[otisfunkmeyer]

I was 19 when this came out and this essay single-handedly changed my life and led me to Ray Kurzweil, Minsky, the Unabomber Manifesto, Naomi Klein, and then ultimately to spirituality through Hawking-trained-physicist-turned-cave-dwelling-monk Peter Russell's "Waking Up in Time."

The rest of my life quite literally flows from reading this essay over and over when it came out. Genuinely happy to see it here.

[zkms]

I also recommend Nick Land's "Meltdown".

[jchrisa]

This is a fruitful investigation. If you are interested in structural impacts over the long term, you might enjoy this article on the difference between a trap and a garden: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

And this short story about cellular automata: https://archive.org/details/TrueNames

[bmomb]

I never heard any of theses terms or texts, can you provide more background? I tried to search for the one "the Unabomber Manifesto" and it seems to be linked to a "mathematician/terrorist", and in the archive.org there is an article about "bad things of industrialization" and some weird characters, what that means?

Can you explain what i'm missing? I'm young and non-american, maybe i'm missing context.

[steaknsteak]

Yes, the Unabomber was a mathematician-gone-terrorist who had a manifesto of sorts published decrying industrialization and technological profress. His academic career was pretty short. There's a Wikipedia page if you want to read up on it.

[otisfunkmeyer]

I believe this article references the Unabomber. If it doesn't, then Ray Kurzweil's "The Age of Spiritual Machines" definitely does.

It's a fascinating line of thought--though I obviously don't support the actions taken by its author.

To clarify a little further, Bill Joy in this essay refers to Kurzweil who refers to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind." I became a technological utopian until reading Naomi Klein's "No Logo" later that year, as well as the book "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman.

This ultimately led me on a sort of existential quest that led to the book "Waking Up in Time" by Peter Russell and then I began to have a much more spiritual orientation towards life and reality and now try to be as practical as possible while working towards a positive technological future.

[chongli]

If you want to read it, you can Google its title "Industrial Society and Its Future" [1].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=Industrial+Society+and+Its+F...

[toastermoster]

Your comment made me think of the Our Lady Peace album "Spiritual Machines."

[paganel]

I also heartedly recommend Jacques Ellul. From his wiki page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul):

> Jacques Ellul (French: [ɛlyl]; January 6, 1912 – May 19, 1994) was a French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and professor who was a noted Christian anarchist. (...) The dominant theme of his work proved to be the threat to human freedom and religion created by modern technology. Among his most influential books are The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

I’ve just finished reading his “Illusion of politics”, where he explained (back in the 1960s) how the West lives in a technocratic world only focused on efficiency and why this causes politicians and political decisions (and ultimately democracy itself) to become sort of obsolete, because all the decisions taken by them (the politicians) should ultimately answer to only one and most important criteria: they should be efficient. And as only the technocrats can tell/approximate which decisions may or may not be efficient, the politicians end up being just “puppets” rubber-stamping the decisions actually taken by the technocrats.

I’m now just about to start reading his “Le bluff technologique” (it’s in French) and I’m very, very excited because of it. Again, I recommend Ellul to all those interested about us, humans, and about how we function, reading him reminded me of when I first read Hobbes, Rousseau or Tolstoy, i.e. other great literary and philosophical figures from the past that did a great job of describing how our species “operates”. Only that Ellul exposes us confronting this new and modern world, which said authors didn’t have the chance to do.

Later edit: For those down-voting this, I urge them to reconsider. Not the down-voting itself, which I don’t care about, but Jacques Ellul himself. Someone mentioned Ted Kaczynski, it turns out Ellul was his favorite philosopher (https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/06/08/the-unabo...). I’ve just finished the introduction of the book I said I was about to start reading, and it’s haunting how he prophetised the “missed chance” represented by the dream of a de-centralized society promised at some point by modern computer networks. He “warned” us (in the 1970s and the 1980s) that we had a very short window of opportunity for making this new technology work in our best interest by making things less centralized. It turns out both the www and more recently crypto-currencies are such missed chances.

> Kaczynski claimed in all humility that half of what he read in The Technological Society he knew already; he discovered in Ellul a soul mate rather than a teacher. “When I read the book for the first time, I was delighted,” he told a psychiatrist who interviewed him in jail, “because I thought, ‘Here is someone who is saying what I’ve already been thinking.'”

[pmoriarty]

Also check out Ellul's "Propaganda", where he says that it's actually the intellectuals who are most susceptible to propaganda, as they feel they have to investigate competing claims and decide for themselves.

Ellul was an interesting thinker. But, to my knowledge, he never advocated violence. I'm not sure where Kaczynski got the idea for using violence to achieve his ends, but it wasn't from Ellul.