too much or too few of anything isn't (by definition) adequate.

By craving for material comfort we want: to possess more => better yield => economies of scale.

This leads us to live in conditions which aren't appropriate to our current 'nature': large urban areas (where we often interact with people we don't know: this is stress-inducing esp. for males), specialization (we aren't ants), centralization and bureaucracy (we aren't cogs)...

Pertinent views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#The_Breakdown_of_...

[tymekpavel]

I’m sure you didn’t mean it, but in the English language “Pollak” and its variations are derogatory terms for people of Polish descent. The preferred term is “Pole.”

[xorvoid]

I also came here to say this. Thank you! It’s a slur and not everyone seems to realize that…

[eptcyka]

Because it isn't a slur in all English speaking cultures.

[ETH_start]

I suspect the isolation misleads the subject. The subject loses their modes of interaction with civilization, that make civilization so far superior to the low-population density existence of prehistoric hunter gatherers.

Without those modes, the subject returns to civilization seeing only what civilization deprives one of: the great expanses of unspoiled wilderness.

And that produces the existential crisis and criminal insanity of TK.

[JackFr]

> And he opens your eyes about edge cases and the victims of this thinking in ways even heavyweights like Nassim Taleb will seem like a rookies in comparison.

Nassim Taleb is not a heavyweight by any stretch.

[inglor_cz]

Well, he lifts a lot ...

[fsckboy]

> It still has potential to be misunderstood ofc

> It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly

I just happened to research this recently, rabbit hole a propos nothing: (1) in English, "Polack" is an ethnic slur for a Polish person; (2) in a handful of unrelated European languages, Polak is just the word for a Pole; just so y'all know.

[inglor_cz]

It is interesting that the native word (because in the Polish language, "Polak" is a neutral standard word for a male Pole; a female would be Polka, just like the dance) mutated to a slur an ocean away.

[Thorrez]

>TK was an accelerationist who believed the means justifies the end.

Is this a typo? Do you mean instead that the ends justify the means?

[gverrilla]

what a stupid endeavor.

[bondarchuk]

If you don't mind, what would you say is the most worthwile of Ellul's books after The Technological Society and Propaganda?

[roeles]

Anyone interested in this material might also enjoy the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.

[perfmode]

thank you