Luigi Mangione, the man alleged to have killed Brian Thompson, wrote a review of Ted Kaczynski's Industrial Society and its Future on Goodreads and this sparked a flurry of renewed interest in it so I thought I might add my two cents on the controversial piece. The manifesto is available on this very site and several other places. I'm just going to outline the work and my two major problems with it rather than exploring the whole thing and responding to every point.
Firstly, I want to say that the manifesto is well written. Kaczynski's incisive and compact style rapidly presents his thesis, marshals evidence in its favor, and answers objections. Having read political tracts whose authors seemed to believe they were being payed by the word I am glad for this. The sophistication of the language and arguments seem to operate right at the limit of the median English speaker's understanding which seems appropriate given it's intended effect.
The manifesto begins with a scathing criticism of modern leftism and society in general. Modern leftist are portrayed as willfully ineffectual and borderline masochistic in their political pursuits and general lifestyle. This is attributed to the stifling of the "power process" compelling the modern man to seek surrogate activities in a mostly ineffectual attempt to meet this psychological drive. The "power process" is composed of the serious expenditure of effort in the pursuit and attainment of ones goal and in premodern life was largely generated from simply remaining clothed and fed. According to the manifesto modern industrial life no longer calls for large expenditures of effort to satisfy basic needs which has drained life of its satisfaction. The remainder of the manifesto is an extensive extrapolation on these themes and what to do about it.
One of the weird things about being human is that one still needs to learn about how other humans work. Industrial Society and its Future portrays the majority of psychological suffering in the industrialized world as a consequence of people being subordinated to highly controlling institutions which they have minimal influence over in contrast to the pre-industrial humans who had comparative freedom to pursue meaningful goals of survival for themselves and their friends and family. I object to this on the grounds that it isn't true. The whole argument hinges on the "power process" being a useful framing. People attempt to move from less technologically developed countries to more developed countries. Fewer children die in technologically developed countries. People strongly prefer their children to live. I consider the last three claims self evident and they stand in stark contrast to the narrative in the manifesto. The general thrust of the manifesto is that hunter gatherers and agrarians are happier than urban populations. This is supported with a cavalcade of social ills from the nineteen nineties as evidence of our society's dysfunction. I'll just come out and say it: hunter gatherers have fewer problems and are not significantly happier for it. It sounds like it shouldn't be possible but the hedonic treadmill conserves the amount of pleasure and suffering in general. Regarding the social ills we have a much larger and better reported on population to draw from in finding aberrant behavior to gawk at. But let's grant that prior versions of society were generally happier for comprehensible reasons. We can engineer those features into our society. Kaczynski vehemently denies that this is possible but both Liberal Democracy and Communism were deliberately attempted with varying degrees of success. Society has never been successfully redesigned from the ground up but it has been deliberately altered for the better several times.
The other really big problem with the manifesto is that the solution is unworkable. Let's ignore that the global food supply is dependent on industrial fertilizer production and that weening ourselves off of it will involve global depopulation accomplished by either mass starvation or mass sterilization neither of which are going to be generally popular. Grant that the Neo-luddites somehow get this done anyway; how do you maintain it? Global telecommunication doesn't exist because all telecommunication is removed. We went from barely having steam engines to the internet in eight generations. That was without knowing what was possible. If you are a hunter-gatherer or subsistence farmer who just lost a second child to cholera how strong is the desire to not lose a third versus losing some autonomy to a techno-industrial society? This and more general forms of the question are at least somewhat empirical. There are some number of people who would take that trade. I do not think that they are in the majority. But what if everybody is wrong about what they actually want and they really would prefer to be hunter-gatherers? That wouldn't change matters. Imagine the world somehow ends up post-technological. Will it stay that way? It didn't the first time when the world was not in fact littered with examples of electric motors. Perhaps an anti-technology priesthood could be brought into existence to suppress industrial development. Yes, I see it now: A powerful priesthood which would prevent the creation of labor saving and manufacturing devices so that humans could be free to experience the true pleasure of living and dying as part of small communities with two room huts and three of their six children surviving to puberty. But what if a group decides to overthrow their church of ignorance and inefficiency and begins manufacturing guns or sanitary wipes? Or both? They could become an unstoppable force of destruction or sanitation! Or both! Clearly the temples of virtuous poverty will need to remain armed with modern weapons to quell defections against our collective interest and they will need an industrial base to maintain it but it can be way smaller than the current ones. In the extremely unlikely scenario where an organization with the longevity of the Catholic Church can assume control of all of the firearms and means of production and acts to prevent anybody trying to rival their power it is conceivable that a reemergence of techno-industrial society could be prevented for a few millennia. Dystopian? Sure. Plausible? No. Literally possible? Who can say? Kaczynski wisely avoids describing any sort of maintenance of the post technological world because it makes no sense without control of all societies. Without that control it is an n-player prisoners' dilemma between all societies till the sun swallows Earth.
Assuming that my two objections are correct then continued technological development is almost inevitable so long as humans continue to exist and the amount of per capita suffering will not change much. If my first point is wrong then the future is a bleak and inevitable dystopia so worrying about it won't get you anything but high blood pressure. If they are both wrong we have a narrowing window to basically destroy society. Since very few people have read much less been convinced by Kaczynski this is all mostly academic but I'm afraid that it's pulling people who might otherwise be usefully working on actual societal dysfunction into depressive spirals when it's just not that strong of an argument. Technologically mediated dystopias are entirely possible and people can and should act to prevent and/or mitigate those outcomes in ways that don't kill most of the people on Earth.