Industrial Society and Its Future, is otherwise known as “The Unabomber Manifesto,” written by Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynsnki is a terrorist who killed three people, and injured twenty-three others, by sending bombs through the mail, between 1978 and 1995. He used his terror campaign to exploit the negativity bias of media and pressure the Washington Post and New York Times into publishing his 35,000-word anti-technology manifesto. Obviously, what Kaczynski did was horrible, but his manifesto is a thought-provoking, albeit extreme, perspective on technology. And so here is my summary of Industrial Society and Its Future. Leftism creeps towards totalitarianism The manifesto begins with a seemingly out-of-place rant about leftism creeping toward totalitarianism: According to Kaczynski, leftists have low self-esteem, are defeatist, and hate themselves. They hate success, and feel the groups they try to protect are inferior. They are overburdened by guilt over their natural drives, and so want to turn into issues of morality things that don’t have anything to do with morality, such as policing the use of words to which they themselves have applied negative connotations. Anti-left is not far-right When people hear anti-leftism, they tend to assume the person with those views is far-right. But it’s worth noting that’s not Kaczynski’s view. A quote, for example: [Leftists] want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black- style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects most leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. In sum, Kaczynski is anti-left, because ultimately leftists still work to preserve the industrial system. This appears to come out of “left-field,” but the meat of the manifesto is more coherent, and later we’ll better understand why he brought up his views on leftism. Industrial society robs us of the “Power Process” As industrial society progresses, Kaczynski says, people lose more and more freedom. This makes them miserable, because it robs them of what he calls the “power process.” The power process consists of four main elements: A goal Effort put forth toward that goal The attainment of that goal Autonomy in pursuit of that goal To be happy, a person needs goals that require effort, a reasonable rate of success in achieving those goals, and personal control throughout that process. We replace the power process with “surrogate activities” You might think we, in industrial society, have many goals we pursue and attain through effort, but Kaczynski says we merely pursue what he calls “surrogate activities.” Surrogate activities are artificial goals, because they aren’t for the purposes of meeting our basic biological needs, and so aren’t totally fulfilling. He says we merely think surrogate activities, such as our jobs, are fulfilling, because we have to do very little in industrial society to meet our basic biological needs – such as eating, or having shelter. So, we’ve never felt true fulfillment. All we do is either easy or impossible He says there are three kinds of drives we experience in the pursuit of goals: 1) minimal effort, 2) serious effort and 3) impossible. The power process, he says, is more about group two, or serious effort. Our surrogate activities require minimal effort. But at the same time, many other things are impossible in industrial society, because we don’t have control over them. For example, our security depends upon decisions made by others, such as safety standards at a nuclear power plant, how much pesticide is in our foods, and how much pollution is in our air. Somebody else makes these decisions for us, and in many cases we can’t even know if what w