Any thoughts on this guy's writing? Currently making my way through Technological Slavery which has his collected works as of 2011 or thereabouts and I find it interesting. I'm not really that big on socialism/communism and just lurk here occasionally, but I see a lot of right leaning-guys make constant references to his description of "leftists", but his description seems to be that of progressive infiltrators, his key warning is that they will co-opt any revolutionary movement and make it about gay rights, racial issues etc. At the same time you could replace "technological society" with "capitalism" throughout most of his tips for revolutionaries and it wouldn't seem out of place.
While people meme about Anprims he doesn't seem to be against all technology so much as technology that requires an all powerful system to produce. Stuff like basic metalworking, building and so forth don't necessarily require a coercive technological system to support them. The picture I got of the future he envisions seems pretty comfy once you get past all of the people dying due to technology being required to support overpopulation.
anything after agriculture results in oppression by technology. metalworking and building is off limits.
tes id right in pretty much everything he says. some stuff he isnt really right on but its been a while since ive read his last book and i dont quite remember where he fucked up. i think its that as he goes further along he requires you to continue to make leaps of faith with him because some things cant be proven yet, only hypothesized. but for the most part he's a good boi
the problem with ted is that he thinks human beings are worth saving, and they are not. the second is he thinks human beings have any sort of free will over the process of technological innovation and enslavement. they don't.
sure, in the order of thousands of years it might happen that a catastrophe occurs and technological progress is reversed and stays reversed for a time. but human beings are a technological species, and have been from the get. man has always been reaching away from nature and the material towards godhood. eventually man will reach it and with it its own destruction, but that was always meant to be
Nolan Miller
This was my take as well. Ted is a good read though.
He's 100% right about everything and humankind was never worth saving.
Angel Long
lmao what a dumbass it's a proven fact that as societies grow more educated and become more industrialized that birthrates drop; he got himself all worked up over the meme of overpopulation for nothing. Also our modern day capitalist economy produces enough food to feed the entire planet; so much for people getting hungry and invading others for food in that ridiculous scenario he postulates.
William Bell
Please be kind to ted, the government spiked his coffee with LSD and he's never been the same.
Oliver Morales
Maybe I misunderstand but that's credited to Steven A. LeBlanc, not Ted.
Jackson Barnes
'Gather as many with you as you can. Take care of each other.'
I've said it before and I'll say it again: he wrote about violence being part of the natural course of things and so we shouldn't bemoan it or try to avoid it. But then he does not make the same case about technology or tekne which plenty of animals utilize. Primitive people used tools and boats and even had metalworking in both North America and the Pacific Islands.
I'm honestly sorry you feel this way.
sort of a moot point, the ants can fight back. Should they be vanquished, c'est la vie.
We are already at the brink of the abyss from the population GROWTH that industrialization brought. Talking about birthrates now is meaningless. As it stands the capitalist economy does not feed everyone, so the only ridiculous thing is your bright future communism.
Michael Long
pardon my reddit spacing and goddamn is that some depressing shit. I don't think we should harbor too much of this thought that simply writes off humans as actors.
David Baker
fuck off neoliberal
David Edwards
...
Hunter Ramirez
Are you forgetting something or just speaking out your ass? He states in ISAIF that there is a difference between technology that requires a coercive technological system to maintain and more primitive technology that can be used and maintained by people independent of a technological system. He even brings this up in rebuttal of the argument that technological progress is inexorable an inevitable. Advanced technology that relies on technological system has throughout history advanced and receded with the fall of empires. When Rome fell, their aqueducts and roads fell into disrepair and their techniques were lost. It is those technologies that are not reliant on a technological system that inevitably progress, barring sustained violence and loss of life resulting in techniques being forgotten.
Technologies that aren't reliant on technological systems are essentially just more complex versions of the techniques/knowledge animals teach their young. Basic metalworking or other technologies being taught generation to generation is analogous to an orangutan teaching their young which fruits are safe to eat.
Brody Sanders
Yes I forgot that part.
Elijah Gomez
he has a phd in math you would never accomplish that
Josiah Ward
So? Idgaf how good at math he is, it's irrelevant since I'm judging him based on his retarded socioeconomic commentary.
Not that guy, but the only thing that allows humanity to grow/manufacture/distribute metric fucktons of food is cheap cheap cheap energy. If that goes away or even declines it has massive repercussions. Combine that with the way that climate change has already impacted agriculture and you have a recipe for disaster - not an if but a when.
I think he was intelligent and well-read enough (he also debated/BTFO'd Zerzan) to tell the difference, so I assume he didn't like real leftists either.
Ryan Wood
He didn't like right wingers either.
Elijah Sanchez
On top of that, he also seemed to have a bee in his bonnet about scientists.
Adam Fisher
well he had no reason to like most actual leftists. He was a primitivist, most leftists have a strain of utopian technological progressivism. He might not have cared about the difference because he didnt like either of them. Nor did he entirely like other primmies, because theyre frequently retards who misrepresent the reality of primitive life(he wrote an EXCELLENT paper about this, pdf related) I'm not trashing him for that, I sympathise with him in some ways if not entirely agreeing, but the angle he was coming from, in terms of what ideas are associated with which broad groups, didnt really give him cause to be nice and sympathetic to any existing ideological label. Personally I dont think "technology" is the problem itself. Technology is just a broad way of talking about tool use. There are a lot of problems with the way people design and use tools, to do with embracing unnecessary complexity and automation that makes people dependent upon whoever makes/fixes the machines, thereby taking away some of their autonomy, but I dont think these issues are unfixable or necessary. Lots of existing technology is unnecessary or unnecessarially complex.
Henry Russell
makes sense after the whole Harvard thing
Nathaniel Butler
Actually that's exactly what I meant by "BTFO'd Zerzan". But honestly why would it matter that he's the most despooked primitivist if I fundamentally disagree with his ideology? If anything, I'd rather support the Zerzanite hippies, for the sole reason of letting them make asses of themselves by spouting bullshit about 3 hours workday and telepathy before the development of deceptive symbolic language.
I won't deny that I have a horse in that race (I'm a stemfag, and practicing, unlike Ted), buy I think his strategy is misdirected. I think it's the capitalism and the profit motive (thus the drive for unsustainable exponential growth) that makes people's lives shittier, and trying to turn the river back with a stick by combating the superstructure is a futile endeavor. (I won't even try to argue with mailing pipe bombs to random scientists, as I guess this was nothing more than a publicity stunt from start to end),
Gavin Sullivan
No humans don't have any free choice about technological progression.
When we see one technology giving others benefit, and would result in a net gain for us we would use the newer technology (this net gain can also be secondary to survival such as social networks).
Machine learning algorithms are new, but given the correct input and data it can be used to solve any problem, except maybe the problems we make for ourselves due to our social behavior (norms and values of individuals forming society). If you can somehow make a question out of some problem you have, a machine learning algorithm might be able to provide to you the best inferences possible based on what you give it.
Technological progress can be hindered by society though by making it 'taboo'. But this never stopped technological progress from occurring.
Overpopulation isn't a meme. Post WW2 the growth rate of world population in % has been higher than from 1800-1940. In the west our population isn't growing as rapidly. I think the blame of this lies on a combination of social factors + material factors which form social factors. That of course being that women are pushed more into careers to work and kids of course are a large obstacle in this. Governments do little to make having a kid an economic viable choice.
