The Unabomber was right?

A post over at The Technium begins with the eye-cocking premise that the Unabomber had a few things right:

As best I understand, the Unabomber’s 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.

In short, Kaczynski claims that civilization is the disease and not the cure. He wasn’t the first to make this claim.

In a lengthy and fairly-well-thought-out post, though, the author goes on to deconstruct that claim, and the claim of other, similar “anti-civilzation collapsatarians.”

The problem is that Kaczynski’s 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 …. In his Montana hermitage he was free to move about as much as the snow and weather permitted him. He could freely choose among a limited set of choices of what to do in the evenings. He may have personally been content with his limited world, but overall his choices were very constrained, although he had unshackled freedom within those limited choices. Sort of like, “you are free to hoe the potatoes any hour of the day you want.” Kaczynski confused great latitude within limited choices as superior over modest latitude in an expanding number of choices.

It’s a good read!

Oh, and speaking of the Unabomber — he totally spawned a “look” didn’t he? He wanted to spawn a movement, but I’ll bet he didn’t want it to be a fashion movement. This always makes me think “Unabomber”: