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.
All very interesting questions, CC. Well worthy of teasing out somewhere.
As regards your earlier issue raised, about Ted K's claimed "oversocialization" and your own claim of "undersocialization", perhaps the real issue isn't the amount of social contact but its quality. Since more community-based socialization becomes rarer and workplace contacts are as temporary as the jobs that go with them, there's a tendency to develop the kind of parasocial relationship typical of the social media contact and make it more generally true in real life. That's to say, it's based on low-cost gestures (mutual quick messages) rather than actually valuable friendship acts (help in moving, a shoulder to cry on, just someone trustworthy to watch the kid or feed the pet).
Regarding the last one, infantilization, I'd say there's a dynamic going on where both things are true: making one's way in professional and family life is so much more difficult and burdened with debt than ever before, while staying at home hand having treats delivered is easier than ever. So there are negative and positive stimuli tending the contemporary individual toward infantilism.
I get the sense that you're exploring Ted K in relation to Luigi M and his manifesto, and there might be a lot of common factors in both cases. Certainly K was a more powerful intellect but his essential "lonerness" (American individualism?) meant that his actions would always be pointless. John Wayning the problem gets nowhere.
That said, there's an awful lot to be said for direct action taken against corporate aggression - occupation, sabotages and many other acts of force that have an effect tending to the overthrow of the existing system. Just that it has to be well judged and co-ordinated in terms of its real efficacy.
All talk of grudges and resentment - or ressentiment if you take the Nietzschean line - aside, there IS a class war going on, and our class ain't winning right now. As far as I know, you're not an oligarch, so that puts you on the losing side alongside the rest of us. I'm sure you remember Spinoza's hard question...
Good points, I agree about the infantilization dynamic, I think the ambiguity of analyzing/condemning it comes from how both sides seem operative at the same time, with certain basic life functions having become easier than ever, while others have become more esoteric and elitist. And I also agree that there is such a thing as corporate aggression, class war, conflicting economic interests, and that there are ways in which it makes sense to fight back or participate in the struggle. That's where things get really complicated, at least as I see it, because certainly there are more individualistic solutions that don't work so well, but also, just because it's ostensibly collective doesn't mean it will pan out either. As for Spinoza's question of why men fight for their own subjugation, yes that's always worth raising and exploring. Of course there is ideological hoodwinking, but ideology isn't such a simple thing either, and economic classes are themselves divided along many other lines that often prevent cohesion and cooperation, people see their interests differently for many different reasons, but all this really calls for its own separate discussion, essay, book, etc
Just a little thing that popped up today re - the low level of investment in social relationships. I've noticed this before but until now I hadn't known there was a name for it - flaking.
When I was younger it was simple - if you said you were gonna show up to help someone move house or go to their dinner, you go. If not, you weren't really a friend, so there were serious consequences to that relationship.
You might want to consider this phenomenon re the quality of socialization rather than the quantity, as we've discussed above.
We can get into it more later, but the most brutal and simple observation we can make here is that people flake because they can, because there are more barriers to and available escapes from relationships. People really are more disposable and replaceable to each other. As to why they want to flake, that will require a closer look
I’d love to delve into these issues sometime, I think a discussion on these points, (especially the infantalizing of society, or the correct way to resist gouging by elites) would be really interesting.
Right now I’m planning to develop my own essay on dread and get a few more voices in on that. If you’re too busy to contribute, I’d at least like permission to repost your original comment on my essay as your contribution, if that’s OK.
If you have time and inclination to say more, that’d be cool too. I’ll give you a heads-up when that’s happening, probably within a week or so.
Great stuff. I don't agree with everything but there's definitely valuable thought here. Only thing is (and this is coming from a fan) your style: there is a lithe line between complexity, nuance, context-awareness, and convolution, circumlocution, redundancy.
Thank you. Fair point to bring up that fine line (lithe works too), we all make our choices. Lately I’ve been willing to step over that line, in part as a playful/hostile repudiation of a more typically mannered economic or concise style. But who knows, I could get bored with the maximalist flouting of reader ease any day
“…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…” Imagine entire pages of increasingly detailed, historical, highfalutin, and sadistic punishment methods just as an aside to the piece.
Mr. Caudell you had my attn: at the complete sentence for a title. The heart is a lonely hunter and etcetera. En toto I want to revisit the litanies in here to see what everybody sees. Maybe by now we should rap to a new iambic pent-up that permits of 'maybe's every few bursts. Henry Miller says he can write the opposite of what he thinks he was going to say and be understood. But one cannot obey single pronouncements of his and not expect fiascos.
Both over-socialization and under-socialization can be true. We need only make a distinction between personal and impersonal forms of socialization to see that modern people suffer from a surfeit of impersonal socialization and a dearth of personal socialization.
I don't agree that technology is *the* problem, that's just it. Technology causes problems, but existence is hardly free of them just because technology and scale are limited. I mocked the primitive solution and made it sound sillier than it is to counter the overblown reverence for it. Odd how the most uncompromising and penetrating critics of all the ills of technological society become so docile, reverent, respectful, ie so uncritical toward the apparent alternatives and antecedents. The critical anthropologist is usually the dupe of his savage superiors. Exactly what I'm contesting is that meaningful being and doing is denied to us in all cases by industrial society. Volunteering at a nursing home, spending time with family(to the extent that you still have one), raising children, coming up with engineering solutions to practical mechanical problems, working in the trades, building and repairing houses, working on cures to diseases, advancing scientific fields, doing research, studying history, trying to create great works of art, learning a range of crafts, practicing a religion; all these things have no meaning whatsoever, or are impossible now, thanks to the machines. Certainly technology and scale complicate, threaten and in some ways bar meaningful activity, but the absolute contrast between a total void of meaning in the present and its bursting fullness from ancient subsistence labor and communion with nature is obtuse.
I do not agree that activities required for subsistence are intrinsically in all cases more physically and spiritually fulfilling. I suppose I'd rather grow a potato than fill out a form, but I'd also rather listen to a Bach fugue or read a sonnet than catch a fish. And I'd rather help build a cathedral or make an earnest attempt at writing a great work than spend all my time making sure my thatched hut isn't leaking. The deep meaning and pleasure of making my own tools and shelter--does that include fashioning my own wicker outhouse and cob bucket toilets? Why is that more deeply pleasurable and meaningful than being a plumber in the modern sense? Call it blanket dismissal if you like, I call the precious extolling of the deep meaning of tending to root vegetables hokum.
It's far from indisputable that primal people's lives were essentially peaceful. When I said I wasn't an ethnologist, I disqualified myself from expertise, but I didn't mean to suggest that I've never even whiffed any work on anthropology. The violent practices and their levels of organization or sanction, the proneness to disease, accidents, the degrees and qualities of the physical vulnerabilities and the mental and physical health of primal peoples seems to be in ongoing dispute and to have varied depending on specific tribes and regions and times, with many complicated findings, reconsiderations and debates occurring. Or did all this just get settled two or three days ago? Sorry I haven't checked recently.
This piece isn't an apologia for industrial digital society; I take no responsibility for implications; those are your own business. That nature is bounded isn't helpful, it's more mystification. Are planetary extinction events *bounded*? The purpose of deconstructing the boundary between nature and technological civilization isn't to celebrate Big Macs but to make more sense of man's struggle with nature which is part of nature's self destructive history. Machines come from the groundless human mind--very satisfying, I'll go back to my stick whittling now. Wait where does that groundless mind come from?
You're throwing a stodgy fit because I don't agree with you that growing a potato is a mind blowing experience or that in hunter gatherer societies no one ever killed anyone. This is already a comical argument but that seems lost on you. And you tie things up by portentously referring to the incoming collapse of society, pretty much par for the anarcho primitivist course. When things don't go your way at least you have the approaching death and deprivation of almost everyone. When we're scrounging for lichen in the near future (in an egalitarian fashion, of course, very peacefully and contentedly) I'm sure you'll feel supercharged with vindication. Do you think there's anything to the idea of the kind of person who doesn't handle disagreement well being especially hung up on fantasies of civilizational collapse and living in a leaderless band of noncompetitive foragers? Maybe you've written about that, feel free to cite another two or three of your own tedious 15,000 word substack articles in a comment thread. I won't be reading any of it.
I have a feeling Bach would give the glory to God, not nature. But it's hardly here or there either way. He might have lived in pre industrial times, but he still lived in a society of grains and oppression, which by enlightened hunter gatherer standards places his cultural output beneath wood carvings and ritual chants. Professional cynic? If only. I've worked in restaurants and most recently as a mailman. I write and publish in my spare time, for fun. What is it that you do for a living?
Of course I enjoy my alienation. Who doesn't? I hope you don't think that's any kind of revelation. But then again it seems you really don't get my sense of humor or style, you seem fixated on how miserable you think I am, but I think you're having a harder time with my material than I am, so maybe this is just now dawning on you. You might be too principled to have caught on to a mundane psychological insight before now, as you surely don't enjoy even a moment of writing and publishing dystopian novels that are blurbed by Terry Gilliam and Russell Brand, what with all that meaningful potato peeling and fish gutting you missed out on.
Even if I sneered hard enough to have a stroke I don't think I could match the arch pissiness of saying I don't even need to argue because mommy nature is going to come and punish everyone for being bad boys.
All very interesting questions, CC. Well worthy of teasing out somewhere.
As regards your earlier issue raised, about Ted K's claimed "oversocialization" and your own claim of "undersocialization", perhaps the real issue isn't the amount of social contact but its quality. Since more community-based socialization becomes rarer and workplace contacts are as temporary as the jobs that go with them, there's a tendency to develop the kind of parasocial relationship typical of the social media contact and make it more generally true in real life. That's to say, it's based on low-cost gestures (mutual quick messages) rather than actually valuable friendship acts (help in moving, a shoulder to cry on, just someone trustworthy to watch the kid or feed the pet).
Regarding the last one, infantilization, I'd say there's a dynamic going on where both things are true: making one's way in professional and family life is so much more difficult and burdened with debt than ever before, while staying at home hand having treats delivered is easier than ever. So there are negative and positive stimuli tending the contemporary individual toward infantilism.
I get the sense that you're exploring Ted K in relation to Luigi M and his manifesto, and there might be a lot of common factors in both cases. Certainly K was a more powerful intellect but his essential "lonerness" (American individualism?) meant that his actions would always be pointless. John Wayning the problem gets nowhere.
That said, there's an awful lot to be said for direct action taken against corporate aggression - occupation, sabotages and many other acts of force that have an effect tending to the overthrow of the existing system. Just that it has to be well judged and co-ordinated in terms of its real efficacy.
All talk of grudges and resentment - or ressentiment if you take the Nietzschean line - aside, there IS a class war going on, and our class ain't winning right now. As far as I know, you're not an oligarch, so that puts you on the losing side alongside the rest of us. I'm sure you remember Spinoza's hard question...
Good points, I agree about the infantilization dynamic, I think the ambiguity of analyzing/condemning it comes from how both sides seem operative at the same time, with certain basic life functions having become easier than ever, while others have become more esoteric and elitist. And I also agree that there is such a thing as corporate aggression, class war, conflicting economic interests, and that there are ways in which it makes sense to fight back or participate in the struggle. That's where things get really complicated, at least as I see it, because certainly there are more individualistic solutions that don't work so well, but also, just because it's ostensibly collective doesn't mean it will pan out either. As for Spinoza's question of why men fight for their own subjugation, yes that's always worth raising and exploring. Of course there is ideological hoodwinking, but ideology isn't such a simple thing either, and economic classes are themselves divided along many other lines that often prevent cohesion and cooperation, people see their interests differently for many different reasons, but all this really calls for its own separate discussion, essay, book, etc
Just a little thing that popped up today re - the low level of investment in social relationships. I've noticed this before but until now I hadn't known there was a name for it - flaking.
When I was younger it was simple - if you said you were gonna show up to help someone move house or go to their dinner, you go. If not, you weren't really a friend, so there were serious consequences to that relationship.
You might want to consider this phenomenon re the quality of socialization rather than the quantity, as we've discussed above.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jan/07/flaking-out-of-social-plans
We can get into it more later, but the most brutal and simple observation we can make here is that people flake because they can, because there are more barriers to and available escapes from relationships. People really are more disposable and replaceable to each other. As to why they want to flake, that will require a closer look
I’d love to delve into these issues sometime, I think a discussion on these points, (especially the infantalizing of society, or the correct way to resist gouging by elites) would be really interesting.
Right now I’m planning to develop my own essay on dread and get a few more voices in on that. If you’re too busy to contribute, I’d at least like permission to repost your original comment on my essay as your contribution, if that’s OK.
If you have time and inclination to say more, that’d be cool too. I’ll give you a heads-up when that’s happening, probably within a week or so.
Of course, you can repost. Let me know when you’d like additional comments
Great stuff. I don't agree with everything but there's definitely valuable thought here. Only thing is (and this is coming from a fan) your style: there is a lithe line between complexity, nuance, context-awareness, and convolution, circumlocution, redundancy.
Thank you. Fair point to bring up that fine line (lithe works too), we all make our choices. Lately I’ve been willing to step over that line, in part as a playful/hostile repudiation of a more typically mannered economic or concise style. But who knows, I could get bored with the maximalist flouting of reader ease any day
I like the idea of absurd maximalism.
“…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…” Imagine entire pages of increasingly detailed, historical, highfalutin, and sadistic punishment methods just as an aside to the piece.
Mr. Caudell you had my attn: at the complete sentence for a title. The heart is a lonely hunter and etcetera. En toto I want to revisit the litanies in here to see what everybody sees. Maybe by now we should rap to a new iambic pent-up that permits of 'maybe's every few bursts. Henry Miller says he can write the opposite of what he thinks he was going to say and be understood. But one cannot obey single pronouncements of his and not expect fiascos.
Both over-socialization and under-socialization can be true. We need only make a distinction between personal and impersonal forms of socialization to see that modern people suffer from a surfeit of impersonal socialization and a dearth of personal socialization.
> Nature is no eden and never was. The temporary harmony of any environment is won through carnage, exploitation and even excoriating boredom.
That's a modern idea.
I don't agree that technology is *the* problem, that's just it. Technology causes problems, but existence is hardly free of them just because technology and scale are limited. I mocked the primitive solution and made it sound sillier than it is to counter the overblown reverence for it. Odd how the most uncompromising and penetrating critics of all the ills of technological society become so docile, reverent, respectful, ie so uncritical toward the apparent alternatives and antecedents. The critical anthropologist is usually the dupe of his savage superiors. Exactly what I'm contesting is that meaningful being and doing is denied to us in all cases by industrial society. Volunteering at a nursing home, spending time with family(to the extent that you still have one), raising children, coming up with engineering solutions to practical mechanical problems, working in the trades, building and repairing houses, working on cures to diseases, advancing scientific fields, doing research, studying history, trying to create great works of art, learning a range of crafts, practicing a religion; all these things have no meaning whatsoever, or are impossible now, thanks to the machines. Certainly technology and scale complicate, threaten and in some ways bar meaningful activity, but the absolute contrast between a total void of meaning in the present and its bursting fullness from ancient subsistence labor and communion with nature is obtuse.
I do not agree that activities required for subsistence are intrinsically in all cases more physically and spiritually fulfilling. I suppose I'd rather grow a potato than fill out a form, but I'd also rather listen to a Bach fugue or read a sonnet than catch a fish. And I'd rather help build a cathedral or make an earnest attempt at writing a great work than spend all my time making sure my thatched hut isn't leaking. The deep meaning and pleasure of making my own tools and shelter--does that include fashioning my own wicker outhouse and cob bucket toilets? Why is that more deeply pleasurable and meaningful than being a plumber in the modern sense? Call it blanket dismissal if you like, I call the precious extolling of the deep meaning of tending to root vegetables hokum.
It's far from indisputable that primal people's lives were essentially peaceful. When I said I wasn't an ethnologist, I disqualified myself from expertise, but I didn't mean to suggest that I've never even whiffed any work on anthropology. The violent practices and their levels of organization or sanction, the proneness to disease, accidents, the degrees and qualities of the physical vulnerabilities and the mental and physical health of primal peoples seems to be in ongoing dispute and to have varied depending on specific tribes and regions and times, with many complicated findings, reconsiderations and debates occurring. Or did all this just get settled two or three days ago? Sorry I haven't checked recently.
This piece isn't an apologia for industrial digital society; I take no responsibility for implications; those are your own business. That nature is bounded isn't helpful, it's more mystification. Are planetary extinction events *bounded*? The purpose of deconstructing the boundary between nature and technological civilization isn't to celebrate Big Macs but to make more sense of man's struggle with nature which is part of nature's self destructive history. Machines come from the groundless human mind--very satisfying, I'll go back to my stick whittling now. Wait where does that groundless mind come from?
You're throwing a stodgy fit because I don't agree with you that growing a potato is a mind blowing experience or that in hunter gatherer societies no one ever killed anyone. This is already a comical argument but that seems lost on you. And you tie things up by portentously referring to the incoming collapse of society, pretty much par for the anarcho primitivist course. When things don't go your way at least you have the approaching death and deprivation of almost everyone. When we're scrounging for lichen in the near future (in an egalitarian fashion, of course, very peacefully and contentedly) I'm sure you'll feel supercharged with vindication. Do you think there's anything to the idea of the kind of person who doesn't handle disagreement well being especially hung up on fantasies of civilizational collapse and living in a leaderless band of noncompetitive foragers? Maybe you've written about that, feel free to cite another two or three of your own tedious 15,000 word substack articles in a comment thread. I won't be reading any of it.
I have a feeling Bach would give the glory to God, not nature. But it's hardly here or there either way. He might have lived in pre industrial times, but he still lived in a society of grains and oppression, which by enlightened hunter gatherer standards places his cultural output beneath wood carvings and ritual chants. Professional cynic? If only. I've worked in restaurants and most recently as a mailman. I write and publish in my spare time, for fun. What is it that you do for a living?
Of course I enjoy my alienation. Who doesn't? I hope you don't think that's any kind of revelation. But then again it seems you really don't get my sense of humor or style, you seem fixated on how miserable you think I am, but I think you're having a harder time with my material than I am, so maybe this is just now dawning on you. You might be too principled to have caught on to a mundane psychological insight before now, as you surely don't enjoy even a moment of writing and publishing dystopian novels that are blurbed by Terry Gilliam and Russell Brand, what with all that meaningful potato peeling and fish gutting you missed out on.
Even if I sneered hard enough to have a stroke I don't think I could match the arch pissiness of saying I don't even need to argue because mommy nature is going to come and punish everyone for being bad boys.