Wednesday, December 17, 2025
Rage Against the Machine
At a restaurant recently I saw a family of four out to dinner. All four of them were staring at their phones, even when the food came. There was almost no conversation between them. If you look for it, you will see this everywhere you go-- people walking down the street, even, in the middle of the city, just staring at their phone. It's unsettling, and marks some kind of change in human evolution.
Between 1978 and 1995, a sociopath killed three people and seriously injured 29 others. He plead guilty to all charges in 1998, and was sentenced, appropriately, to life without parole. He committed suicide in prison in
Ted Kaczynski was a murderer above all. He is getting some attention now, though, because of his manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," which posited three primary evils that come with the advance of modern technology:
1) The diminishment of personal freedom and individuality;
2) Psychological challenges for individuals; and
3) Environmental degradation.
I'm not sure Kaczynski was right, but I do know this: that his answer to it all, primitivism, is likely to see a resurgence as AI advances. That is, I think that over the next few decades we are going to see large communities of people withdraw from technology and live without it. It will be interesting to see how the government reacts to that-- especially as the government grows more and more reliant on an ever-expanding database on citizens that would be undermined by the primitivists.
