Machines Come From the Earth

I’d been thinking about some of the flaws in Ted Kaczynski’s writings, and the sympathy with his attitude toward technology and his condemnation of industrial society among those who mostly object to the exploding mailbox portion of his practice, those scattered across the political spectrum, pointing in all directions and tending to meet ass to mouth at the intersection of vague antipathies, grudges and frustrations and escapist power fantasies and romantic primitivist nostrums, high-tension hunches about systems and individual freedom, and so was girding my psychic loins for the task of outlining cretinous oversights, crackpot banalities and simmering lunacies in his work, in his popular reception and his mythic image in the dissident sphere, for a public illiterate and constantly reading and writing, inhaling words, buffeting language and huffing stories, tirelessly snorting lines, undertaking more and more self-conscious and cringing projects, oddly encouraging of apparent fellow travelers and hysterically dismissive and defensive when encountering interlopers, both alone and inescapably surrounded by similar others, with one eye always out the door, caught in a barnyard riot of animals (virtually) actuallying each other, when I tried to log in to my USPS account to sign up for direct deposit and health insurance, and I called a helpline number and waited for a friendly robot man to run through a list of options, and then I selected what I thought was the correct course and was given a new number to call, another automated line that told me to call the original number for further assistance, thus putting me through a repetition of the menu of options, when I made a breakthrough and put myself on a list to be called back in an hour and forty minutes to two hours later, and finally talked to a human being (allegedly) and was given advice that didn’t help, forcing me to call the robot line again and be put on hold for another two hours, when I renounced my intentions and decided uncle Ted was right and industrial society needs to collapse immediately if not sooner; billions must die, some quickly and others protractedly, but all in blazing pain and terror; tidal waves and mud slides must sweep away the cities and the earth should open and suck us into Satan's guts; all surviving programmers, scientists, doctors, technicians and bureaucrats must be hunted down and killed with stones. The only healthy human population size is 35, and the highest acceptable level of technology is the fig leaf.

Therein resides one of the key problems with Kaczynski; the elevation of a bellyache into a belief; the promotion of assorted gripes and crankish obsessions into a worldview. Always with this type, I note a seeming severity of reasoning betraying a disorderly mind (am I projecting here? Check my pulse.) All too often, people are easily impressed by an appearance of rigor and unflinching honesty, of authenticity, and by the pose of the radical, the uncompromising thinker willing to reach revolutionary conclusions and live with extreme consequences (or die by them), when such radicality more often attests to lapses of thought, slovenly logic, threadbare scholarship, failure of spiritual nerve, deficiencies of reverence or awe, and corruption and attenuation of social instincts.

Writing anything, ever, for any reason, is already questionable enough, borderline inexcusable and probably best countered with corporal punishment (caning, whipping, tarring and feathering, gluing and cotton balling, locker shoving, head shaving, drawing a magic marker penis on the forehead); a manifesto is a self-diagnosed certificate of murderous/suicidal insanity. All writing leans in the direction of the manifesto, tempting its writers and readers to act; all writing that calls for spectacular action or the forming of a movement shouts its inadequacy, just as all acts and movements sprung from written soils inevitably show their shallow roots and come apart, sometimes in mincing art collectives and other times in the violent outbursts of stewing loners and the semi-organized slaughter of totalitarian regimes.

Systems thinking refers in the ideal sense to grasping interconnections among parts and analyzing feedback loops, a holistic comprehension of complex organizations and organisms. In the wild, the invocation of a system often serves as lazy shorthand, creating a semblance of critical and dispassionate judgement out of idiosyncratic fixations. References to complexity become simplistic; nods to systems regress into spasms.

In any social order or environment, there is never one dominant or encompassing system, only more and less tenuous interrelations among partial systems and inconsistently contributory elements. Stronger and weaker tendencies, varying paces of production and consumption, diverging and overlapping populations, temporary accords, competing formalizations and dissolutions, occasional and irreducible expressions of singular natures. For the sake of analytic ease and psychological stability, one particular system is isolated and determined as an overriding influence on a range of phenomena, behaviors, observable trends, statistical effects; this mental abridgement applies to all levels of scale in explaining actions of individuals, groups and other systems. Thus the missing whole is plugged by a swollen particular; the bigger the whole the more hot air is pumped into the replacement piece.

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On weekend routes on the affluent old north side, down streets with historic mansions and those newer builds, the bug boxes and dildo drawers and anal bead bottles, the sky grading blue and grey and purple, faded, in untroubled rot, reposing, as if separated not only by distance but by time, as if drawn and lying slack in the irrecoverable past, the reflected light of tarnished nickels on bare trees, sidewalks, crusted mud and brown grass lawns, icy pricking winds accenting the ambient temperature flushing snot and tears and scouring extremities raw, through sparsely peopled neighborhoods, stomping on a generally sleepy scene, almost suspiciously placid except for the inner alarm of knowing how many more hours I’ll need to finish delivering all the mail and parcels, the hard plastic and paper advertisements with razor blade edges, the dizzying mix of unwanted and oily marketing intrusions into inner sanctums and secret bubble wrapped desires in anonymous circulation(the queasy erotic connotation of the word package), the privately ordered whim fulfillments carried by miscellaneous economic marginals, typically of lower educational extraction but sometimes temperamentally maladjusted or unambitious, mercenary barbarians at the unlocked cheap metal gates of imperial clerks, mandarins, puffy administrators, huckstering dentists, mixed race union managers of purebred dog families, stooping on front porches before the lidless eye of digital recording devices often eerily chiming their inhuman recognition of the quasi-human presences soon shuffling back to idling vans and tauruses while talking to the uncoupled coparents of their children on speaker phone.

Industrial society has given me and all my fellow shambling package handlers and mail carriers what someone like David Graeber might call a bullshit job, not as artificial and unnecessary as many other jobs, but a line of work that could probably be reorganized, slimmed down or eliminated. Ted Kaczynski would classify my labor as well as the consumption of my labor as a surrogate activity, a misplaced attempt to satisfy what he calls the power process.

But his understanding of the proper bounds of the power process is just as arbitrary and artificial as any allegedly inessential work or recreation. Without even providing a rigorous definition, he boils true satisfaction down to successful physical and mental exertion in securing necessities, i.e. deploying ingenuity and endurance in hunting, gathering, possibly tilling, and building rudimentary shelters. There’s almost no elaboration on or support for this foundational claim but Kaczynski uses it to discredit most civilized activities.

I could accept that killing animals and picking berries might technically come closer to necessary labor than many other pursuits, in that nothing can be accomplished when people starve to death, but if technological development and exploitative/cooperative economic structures have reduced the need for a great number of people to perform subsistence labor, why should those additional people not fill their time, earn a living and flesh out their talents and interests in other ways? If many people experience profound frustration and disappointment in their efforts to find tolerable or respectable or satisfying work, and feel plagued by insecurities and tormented by boredom, or feel permanently uneasy, adrift, discontented in mass scale commercial environments and defeated in civilized status competitions, and suffer from diseases and mental and spiritual afflictions specifically produced by technologically advanced production and consumption patterns, it doesn’t necessarily follow that chasing a warthog through the woods all day and then relaxing by staring at a dirt patch for hours would provide some deep and abiding meaning or contentment that would then fully console a person for the still mysterious and irremediable problems of suffering and death.

Without being much of an anthropologist or ethnologist, I venture it’s a typical quirk of the western industrialized mind, with Kaczynski as an extreme and caricatural example, to overrate the peace, stasis, well-being and credulity of primitive man, carelessly relying on the categories of primitive, natural, ancient, evolutionary, etc to haphazardly lump together wildly disparate and incompatible levels of political and technological sophistication, economic habits, social practices and belief systems.

While salient in some crucial respects, the emphasis on the rupture or quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, or any periodization that marks the industrial revolution as the decisive event of human history, risks serious misapprehension of both human nature and the natural world, with a common inclination to error consisting of neglecting the supposedly modern qualities inhering in primitive man, and conversely overlooking the continuity of savage and mythic/enchanted techniques and coping mechanisms in modern technological society. Broadly considered, we should question whether primitive man in all cases was such a self-satisfied, credulous numbskull, without irony, dread, insanity, or frivolous economic roles, just as we might suspect modern man of exaggerating his own special disenchantment, superfluity and distance from an origin or unwavering nature and presence.

Along the same lines, I also view Kacynski’s definition of socialization as narrow and misleading; he thinks of socialization rather more like a programmer or a technician overly influenced by a particularly atomized social environment, as a top-down imposition of codes and behaviors onto individuals considered as essentially isolated, who conform with greater or lesser agility and comfort. But socialization should be thought of as the creation and cultivation of relationships, aiming at their durability and continuity, beginning and primarily remaining within the sphere of small-scale networks, of families, neighborhoods, communities and professional or craft organizations. Under this model, an entirely different picture of modern maladaptation emerges. For Kacyznski, who spends inordinate time in his manifesto detailing the psychology of a political faction, a typical source of modern suffering can be traced to oversocialization, in the sense that people have been excessively programmed and conditioned and have become pathologically sensitive to infractions and violations and overly preoccupied with the judgements and behavior of others. According to Kacyznski, the moral hectoring and aggression characteristic of what he thinks of primarily as the leftist stem from the need to vent stifled urges, to experience a kind of freedom from oppressive norms.

But if we see socialization not as an anonymous and mass shaping power over individuals but as a multi-pronged, reciprocal and ongoing process of relationship building and maintenance, then the average modern person suffers more from undersocialization, with the much-observed hostility, calculated ruthlessness, as well as the more recently pronounced demoralization and anhedonic withdrawal as effects of deteriorating social bonds and forms. What Kaczynski and many others profile as the sanctimonious, domineering yet self-loathing and insecure leftist arises not through excessive identification with moral codes but out of the steady erosion of social networks and support structures. In this domain as in many others, Kaczynski reveals a puerile and shallow outlook that should call into question the scope and cogency of his critical assessment of technological society.

As a corollary to romanticizing the wholeness of primitive man, nature is misrepresented as a lost homeland, a leafy green heaven, either perfectly balanced and pure or at least evolving at a measured and reasonable rate, slow enough for each species to reconcile itself to its extinction. Thanks to restless man, machines proliferated and scourged the earth, accelerating rhythms and plunging into forbidding depths. As the maker of machines, modern man then bears outsized responsibility for the destruction of nature, upsetting the former balance with his arrogant attempt at technological control.

Nature is no eden and never was. The delicate balance of any environment is won through carnage, exploitation and excoriating boredom. The fleeting peace of any average animal, momentarily free from agonizing pain and death, contains a tremble of anxiety, restlessness, and despair; natural being resonates with an obscure sadness and a longing for transcending its wretched mortal and limited frame.

Diagnoses of modern ills, especially of the more conservative or reactionary strand, tend to fall into the ambiguity of blaming moral enervation on technologically procured conveniences and pleasures, the lack of fiber stiffening hardships, while also decrying the increasing difficulty of attaining social goods and even basic necessities. It would almost seem as if historically uncommon cleverness and drive were needed to flourish. And it’s usually unclear, if we stop and think for a moment, if life has been made so effortless it infantilizes people, or if rather infantilization is a reaction to a heightening of savage economic and status competitions.

I wonder to what extent the routine experience of chafing with impatience during a bureaucratic procedure and the unresolved (irresolvable) envy and frustration of competing with fluidly shifting populations for material resources, reproductive and romantic advantages and amorphous prestige have fueled theories and daydreams on the political left and right about millennia long missteps by way of the dominance of instrumental reason, Judeo-Christian Universalism and egalitarianism, the forgetting of being, agriculture and eating cereal.