Ted K and Techno-Authoritarianism, by @DegreeStudies

@DegreeStudies Analyzes Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto and its Prescient Warnings

In Ted Kaczynski’s rambling manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, the author vacillates between unhinged gripes clearly drawn from his personal life to eerily prescient warnings about the nature of technology. Among Kaczynski’s most troubling claims was that technology cannot be harnessed towards human ends, that machines have their own prerogatives and are capable of imposing them on humanity.

“The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down,” Writes Kaczynski. “If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.”

It’s difficult to see all the ways that technology instrumentalizes human beings under normal circumstances, as the degradations are generally introduced slowly over time. But COVID has accelerated the introduction and adoption of new technologies, revealing the extent to which human life is diminished when further integrated with machines. In almost every instance, new applications of technology under COVID have exacerbated, rather than alleviated, the dehumanizing aspects of lockdown, namely isolation, surveillance and distraction. 

Although it’s difficult to imagine any pandemic response not requiring some amount of enforced physical distance, technology has allowed technologically advanced societies like America to double down on enforced isolation.

This is particularly disturbing in the context of children and school. Access to certain academic materials or books can be replicated online, but as pediatricians keep insisting, one of the biggest advantages of in-person schooling is the facilitation of social life between children. These social bonds spur brain development and help children form identities that will carry on into adulthood. Implicitly then, replacing in-person school with a tech-based substitute (Zoom class) that makes no effort to recreate social life elevates learning over all other values that school provides. Who decided this, exactly?

To some extent, no one did but machine capabilities determined the outcome by their ability to replicate the contents of a lesson but not the contents of a relationship. COVID has also created entirely new social relations in a school-like setting that are devoid of prosocial content. For instance, some parents have formed small pods where a few students can watch their Zoom lessons together in one room. These parents often hire a former teacher or caregiver to act as a sort of monitor. In theory, this person is a stand-in for the teacher, but their only professional function is punitive and regulatory – to keep kids on task. These pod monitors are not mentors or even scholastic helpers, they are there to make sure your child’s eyes stay glued to the screen. In this way, Zoom class does not simply replace in-person teaching with a sterile, online substitute, it also degrades the remaining interactions between child and adult in a scholastic space. 

“In part this (freedom) was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.”

Adults don’t need this kind of human monitor while working from home. They have apps for that. COVID times have been a boon for several “management” applications colloquially called “tattleware.” These software packages track employees’ every online move via webcam, mic and screen access. When used to its full potential, tattleware can monitor the actual number of minutes and seconds that were spent on work tasks as opposed to browsing the internet or just doing nothing. In the context of a contract employee, this information can be used to challenge or modify the work hours that the employee reports. These applications also log time away from the computer, including bathroom breaks. This Illustrates the authoritarian potential of machines.

Post 9/11, Americans ultimately tolerated explicit inspection and surveillance in public (airports, sporting events) and implicit surveillance in private (phone tracking, internet data sales) but COVID has allowed a more intrusive explicit surveillance to enter the private spaces of work and home. This new intrusion relies on the fact that work and home are now the same space for almost half of the American workforce. 

“Our use of mass entertainment is ‘optional’: No law requires us to watch television, listen to the radio, read magazines. Yet mass entertainment is a means of escape and stress-reduction on which most of us have become dependent.”

COVID has weaponized entertainment against the human project as well. Our society has always split its interest between a balance of high and low art, but contemporary entertainment is utterly devoid of puncturing any philosophical meaning besides endlessly shallow reflections on race. Some have blamed this blandification on the global market and the Chinese specifically, noting that Hollywood now needs to make products that are viable internationally. This analysis lets Americans off the hook, when there is obvious evidence that American tastes were regressing with or without this foreign influence. This childish nostalgia has incentivized the creation of products that are reliably formulaic, particularly on Netflix. This is a feature not a bug, and certain viewers celebrate the degree to which Netflix has perfected forms like the true crime story or the oddball documentary. It is not clear that machines could ever create derivative entertainment products, but if they can, Netflix will be the middle step between human creativity and a tested formula that shows the way. 

Unfortunately, the intensification of the trends identified above cannot be dismissed as a quirk of conditions under COVID. Our own government, business leaders and influential multinational organizations have all expressed enthusiasm for aspects of COVID life and are positioned to ensure they continue post-lockdown. In so doing, these leaders have clarified that in any further conflict between human and machine values, they side with Skynet. Some readers may wonder how the phenomena identified here will possibly continue after most of the population is vaccinated and the spread of disease is under control. Well, if Ted was right about our elites, they will find or create another crisis as soon as this one ends. For now, there are free minded people who have left the deadly warm embrace of technological convenience and are trying to establish beachheads for humanity in the wilderness. These people are brave, but as Ted also said, “in practice there is very little wild country left.”

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Illustration by Adam Lehrer