Summary of Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How
Legally stifled after capture, the imprisoned revolutionary continued to urge for Man to stand up for Nature and thereby preserve freedom from the onslaught by Technology.
In the first half of this book, Kaczynski describes why the development of society is beyond human control or rational planning and steering, and the mechanism by which the technological system inevitably leads to self-destruction, in any scenario.
Chapter 1. The Development of a Society Can Never Be Subject to Rational Human Control
Changes which can be made quite often produce unexpected results, and rarely are these truly good or beneficial to Man or Nature.
Some may argue that human society can be rationally controlled through social consensus. However, social consensus suffers from fundamental difficulties. Humanity has never once reached agreement on the question: “What kind of ideal society should we pursue in the long run?”
Even if consensus is reached on a particular issue, it cannot be effectively enforced due to the tragedy of the commons.
Even when power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of political leaders to prevent the tragedy of the commons, the options available to those leaders are extremely constrained by various factors—internal conflicts among leaders, resistance from subordinates, and purely technical limitations.
There exist self-preserving and self-replicating human groups that emerge through natural selection—such as states, corporations, bureaucracies, ideological groups, armed organizations, and criminal networks. For these entities, the most important objective is short-term survival and propagation, and they compete to acquire the power necessary to achieve this. Their existence will render all attempts to rationally control human society in the long term futile.
If philosopher-kings are assumed, the questions immediately arise: “Who will choose the philosopher-king?” and “How will power be granted to him?” Moreover, to develop society in a consistent direction, philosopher-kings who share identical values would have to succeed one another indefinitely.
Even if we assume that all of the above problems have been solved, there still remains the question: “Is it possible to design a satisfactory system of values?” Constitutions, which embody the value systems that societies are meant to follow, are written in highly abstract and ambiguous language. As a result, justices can reach completely opposite decisions while relying on the same constitutional provisions. If a constitution were written in detailed and rigid language, there would be an enormous number of situations in which irrational decisions would be unavoidable. Thus, value systems inevitably rely on abstract and ambiguous language, which leaves room for virtually any decision to be justified. Consequently, it is also impossible to guide society in a consistent direction over the long term.
Since the idea of resolving all of the above problems is unrealistic, we must conclude that social development will forever remain beyond the bounds of rational human control.
Chapter 2. Why the Technological System Will Destroy Itself
Proposition 1: In any environment that is sufficiently rich, self-propagating systems will arise, and natural selection will lead to the evolution of self-propagating systems having increasingly complex, subtle, and sophisticated means of surviving and propagating themselves.
Proposition 2: In the short term, natural selection favors self-propagating systems that pursue their own short-term advantage with little or no regard for long-term consequences.
Proposition 3: Self-propagating subsystems of a given supersystem tend to become dependent on the supersystem and on the specific conditions that prevail within the supersystem.
Proposition 4: Problems of transportation and communication impose a limit on the size of the geographical region over which a self-propagating system can extend its operations.
Proposition 5: The most important and the only consistent limit on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating human groups extend their operations is the limit imposed by the available means of transportation and communication. In other words, while not all self-propagating human groups tend to extend their operations over a region of maximum size, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups that operate over regions approaching the maximum size allowed by the available means of transportation and communication.
Proposition 6: In modern times, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups whose operations span the entire globe. Moreover, even if human beings are some day replaced by machines or other entities, natural selection will still tend to produce some self-propagating systems whose operations span the entire globe.
Proposition 7: Where (as today) problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating systems.
Ted Kaczynski critiques futurist and transhumanist visions of technological utopia. He argues that technophiles (“techies”) treat speculative ideas—like immortality through body preservation, human-machine merging, or mind uploading—as near certainties, while ignoring social and evolutionary realities. Kaczynski claims that self-propagating systems such as governments and corporations act for survival and power, not human well-being, meaning immortality would only serve a small elite, if anyone at all. He predicts that as machines surpass humans in usefulness, even elites and hybrids will be discarded, making human-derived entities obsolete. Ultimately, he portrays these utopian beliefs as a quasi-religious faith (“Technianity”), akin to millenarian cults, reflecting not confidence in technology but anxiety about societal collapse.
Chapter 3. How to Transform a Society: Errors to Avoid
• Postulate 1. You can’t change a society by pursuing goals that are vague or abstract. You have to have a clear and concrete goal. As an experienced activist put it: “Vague, over-generalized objectives are seldom met. The trick is to conceive of some specific development which will inevitably propel your community in the direction you want it to go.”
• Postulate 2. Preaching alone—the mere advocacy of ideas—cannot bring about important, long- lasting changes in the behavior of human beings, unless in a very small minority.
• Postulate 3. Any radical movement tends to attract many people who may be sincere, but whose goals are only loosely related to the goals of the movement. The result is that the movement’s original goals may become blurred, if not completely perverted.
• Postulate 4. Every radical movement that acquires great power becomes corrupt, at the latest, when its original leaders (meaning those who joined the movement while it was still relatively weak) are all dead or politically inactive. In saying that a movement becomes corrupt, we mean that its members, and especially its leaders, primarily seek personal advantages (such as money, security, social status, powerful offices, or a career) rather than dedicating themselves sincerely to the ideals of the movement.
• Rule (i) In order to change a society in a specified way, a movement should select a single, clear, simple, and concrete objective the achievement of which will produce the desired change.
• Rule (ii) If a movement aims to transform a society, then the objective selected by the movement must be of such a nature that, once the objective has been achieved, its consequences will be irreversible. This means that, once society has been transformed through the achievement of the objective, society will remain in its transformed condition without any further effort on the part of the movement or anyone else.
• Rule (iii) Once an objective has been selected, it is necessary to persuade some small minority to commit itself to the achievement of the objective by means more potent than mere preaching or advocacy of ideas. In other words, the minority will have to organize itself for practical action.
• Rule (iv) In order to keep itself faithful to its objective, a radical movement should devise means of excluding from its ranks all unsuitable persons who may seek to join it.
• Rule (v) Once a revolutionary movement has become powerful enough to achieve its objective, it must achieve its objective as soon as possible, and in any case before the original revolutionaries (meaning those who joined the movement while it was still relatively weak) die or become politically inactive.
• Conclusion: The revolutionaries should aim to bring about the total collapse of the worldwide technological system by any means necessary.
Chapter 4. Strategic Guidelines for an Anti-Tech Movement
1. First, the movement must build its own internal sources of power.
Second, the movement must build power in relation to its social environment.
Third, the movement must undermine people’s faith in the technological system.
2. One cannot plan the revolution long in advance of their actual occurrence. The revolutionaries must build the acumen to recognize and exploit the unexpected opportunity.
3. Major opportunities, however, may be a long time in coming. The revolutionary movement may have to lie in wait for them. While it is waiting, the movement must remain hard at work.
4. The movement must maintain flexibility.
5. The single ultimate goal of a revolutionary movement today must be the total collapse of the worldwide technological system.
6. The real revolutionaries will be be prepared to accept any amount of hardship, or even a certainty, of death in the service of their cause.
7. Many ordinary people become heroes when there is a severe disruption of their society.
8. The revolutionaries have to inspire, organize, and lead people when the technological society is in turmoil.
9. Ordinarily, an opportunity for revolution depends on some serious failure of the existing social order.
10. A successful revolutionary movement may start out as a tiny and despised group of “crackpots” who are taken seriously by no one but themselves.
11. To summarize, the expected pattern for a revolution against the technological system will be something like the following:
A. A small, disciplined core of committed revolutionaries should build strength through organization and uncompromising integrity, operating across key global regions.
By spreading sound but unpopular ideas and proving itself more effective than rival factions, the movement prepares the groundwork for revolution.
B. Many people will acknowledge the validity of revolutionary ideas but ultimately reject their solutions due to fear, apathy, or attachment to familiar ways of life.
C. A severe systemic crisis will erode people’s ability to live normally and destroy trust in the existing social order, leaving many desperate or angry. If revolutionaries intervene in time to provide purpose and organization, they can transform this desperation into determined action despite high personal risk.
D. The movement will likely win active backing from only a small minority, while most people remain apathetic or self-preserving and therefore do not defend the system.
E. The authorities’ disorientation and fear will prevent effective resistance, allowing revolutionaries to seize power.
F. By the time revolutionaries seize power in one country, global interdependence will be even deeper due to advanced globalization. Shutting down the technological system there would trigger a worldwide economic crisis, creating opportunities for similar movements elsewhere.
G. At the decisive moment, revolutionaries must act without hesitation or doubt, since any wavering would undermine unity and morale.
12. The revolutionaries must avoid all hesitation or vacillation when the moment for decisive action arrives.
13. Revolutionaries must take their goal to be the collapse of the system no matter what. If you don’t have the courage to do this, then you’d better give up the revolution.
14. Quality is more important than quantity. Focus on recruiting high-quality people who are capable of total commitment to the cause.
15. If the goal of revolutionaries is the complete elimination of the technological society, then they must discard the values and the morality of that society and replace them with new values and a new morality designed to serve the purposes of revolution.
16. The revolutionaries should never retreat from their extreme positions for the sake of popularity or to avoid offending the moral or other sensibilities of the general public.
17. Develop the practical abilities through practical experience. Get involved in political efforts that are peripheral to the central issue of technology. Publish a newspaper or journal devoted to anti-tech work.
18. A revolutionary organization must be capable of unity in action.
19. If there is a persistent, irreconcilable disagreement within an organization, then it will be best if the dissident minority separates itself from the parent group.
20. A revolutionary movement has to be self-confident.
21. A revolutionary movement has to avoid overconfidence when it comes to particular projects or operations.
22. There are many historical cases that following a crushing defeat that seems to leave a group in a hopeless situation, a determined renewal of effort by whatever is left of the group very often leads to victory.
23. Just because we often cite from the Bolshevik/Communist leaders doesn’t mean we admire them as human beings or respect their goals or their values. We only take notice of them because we can learn something from their experience. They were committed technophiles, and therefore they are our enemy.
24. A revolutionary movement should try to identify the sectors of the population whose members are most likely to be predisposed to accept the revolutionary message.
25. A revolutionary movement must maintain clear lines of demarcation that separate it from other radical groups holding ideologies that to some extent resemble its own.
26. A revolutionary organization should avoid getting entangled in sterile, interminable wrangles over ideology. State your message as concisely, clearly and convincingly as possible, and make it interesting to third parties watching the arguments. Focus on recruiting the potential members to your organization.
27. Beware of traitors.
28. Study the history and revolutionary theory.
29. We can get some ideas from our study. For example, an anti-tech member might infiltrate into radical environmentalists organization, and morph it into anti-tech organization.
30. The result of the future revolution will be determined by technological competence. The revolutionaries must be technologically competent.