Deconstructing Theodore’s Manifesto (Part 1)
Tags: Tech, Politics, Surveillance, Technology, Capitalism

I finished reading Industrial Society and Its Future, Theodore Kaczynski’s Manifesto, at 22:03 on Monday February 3rd, 2020, the year of what mass media has incessantly called a pandemic, in the apartment I occupy in Tokyo, Japan. I wrote in red, thick ink on the last page of the text, One of the most important texts. Surprised it has not been suppressed. Those two phrases, I believe, set the tone for the following dissection of each of the 26 parts that constitute the body of Mr. Kaczynski’s essay. Before I begin, though, I must mention that I will not comment on Mr. Kaczynski’s acts of violence, but only on the text both The Washington Post and The New York Times published in 1995.

The text, in a conventional fashion, begins with an Introduction whose first sentence reads The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, a broad, debatable statement. What merits particular attention, though, is the remainder of this first phrase. (They) have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. In May of the present year Hana Kimura, a 22-year-old, pink-haired wrestler and participant of the reality show Terrace House, was found collapsed with a bag around her head after posting farewell messages on the social platforms Instagram and Twitter following a series of cyber bullying attacks. Her suicide was first announced on the Twitter social media platform. This phenomenon is more than well-known in countries like South Korea, where so-called celebrities kill themselves following vicious comments from strangers on social media platforms on a regular basis. British cultural theorist, teacher and writer Mike Fisher, an adamant critic of the predating effects of capitalism and technology, wrote in Capitalism Realism that Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive toward atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals. Mr. Fisher, who openly admitted and discussed being depressed, hanged himself in January 2017. The publisher of his books also announced his death on Twitter. Canadian Associate Professor John Vervaeke, colleague of famed writer and professor Jordan Peterson, conscious of the appalling mental-health crisis, released on the on-line sharing platform YouTube a fifty-episode series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

Regarding the damage to the natural world mentioned before, I would need thousands of pages to write about overpopulation, factory farming, air and water pollution, soil degradation, deforestation, depletion of the oceans, acid rain, plastic pollution, chemical pollution, unprecedented waste as a result of unprecedented hyper consumption, urban sprawl, nuclear disasters, genetic modification and what scientists have called, when faced with the accelerated man-made species extinction and biodiversity loss, the sixth extinction, among others.

Mr. Kaczynski continues by commenting that, were the industrial-technological system to survive, the cost would be permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. That most humans have been cogs in a machine is hard to contest. Carl Marx wrote decades back that the devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Nothing new under the sun. It is the machine itself which has changed, though, a fact noticed by the likes of French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who explains, alluding to realizations by French Philosopher Michel Foucault, in his Postscript on the Societies of Control, how the industrial-technological machine has moved from a sovereign society, where a King or Queen ruled and imposed taxes on his subjects, to a disciplinary one where humans where ordered in time and enclosed in spaces like schools, factories and prisons, to a society in which the mechanisms of (technological) control transcend space and time and become constant and ubiquitous. Here again I will avoid noting the obvious; we have made of most non-human species, of their lives, bodies and offspring, commodities for our entertainment, comfort, pleasure or consumption. One word euphemisms have become the tool of choice to commerce live-plucked goose and duck feathers as down, the flesh of animals as meat or seafood, maternal bovine secretions as milk, strips of pig abdomen as bacon, deboned chicken carcasses made into a paste as nuggets, animal skins as leather, stomach-enzymes extracted from butchered calves as rennet, the boiling of cocoons containing live pupae as silk and the capture, enslavement and exploitation of non-human creatures as circus, zoo or aquarium. Only a species as depraved as ours could extract culinary pleasure from eating baby pigs (cochinillo), baby cows (veal), baby sheep (lambs) and baby ducks (ballut).

Mr. Kaczynski writes of people deprived of dignity and autonomy, a concept Félix Guattari, another French philosopher, imagined when he wrote of a city where one would be able to leave one’s home, street and neighborhood thanks to one’s electronic card that raises a given barrier, years before the Chinese government implemented the social credit system, in which Chinese citizens are scored, rewarded and punished based on their actions, behavior and compliance to the norm. Too low a score could mean for the citizen in question the inability to buy a train or airplane ticket, take out a loan or buy property. There is, as a matter of course, no one the penalized citizen can complain to. Criticize the system openly, especially in the heavily surveilled and censored country’s Internet, and you will be fined or arrested. The estimated 200 million CCTV cameras and advanced facial recognition system of the nation only reinforce this lack of dignity and autonomy. Alternative versions of the Chinese system are being tested and deployed by governments of many other countries.

These same governments have used the on-going panic generated by the reported spread of a new virus named Covid-19 as justification for the exacerbation in the erosion of dignity and autonomy swiftly imposing contact tracing mobile applications, quarantines for the healthy, social distancing, mandatory facial coverings, lock downs, curfews, work from home, disinfection stations, temporary shutdown of restaurants, bars, theaters, gyms and other small businesses, systematic temperature checks with handheld devices and intelligent monitors, cashless payments, border closures, mass testing and vaccination.

That Mr. Kaczynski mentions his proposed revolution’s object is to overthrow the economic and technological basis of the present society and not governments, as the reader could have expected considering past revolutionary episodes, is worth of notice. Although it would be irresponsible to generalize, it is certain that at least in certain nations’ corporations are as powerful, if not more, than their governments. Technocrat behemoths like Amazon, Huawei, Twitter, Nokia, Equifax, Alphabet, Microsoft, Disney, PayPal, Facebook and Apple use technology to spy on their users and customers, collect and commerce their personal data and /or influence their behavior and choices. They also influence the result of presidential elections. Danish Professor Anders Esmark opens his paper on The Technocratic Take-over of Democracy by writing that liberal democracies have for a long time been submitted to an altogether different system of rule: that of technocracy and defines technocracy as a system of rule even if it lacks proper political theory and constitutional underpinnings. He goes further by quoting American public policy writer Frank Fisher’s definition of technocracy, a system of governance in which technically trained experts rule by virtue of their specialized knowledge and position in dominant political and economic institutions. Mr. Esmark might well have a point.