It is striking how much the Unabomber's manifesto sounds like Tucker Carlson when philosophizing: against leftists, feminists, political correctness, cities, and progress.
Note also the irony in how much the Unabomber sounds like today's AI hypster/doomsayers:
@emc2@jeffjarvis Seems like it's leftist in its analysis but regressive in its prescriptions. A case of Yes-Yes-No which goes sideways by taking the likely outcome of the current trajectory and holding it up as an objective.
That view is based on false equivalence, of progressivism and the notion of capitalism as an end-state (which it explicitly rejects), and of technology/science as being inherently capitalist (it isn't).
Here is a challenge for you: go point-for-point with primitivism, press it, and try to distinguish it from reactionary thought. You'll find it differs only in that primitivism wants to go much, much farther down that road.
No worries. Based on everything else you said, I assumed you were just a bit confused.
I was already blocked by one of the people who think the Internet going out briefly means we need to dump all technology in order to save us from being dumped by all technology and another is declaring victory because they want to take their ball and go home.
@opendna@jeffjarvis That's the classic fascist playbook, though. Point to problems arising from systems, but then cut to restoration of a mythologized past as the "solution". Primitivists just mythologize the paleolithic, as opposed to some sort of racial/national origin.
Oh for sure! And incredibly cavalier about sentencing the majority of current and future humans to die from preventable disease, starvation, or predation.
@emc2@jeffjarvis While there are certainly leftists that support reactionary primitivism, I think one should take care to distinguish between them and those supporting a measured withdrawal from maladaptive technologies and infrastructure, often called rewilding or similar, as well as those more generally advocating for sustainability.
So I support things like (parts of) solarpunk, social ecology, and what's sometimes called social, open, or liberatory technology. All of these advocate a rational approach to technology, with benefitting humans and positive social impact as their primary motivations.
I resoundingly reject anything founded in mysticism, guardianship, reaction, austerity, or demonizing technology or progress.
I regard solarpunk very positively, even as one who approaches everything with a critical mindset.
My only critiques (very slight) tend to be where it interacts with systems based around austerity or anti-rationality, but these seem to be largely confined to the fringes.
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