The Unibomber Trial: The Manifesto

09/22/1995 Industrial Society And Its Future

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm

As potential future engineers, we aim to become innovators or designers that improve the technologies that support our society. I figured that we should ask ourselves the most fundamental questions about our roles. Why do we do this? Is it really the right thing to do? Why technology? Is this the best course of human society? These are questions I believe we should consider if we are to take part as future crafters and builders of modern society.

Human beings are shaping the course of our own evolution unlike any other species in the known world.

Ted Kaczynski is one of the most famous and passionate examples of some one who said no to this idea. Kaczynski argues in his manifesto that the Industrial Revolution has destabilized society and made life unfulfilling, along with inflicting severe damage on the natural world. He argued that continued development would cause more unhappiness and that humans would be reduced to engineered products of the social machine. Kaczynski advocates revolution against the industrial system, overthowing not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.

Kaczynski attributes the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that we are living in conditions that are radically different and contradict earlier conditions that we’ve evolved in. He points to modern medicine and states that because medical technology allows individuals with genetic tendencies to certain diseases, we are removed from natural selection and that genetic engineering will occur as a necessity.

He also argues that modern industrial society has made it so that one requires only minimal effort to satisfy one’s physical needs such as  food, water, and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. He says that with these needs satisfied, the average person becomes bored, demoralized, and decadent; and that people must develop what he calls “surrogate activities” that are less meaningful and directed toward artificial goals leading us to be less happy and fulfilled.

Another point he emphasizes is the lack of freedom that technology presents. He argues that technology while often intended to enable us to do more, actually limits our freedom. He considers motorized transport which was supposed to mobilize us, only caused more regulation of our movements with road laws and traffic technology; even a pedestrians freedom to walk is now impinged. He says that once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation.