Good books on Luddism/Deep Ecology/Simple Living/anti-Technology.
Something that's not "Kill computer scientists" or some edgy Linkola shit. The best I've been able to find is Pynchon's essay "It is OK to be a Luddite?"
>>8164709
Not even trolling,
http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt
Ted Kaczynski's manifesto is on that exact topic and is considered to be quite well done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Society_and_Its_Future
Also, he put his money where his mouth was.
>>8164709
I'll bump this
Just got a smartphone after having a basic slidephone for over 6 years.
Feels weird and I really don't want/need it.
But the ability to use GPS seems to nice for me to go back, honestly.
>>8164709
I thought Singularity was bullshit but this was very well received.
Its hard to find stuff on this that isnt tinfoil on this
>>8164738
>Its hard to find stuff on this that isnt tinfoil on this
Yeah, I feel you.
>>8164728
I'll probably check it out, and a biography his brother wrote about him. Is killing computer scientists inherent in his work or was it an afterthought? I heard he gets friends/family to print out internet websites and bring to him in prison.
>>8164765
His work isnt an apologia for his acts, its a work of sociology in the context of technological singularity, or even the point where technology becomes an irreversible crutch for mankind.
The link includes a 4 paragraph introduction which is self explanatory.
>>8164772
tldr
> 1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster
for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of
those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have
destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected
human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological
suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have
inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued
development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly
subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage
on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social
disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased
physical suffering even in "advanced" countries.
>>8164772
Alright, got any more?
>>8164730
you could use a basic phone and a handheld gps
but then at that point you would start to become a joke of yourself
>>8164709
Jaron Lanier's books are great
Not "luddite" at all, but a good take and criticism of the current online and digital world.
>>8164924
this is pretty good
>>8164709
im very much into this topic and can recommend a few:
Ted Kaczynskis manifesto is ofc seconded.
As a basic philosophical text you can't miss Heidegger on the Question Concerning Technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology
Then there's Jacque Ellul's The Technological Society, which greatly influenced Kaczynski and is a fine read.
John Zerzan obviously has a few points to make.
Then there are films which i can higly recommend:
The Net: The Unbabomber, LSD and the Internet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLqrVCi3l6E
and two series by ADAM CURTIS, probably the most knowlegeable and intelligent filmmaker around, called PANDORA'S BOX and ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE
I also heard that the new book by David Gerlernter (a guy the Unabomber/Kaczynski tried to kill) positions itself against CS/robotics/AI.
The gist of all this is the following: Technology that no single person understands is shit. It has its inherent logic and produces it's own prerequisites. It is the most disrupting factor on humanity and planet earth as a whole. Technology is mostly produced by the military-industrial complex and people tend to swallow it like hungry children in Africa, although they have no idea how it works or more importantly what its effects are. Technology supplants our basic desires like food and shelter with consumption of shit, so that we have more spare time to shove other shit down the throats of our fellowhumans. Not to mention ecological catastrophe.
AI however is BS. No one will ever be able to produce a conscious organism. We don't understand consciousness and cannot model something alike. We cannot ever understand consciousness since everything we observe happens mediated by it. We can never observe it objectively as we would have to step outside of it. You cannot build a model inside the thing. You cannot model the universe in it's complexity inside the universe. Complexity cannot be sufficiently reduces as to have a functioning model. However the problem of a self fulfilling prophecy persists. What if an AI passes the Turing test and people believe it has a conscience although this is mere simulation?
"I am not a robot."
>>8165370
>It is OK to be a Luddite
And don't ever forget your Henry David Thoreau
WALDEN
>>8165370
great post
>>8165370
I wonder if you've heard of Vilem Flusser or Peter Sloterdijk. I think both take up Heidegger on technology.
Sloterdijk seems pretty conservative although I haven't actually read him. I think he claims that the 21st century will be one of increasing conservatism (trying to conserve what it means 'to be human') in the face of technological advancedment.
>>8165907
thanks, haven't posted in a while as im behind a blocked ip range at home.
>>8165948
Haven't heard about Flusser ( ill definitely have a look) but since I'm German I ofc know Sloterdijk. He was the most hyped philosopher after Habermas here and even had his own TV show. I only have "In the World Interior of Capital" and started reading it but got bored soon. I just saw a few lectures by him. His keyword is the crystal palace that we as western profiteers of globalization inhabit. He's also fond of Rousseau's reveries, however I think HD Toreau and his fellow transcendentalists/pragmatists are way ahead of Sloterdijk although Walden got published in the 1850s. Also Sloterdijk discredited himself in my eyes as racist and thwarted his own coinage of the crystalpalace by anti immigrant remarks. What those conservatists/revisionists don't get is that you can never go back.The past is gone. You're fucking too late. Look what you can do now and envisage an alternative instead of the lame lamenting over good old times. We don't know if they were good but we for sure know they're over. I of course share some of his cultural pessimism but that doesn't lead anywhere. Clinging to the old societal structures keeps us in place and technology in part serves the powers that be and that brought us here like the nation state and its protectorate the capital.
>>8166170
>What those conservatists/revisionists don't get is that you can never go back.The past is gone. You're fucking too late.
I agree. You're a wise and good poster.
Just read a lot of Heidegger, Hamsun, and William Morris, and nothing about their personal lives.
>>8166296
I know Heidegger and have some reservations about him but his stuff on technology I think is his best.
>>8166301
Hamsun and Morris are very good at taking the nothing useless can be truly beautiful and back to the land ideas nice if hard working places. Just one was a nazi and the other made millions off cyanide, so there's always a drawback even if it's not fucking students like Heidegger.
>>8166332
>you are not making sense. Don't know Hamsun and Morris. Heidegger really liked Nazi Germany in his Schwarze Hefte
Morris is one of the most famous designers of the Victorian age, who owned the largest cyanide mine in the British Isles and started the Arts and Crafts movement. He wrote a novel called "News from Nowhere" which is a socialist reimagining of the grail myth in a future Britain where egalitarian craftsmanship was embraced. Elaine gets a sledgehammer and everything.
Hamsun is one of the key figures of the stream of consciousness trend in modernist literature, because of his novel Hunger which deals with the abasement of city living on the spirit. He's also well known for his bucolic novels about near Amish levels of back to the land living, and being a determined Nazi.
Heidegger went with the flow and fucked Jewesses, while Hamsun was still trying to convince people in his final book and dying years that he really did know what he was talking about and he really did like national socialism because he thought it was a good idea, not because of something they could handwave.
All three focus on having a meaningful relationship with technology on a human scale, rather than an industrial one, even though all of them have done weird shit in life. The "oooh Heidegger was a nazi" overlooks he was a terrible fucking Nazi.
Fuck me, Wodehouse read propaganda for the Nazis because he felt he ought to be polite to them, and nobody bothers to factor that in to whether or not Jeeves and Wooster are funny.
>>8166374
So what's the best Hamsun?
> The "oooh Heidegger was a nazi" overlooks he was a terrible fucking Nazi.
I find it ironic that he praised the German language as being better able to speak Being, and therefore more capable of resisting nihilism etc but the Nazis were incredibly technological and it was probably their strength. I don't know what to make of his Nazism. It's there, but I think he could neither accept them fully nor let them go.
> Wodehouse read propaganda for the Nazis because he felt he ought to be polite to them
Had no idea. The guy who got me into Wodehouse was Jewish now that I think of it.
How does a self-professed Luddite determine what counts as technology? What counts as simple living?
>>8166409
Read the book by the Jewish student he fucked, Hannah Arendt, called Eichmann in Jerusalem. It's mostly about the "good Germans" idea.
>Had no idea. The guy who got me into Wodehouse was Jewish now that I think of it.
It's actually a really beautiful story, because it's almost something out of Jeeves and Wooster. They asked him nicely so he thought it would be rude to say no, and since he'd never had much interest in politics, it didn't really matter to him which party they were, since they had been rather nice about the whole thing.
Best Hamsun for this is probably Growth of the Soil. You could read Hunger for how awful city life is, but GotS is the starting point for what to do instead. After that, just keep going if you like him.
>>8166424
For Jacques Ellul " technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity."
So if you use something for fucks sake and not because its efficient you're okay.
I think you can best distinguish it by its effects although they are sometimes difficult to foresee and by the amount of organization and resources (human and natural) to realize them.
>>8166424
> OMG I think my bong is technology!
>>8164765
>mfw teddie boy prints out /pol/
>>8164709
Hello,
I guess you read some Arne Næss ?
>>8167668
who is this
>>8164709
>Something that's not "Kill computer scientists" or some edgy Linkola shit
Imagine being so low testosterone that you think either of those things are anything but reasonable reactions to living on garbage planet
>>8168329
hello, pekka
>>8168347
I fully believe that the fenno-ugric race, along with russian hooligans, balkanite mobsters, siberian trappers and scandinavian subsistence farmers will be the ones to save the world from the western european menace
>>8168373
Got any books to back up that claim?
>>8164728
>Also, he put his money where his mouth was.
I do have to respect that, desu. Same with Osama bin Laden and that crazy feminist who shot Andy Warhol.
>>8165370
Good post.
Climate change is the number one most serious crisis we face
guymcpherson.com
>>8171111
quads for truth
>>8168329
Isn't this the stupid faggot that tried to spam his philosophy website here a few years back?
>>8165370
>Technology that no single person understands is shit.
That's all technology because our understanding of physics is incomplete.
>>8164709
>Something that's not "Kill computer scientists"
There's no reason to allow them to live.
>>8165370
>AI however is BS. No one will ever be able to produce a conscious organism.
We will be able to create a superficial artificial intelligence. We can have learning and "intelligent" systems now and it is merely a question of complexity until we get something similar to true intelligence. The brain is an association network and then some. The day will come we can recreate a cheap copy of it. probably sooner than later.
A true consciousness maybe not, but what is true consciousness in the first place? Just a sufficiently advanced intelligent system.
>>8164709
Anarcho-Primitivism and Green Anarchism (lol)
Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin
>>8172424
> that entire post
> thinking you refuted anything and not just proved him right
do you even fucking read?
>>8172424
> guy claims we can't make AI because we can't define and step outside of consciousness
> DUDE WERE GONNA MAKE AI, WHATS CONSCIOUSNESS? I DUNNO LOL. ITS DEFINITELY A REALLY BIG COMPUTER
stem lords, ladies and gentlemen
>>8168329
i agree
>>8172818
>WE CAN'T HAVE TRUE AI BECAUSE WE GET TO DECIDE WHAT THAT IS AND WE WILL MOVE THE GOALPOSTS AS SOON AS YOU COME NEAR
humanitiesfags everyone
>>8171754
we need them to more efficiently kill industrialists and other computer scientists
>>8172832
Nope. The Nazis performed efficient genocides without cumpoopers.
>>8172843
well, that's not the "we" I'm talking about
>>8172815
You miss the point.
The problem is his idea of "consciousness".
The difference between a rudimentary AI that we might cobble together with a few million dollars and a decade of time and our mind is just a gradual one.
>>8172829
You're just admitting that we'll have robots that can fool us into believing they have consciousness.
You have no idea how to verify if they actually have consciousness because we don't know what it is.
Read more.
>>8173017
No, you miss the hard problem of consciousness.
Only ledditors and stemlords think it's been solved when it hasn't.
Just be honest.
