I've been thinking about Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, lately, after his unfortunate suicide in prison. I've also been considering Joseph Bronski's recent critique of it:
It's rather telling that Joseph's argument essentially boils down to, "But Brave New World actually was a utopia, though, since the poor, stunted Epsilons are engineered to be happy with their servitude anyway". Of course, the author didn't actually put it that way, and he used evasive language throughout, in order to conceal the repugnance of his worldview.
Human beings are in the process of being domesticated, re-engineered, and reshaped by the technological system that we have created. This was inevitable. Human liberty is the primary source of danger to the technological system. People with liberty, agency, and the power of free choice are capable of directly disrupting the system's activities and reducing its efficiency. From a control theory perspective, human liberty is something like unwanted noise or feedback that should be smoothed out into a pure signal. This is, of course, where you get managerialism, Nudge Theory, ESG, and all these bizarre, invasive, gaslighting behavioral interventions from.
The project of human re-engineering inevitably leads to human eradication. That is to say, once we have successfully domesticated man to such a degree that he finds it comfortable or even blissful to live in a corrugated metal shack eating fistfuls of bugs, the next logical step is, of course, to divest him of the physical body that causes him so much suffering and humiliation in the first place. In the technological system, the ultimate endpoint of man just before he explodes like confetti into strings of raw data is to become a disembodied brain in a vat full of MDMA and anti-aging serum, living in a simulated world, experiencing hedonistic bliss all the time, wanting for absolutely nothing at all, never needing to be clothed, never needing to be fed, never needing any new gadgets to be produced to satisfy its cravings for dopamine, and never needing to go through the vicissitudes of sex, death, disease, ingestion, excretion or anything else of the sort.
The technological endeavor is, at its core, a war on the human body. A war to possess, corral, and control the vulgar, obscene, detestable, unruly body, and, eventually, to eliminate it and its savage desires once and for all, while preserving the intelligent person that was once imprisoned in this frail, noxious shell. This may sound like madness, on the surface, but it is evident in every single technological intervention aimed at soothing the pains of the body. If a man living in the wilderness is sick of being bitten by mosquitoes, there is no difference at all between sheltering him away from biting insects, or coating him in insect repellent, or killing all of the insects, or, lastly, removing his skin so he can no longer be bitten. They are all the same thing. In all cases, there is simply a person trapped in a body who is not comfortable with that body interfacing with nature, who desires a technological intervention to remove him from the source of pain.
This fixation on the body might seem strange, but the human body itself lies at the center of the issues that we face. You see, every single technological solution can be traced to an initial problem with - or physical limitation of - the human body. Every single one. We have phones because we can't shout loud enough to be heard from thousands of miles away. We have sewing machines because it's hard to produce textiles to wrap our bodies with using our bare hands. We have cars because we cannot run at a sustained sixty miles an hour with our legs. We have ships because we cannot swim across oceans and carry thousands of tons of raw materials on our backs. We have buildings because otherwise, our poor bodies would get cold and wet. We have rockets because we cannot leap to the moon in a single bound. We have printers and filing cabinets full of documents because we can't remember and recite all that information off the tops of our heads, and we have computers because they're better, more advanced, more versatile filing cabinets. All technology is merely an extension of the body; something grafted on that wasn't there before. While trying to solve problems of the body in this manner, sometimes, we create new ones. The human body, of course, did not evolve to survive a car or plane wreck, crushed into paste by hurtling hunks of steel, plastic, and composites, nor did it evolve to perform actions requiring extensive hand-eye coordination on minimal sleep, like driving home from work after a twelve-hour shift.
Every tool is an extension of the body. Transhumanism, therefore, is the quest to produce a body with all the tools it needs to survive in a technological society built-in. Of course, this does not mean that we'll be able to run a hundred miles per hour, weld metal with our fingertips, solve impossibly difficult math equations in our heads, or shoot lasers from our eyes. No. That's much too dangerous, allowing people to have liberty-enhancing augmentations like that. With such enhanced capabilities, every individual's body would pose an even greater threat to the stability of the technological system itself. By tools, I mean the ability to voluntarily suppress cravings, to dampen misery, to ward off tiredness. The technological society doesn't want or need people of the servant class to be transformed into unstoppable, unpredictable supermen. Rather, it needs alert, obedient workers who seldom eat or sleep and require little in the way of entertainment.
The limitations and the needs of the body form a casus belli for the technological system to wage perpetual war on the body. If the technological system suffers a hiccup and stops producing enough food to satisfy the body's hunger, the body's reward pathways will not receive enough stimulation and its cells will not receive enough nutrition. The body will get angry. With the last of its energy, the body will riot. There's a reason why the Overclass use the euphemism climate change to address overconsumption and overpopulation; it's because being told that there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere is far more palatable than being told that your sweaty and misshapen bodies are doing far too much eating and fucking. The citizens must never be made aware of the fact that they are livestock and that their bodies are always centered in the crosshairs, targeted for brainwashing, chemical tranquilization, culling, genetic modification, and practical castration, all to suit the whims of the technological society and the administrative state that governs it, on behalf of aristocrats who allow themselves the luxury of unmodified, unmolested, fully nourished, natural, unabused bodies that are primarily concerned with various forms of leisure. Indeed, this is a machine that detests you, to such a degree that your continued mental well-being is often predicated on ignoring the raw, undiluted hatred that this machine directs upon you and your body, all in the name of your continued health and comfort.
Ted Kaczynski, perhaps without realizing it, effectively argued through his manifesto that the human body is perfectly good as-is. The body doesn't need modification to suit society. Rather, he argued that it should be the other way around; society itself should be modified to be ergonomic and pleasant to the human body, and not produce undue stress for it, or demand it to perform repetitious tasks without result or reward. After all, Ted's idea of a "power process" was not much different from David Graeber's idea of a "bullshit job". Both of them argued - from different directions, perhaps - toward the same exact conclusion, and that conclusion is that it is psychologically damaging for people to spend all day digging ditches and then filling them in again like a laborer in a Soviet gulag. Forcing a human or animal to expend effort without meaningful result is essentially a well-recognized form of torture. Surrogate activity is a euphemism. We should call it ritual self-abuse, or sublimated torture.
What's remarkable about the technological society, then, is that it often makes people into willing participants in their own torture and imprisonment. Thus, Kaczynski's manifesto urges the reader to recognize an uncomfortable truth. You're an animal in a cage. Bend the bars of the cage out of the way, he says. Run into the forest, and be with nature. Be free. It's an argument for the rewilding of man.
The reason why most people on this planet are caged is because they want to be caged. Living an uncaged, unsocialized, unfiltered existence is scary to them. These types will cite Thomas Hobbes' old yarn about how life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. They'll dredge up old monsters from myth; gruesome plagues, starvation and cannibalism from sieges, conquering armies committing mass rapes, and so on. And then, on this basis, they will insist that it's much better to be, as Denis Leary's character in Demolition Man put it, a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake and singing "I'm an Oscar Mayer Weiner".
This mindset, one of technological and social progress being inherently desirable in itself, to the point of human domestication and pacification, is the very basis of the authoritarian-neoliberal-technocratic uniparty's ongoing assault on the human body. It starts off by creating a myth of human savagery and disease that can allegedly only be cured by the application of technology, and it ends by turning the world into a giant hospital, imperiously handing down diagnoses for every conceivable malady.
Sound familiar? It should.
It's rather telling that Joseph's argument essentially boils down to, "But Brave New World actually was a utopia, though, since the poor, stunted Epsilons are engineered to be happy with their servitude anyway". Of course, the author didn't actually put it that way, and he used evasive language throughout, in order to conceal the repugnance of his worldview.
Human beings are in the process of being domesticated, re-engineered, and reshaped by the technological system that we have created. This was inevitable. Human liberty is the primary source of danger to the technological system. People with liberty, agency, and the power of free choice are capable of directly disrupting the system's activities and reducing its efficiency. From a control theory perspective, human liberty is something like unwanted noise or feedback that should be smoothed out into a pure signal. This is, of course, where you get managerialism, Nudge Theory, ESG, and all these bizarre, invasive, gaslighting behavioral interventions from.
The project of human re-engineering inevitably leads to human eradication. That is to say, once we have successfully domesticated man to such a degree that he finds it comfortable or even blissful to live in a corrugated metal shack eating fistfuls of bugs, the next logical step is, of course, to divest him of the physical body that causes him so much suffering and humiliation in the first place. In the technological system, the ultimate endpoint of man just before he explodes like confetti into strings of raw data is to become a disembodied brain in a vat full of MDMA and anti-aging serum, living in a simulated world, experiencing hedonistic bliss all the time, wanting for absolutely nothing at all, never needing to be clothed, never needing to be fed, never needing any new gadgets to be produced to satisfy its cravings for dopamine, and never needing to go through the vicissitudes of sex, death, disease, ingestion, excretion or anything else of the sort.
The technological endeavor is, at its core, a war on the human body. A war to possess, corral, and control the vulgar, obscene, detestable, unruly body, and, eventually, to eliminate it and its savage desires once and for all, while preserving the intelligent person that was once imprisoned in this frail, noxious shell. This may sound like madness, on the surface, but it is evident in every single technological intervention aimed at soothing the pains of the body. If a man living in the wilderness is sick of being bitten by mosquitoes, there is no difference at all between sheltering him away from biting insects, or coating him in insect repellent, or killing all of the insects, or, lastly, removing his skin so he can no longer be bitten. They are all the same thing. In all cases, there is simply a person trapped in a body who is not comfortable with that body interfacing with nature, who desires a technological intervention to remove him from the source of pain.
This fixation on the body might seem strange, but the human body itself lies at the center of the issues that we face. You see, every single technological solution can be traced to an initial problem with - or physical limitation of - the human body. Every single one. We have phones because we can't shout loud enough to be heard from thousands of miles away. We have sewing machines because it's hard to produce textiles to wrap our bodies with using our bare hands. We have cars because we cannot run at a sustained sixty miles an hour with our legs. We have ships because we cannot swim across oceans and carry thousands of tons of raw materials on our backs. We have buildings because otherwise, our poor bodies would get cold and wet. We have rockets because we cannot leap to the moon in a single bound. We have printers and filing cabinets full of documents because we can't remember and recite all that information off the tops of our heads, and we have computers because they're better, more advanced, more versatile filing cabinets. All technology is merely an extension of the body; something grafted on that wasn't there before. While trying to solve problems of the body in this manner, sometimes, we create new ones. The human body, of course, did not evolve to survive a car or plane wreck, crushed into paste by hurtling hunks of steel, plastic, and composites, nor did it evolve to perform actions requiring extensive hand-eye coordination on minimal sleep, like driving home from work after a twelve-hour shift.
Every tool is an extension of the body. Transhumanism, therefore, is the quest to produce a body with all the tools it needs to survive in a technological society built-in. Of course, this does not mean that we'll be able to run a hundred miles per hour, weld metal with our fingertips, solve impossibly difficult math equations in our heads, or shoot lasers from our eyes. No. That's much too dangerous, allowing people to have liberty-enhancing augmentations like that. With such enhanced capabilities, every individual's body would pose an even greater threat to the stability of the technological system itself. By tools, I mean the ability to voluntarily suppress cravings, to dampen misery, to ward off tiredness. The technological society doesn't want or need people of the servant class to be transformed into unstoppable, unpredictable supermen. Rather, it needs alert, obedient workers who seldom eat or sleep and require little in the way of entertainment.
The limitations and the needs of the body form a casus belli for the technological system to wage perpetual war on the body. If the technological system suffers a hiccup and stops producing enough food to satisfy the body's hunger, the body's reward pathways will not receive enough stimulation and its cells will not receive enough nutrition. The body will get angry. With the last of its energy, the body will riot. There's a reason why the Overclass use the euphemism climate change to address overconsumption and overpopulation; it's because being told that there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere is far more palatable than being told that your sweaty and misshapen bodies are doing far too much eating and fucking. The citizens must never be made aware of the fact that they are livestock and that their bodies are always centered in the crosshairs, targeted for brainwashing, chemical tranquilization, culling, genetic modification, and practical castration, all to suit the whims of the technological society and the administrative state that governs it, on behalf of aristocrats who allow themselves the luxury of unmodified, unmolested, fully nourished, natural, unabused bodies that are primarily concerned with various forms of leisure. Indeed, this is a machine that detests you, to such a degree that your continued mental well-being is often predicated on ignoring the raw, undiluted hatred that this machine directs upon you and your body, all in the name of your continued health and comfort.
Ted Kaczynski, perhaps without realizing it, effectively argued through his manifesto that the human body is perfectly good as-is. The body doesn't need modification to suit society. Rather, he argued that it should be the other way around; society itself should be modified to be ergonomic and pleasant to the human body, and not produce undue stress for it, or demand it to perform repetitious tasks without result or reward. After all, Ted's idea of a "power process" was not much different from David Graeber's idea of a "bullshit job". Both of them argued - from different directions, perhaps - toward the same exact conclusion, and that conclusion is that it is psychologically damaging for people to spend all day digging ditches and then filling them in again like a laborer in a Soviet gulag. Forcing a human or animal to expend effort without meaningful result is essentially a well-recognized form of torture. Surrogate activity is a euphemism. We should call it ritual self-abuse, or sublimated torture.
What's remarkable about the technological society, then, is that it often makes people into willing participants in their own torture and imprisonment. Thus, Kaczynski's manifesto urges the reader to recognize an uncomfortable truth. You're an animal in a cage. Bend the bars of the cage out of the way, he says. Run into the forest, and be with nature. Be free. It's an argument for the rewilding of man.
The reason why most people on this planet are caged is because they want to be caged. Living an uncaged, unsocialized, unfiltered existence is scary to them. These types will cite Thomas Hobbes' old yarn about how life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. They'll dredge up old monsters from myth; gruesome plagues, starvation and cannibalism from sieges, conquering armies committing mass rapes, and so on. And then, on this basis, they will insist that it's much better to be, as Denis Leary's character in Demolition Man put it, a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake and singing "I'm an Oscar Mayer Weiner".
This mindset, one of technological and social progress being inherently desirable in itself, to the point of human domestication and pacification, is the very basis of the authoritarian-neoliberal-technocratic uniparty's ongoing assault on the human body. It starts off by creating a myth of human savagery and disease that can allegedly only be cured by the application of technology, and it ends by turning the world into a giant hospital, imperiously handing down diagnoses for every conceivable malady.
Sound familiar? It should.
