What follows here is rather sketchy, not particularly thought-out or fleshed-out – I am still in Holiday Dysregulation Mode, getting my sleep schedule back in order, feeling juiced, trying to make sure to take walks, eat properly, fold my stupid laundry. In other words, not my best work, as real life is intruding in a particularly drab way, but hopefully interesting, and hey, this newsletter is free.
Obviously, I’ve been doing more reading about the Unabomber over my short holiday break. In particular, I really enjoyed this from RH Lossin, published in The Nation in 2022. As a starting point for my line of speculation, it’s important to mention that Lossin runs through the familiar antecedents to the Manifesto: Jacques Ellul in particular, Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, even hoary old Adorno and Horkheimer. The passage he plucks out of Marcuse is particularly interesting:
The technological universe… is the latest stage in the realization of a specific historical project—namely, the experience, transformation, and organization of nature as the mere stuff of domination.
Since my academic field is (was?) public health, this clearly puts me in mind of public health and statistics – high-modern technoscientific projects to dominate, exploit, subvert, and harness nature to serve the ends of Kaczynski’s System. Public health doesn’t understand itself this way (doesn’t understand itself at all, which engenders a lot of confusion in other quarters), but it is a part of this system of technological domination and rationality. In my estimation, this is a big part of why public health remains completely unable to answer to MAHA in its own idiom, or in any idiom that is intelligible to the general public on an experiential level. In fact, these concerns in their own idiom would mean, for public health, admitting something inadmissible and completely repressed, something essentially true that comes out in the Unabomber manifesto. Lossin: “we seem reluctant to fully acknowledge what Kaczynski proved: we cannot live beyond the reach of our technologies.” (Me: “some points were made.”)
This is one of the reasons I’m so interested in what’s going on with the more conspiratorial reaches of the so-called “Zero Covid” movement. (I don’t think anybody is doing ethnographic analyses of these groups but if they are, please let me know.) There’s an incoherent coherence (characteristic of conspiratorial mindset – something about which I’ll have more to say very soon) to the ZC people’s emerging critique of public health: it is a tool of the state and state power (yes, duh!), which is bad, and – precisely in its capacity as an organ of state power? – it should be able to achieve impossible feats of technical sophistication: containment of Covid-19 after five years of global spread in human and animal populations, widespread implementation of behavioral modifications through vibes alone, and so on. That it hasn’t is evidence of a range of intentional evils from “eugenics” to “normalization” to “cognitive dissonance.” As such, all that is left is to disengage from a system that has failed to “care” about or for us. But nowhere is anyone — that I have seen, anyway — suggesting that this is an illustration of the frustrating and paradoxical nature of technological “progress” as such. I have argued as much on here before, using often-quixotic malaria eradication campaigns (which often follow on the increases in malaria that attend equally-quixotic nature-domination schemes, like the damming of the Nile river to irrigate the surrounding area year-round) as an example.
The price of technological domination of nature is further technological “enclosure” (Lossin) of every aspect of our lives; of increases in the “state power” that is, on the ZC critique, so bad. This critique evinces a curious kind of techno-optimism dressed up as very opaque anti-state anarchism — the very opposite of what is true about the Manifesto. A pandemic like Covid emerges as a consequence of, and at the level of, Kaczynski’s System, the organization of huge (planetary) numbers of people into technicized systems like the global economy, or the global food systems that are constantly incubating new strains of highly pathogenic avian influenza. There is thus something very interesting in how the line of critique advanced through increasingly sparse and mean (in both senses of the word) “left” analyses of the pandemic has changed in recent years. The line has mutated from “criticize policies not people” — while they might still be frustrating or Pyrrhic technical solutions, a System-level problem demands System-level solutions — to “the state won’t save us” and a vague gesture at escaping it via good old Mutual Aid. The former of these analyses rehearses an old left-wing line. Lossin again:
The drumbeat on the left, at least since Lenin praised Frederick Winslow Taylor for his scientific management, has been that it is capitalism, not technology, that is the problem. This is certainly true to some extent, but the corollary—that the technology of capitalism can and will be used differently under socialism or whatever other alternatives may come into being—obstructs vital critical approaches to an apparatus that increasingly incorporates and organizes all aspects of our lives. Talking about Kaczynski may be a way to obliquely address our ambivalence, or even anger, toward a social reality at odds with vaunted American ideals of freedom and independence. Talking about Kaczynski—unambiguously bad, maladjusted, and safely in prison—may also be a way to repress this ambivalence. More than likely, it is both.
This sort of thinking is endemic to the left – that it’s just the capitalism, the “logic of capitalism” (slamming that NUT button any time someone intones about “logics,” plural), or whatever, and that if the technological apparatus of public health were deployed under a better political-economic system – a vaguely “socialist” one, though nobody bothers to care what that means anymore – then, then, it would finally succeed! Not so fast, I think.
Both of these analyses misunderstand the totality of the System, and the near total imbrication of technology and progress with the most minute gestures of daily life. What Manifesto antecedent thinker Jacques Ellul called technique does not have a separate genesis outside of concrete historical conditions – that is, for our purposes, outside of capitalism. Here Kaczynski reappears like a traumatic nightmare (nice repressed you go there…): the good parts of “technology” are inseparable from the bad parts, as in an intensive DDT spraying campaign, and there is no outside. In one sense, this is maybe where I rock with Kaczysnki the most. There is no meaningful outside, not at the level of the population or the planet, short of (and here’s where Kaczynski and I diverge) wholesale transformation of the “System.”
Both of these analyses, which both in their own way hinge on a belief in the disarticulability of technologies from the system, do “obstruct vital critical approaches” (Lossin) to the technical organization of society. It shakes out as all sorts of politics. There are the Big Data reformists, who want to put massive algorithmic systems built to profit from data extraction and manipulation to work doing… well, it’s not clear, but it would be something we think is good instead of something we think is bad. There’s “fully automated luxury gay space communism” or whatever it’s called, which is true dumbass fantasy shit. (In my version of communism, nobody has to mine diamonds – sorry.) And there’s the scattershot vanguard of the Covidposters, who vaguely wish to disengage and detach from the system via locally-organized mutual aid.
But we can’t disarticulate the technologies, and we can’t just escape. Not even Kaczysnki could escape. Lossin:
What Kaczynski wanted was to be left alone. When he found that this was impossible, he started seeking revenge on “the system” that had accomplished such a thorough enclosure that he could not, even in the wilds of Montana, live a life that was free of technology. Airplanes flew overhead; snowmobiles roared in the distance; dirt bikes rode past his cabin; the lumber mill on the neighbors’ property made constant noise; helicopters from mining companies made exploratory trips through the wilderness with dynamite.
(A quick note to recommend a book: The Tuning of the World by R. Murray Schafer, who I have described as “the Ted Kaczynski of the soundscape,” although Ted Kaczynski himself is the Ted Kaczynski of the soundscape.)
I am still thinking a lot about what this all means for public health. I don’t know why – public health doesn’t give a single shit what I think or have to say about it. Nevertheless, at this point, where I stand is somewhere like… it takes a bit of courage and a bit of delusion to take the harder road, the path of transformation. The transformation is huge and difficult to fathom, but this is where the dialectical thinking of Marx can help us out. The system is perpetually in motion, in process of gradual transformation — so where can we put pressure on it? What’s changing and stirring within it that we can potentially exploit? My friend Tim, in his excellent Rolling Stone article about Luigi Mangione and health insurance, articulated something of this, and I’ll let him have the abrupt last word here so I can go take a walk:
It’s been five fallow years for health justice. Is this the spark we need, or is it just a directionless moment of cultural catharsis? Will Brian Thompson’s death bring us to the doors of our neighbors, the halls of our legislatures, and the streets of our cities? Will someone — a union leader, a politician, a community organization — be able to capitalize on this kinetic energy the way Bernie Sanders did, this time more prepared to face the extreme resistance of capital, or is the conquest of the boardroom over the living room absolute? I’m not optimistic, but I’m hopeful; I’m putting my boots on. I gotta. There is no alternative but the nihilism of lonely Luigi Mangione.