I mean, I can understand the appeal, but it's sort of ironic that those fantasies are exchanged and amplified using the most unnatural and complex technology we have at our disposal.
I wonder if this is less a longing for "simpler times" than a longing for a society in which one has more power.
> Without real traumas and existential struggles, our emotional system starts attaching the coping mechanisms that exists for these things to other more mundane aspects of existence like politics and relationships.
This sounds a lot like the old nazi argument for "perpetual war": Without war, men will grow weak and complacent and society will become fragile, therefore war must never end.
I think this sort of reasoning can be easily be cured by talking with an actual veteran.
I always thought it was more about control and self determination rather than power for most, something many here running linux and avoiding cloud services can naturally sympathize with. It's a very old urge with even the aristocrats of ancient Rome had similar notions, farming and getting your hands dirty was held in high esteem for instance. We also see it in Tolkiens writing about hobbits who loved farming and never craved power. It's the sort of theme that seems to be a constant desire throughout history.
One of the recipients of the bitcoins is Luke Smith, I don't agree with his politics but from watching his youtube he seems to practice the self sufficiency he preaches to an extent, from growing his own food to running linux. He's a bit like Kaczynski but spends more time on his vim configuration than mail bombs.
> but it's sort of ironic that those fantasies are exchanged and amplified using the most unnatural and complex technology we have at our disposal.
I think in the long run technology will become sufficiently advanced to solve this paradox, anyone that desires to will be able to become fully self sufficient, we'll fire up our 3D printers to make a pencil instead of relying on the global supply chains we do now. It's either that or our psyche has to adapt to being colony animals, but after 2000 years we don't seem to be getting much closer to that.
While probably unintentional, this sounds very similar to the practice of making high sulfur "pig iron" very inefficiently in backyard furnaces during the Great Leap Forward.
It would be the height of irony if these far-right, hyper-libertarian types took their ideology to the extremities where it begins to resemble Mao or Pol Pot's ideas about autarky.
David Skirbina addresses this is his forward to Technological Slavery[0]. Ted isn't a PhD student doing research; the lack of originality to his arguments is a feature, not a bug.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45035203-technologica...
Kaczynski has also continued to write while in prison and his work is thought-provoking notwithstanding the paradoxes involved (eg how technology has facilitated the spread of his anti-technological ideas). His views don't fit neatly into any political category.
It takes me back to when I read the Unabomber manifesto online as a teenager when it was first printed. I largely rejected it, but there was this part of me that resonated with the emotional appeal to a simple world with simple ideals and a connection to nature. I knew enough to realize that this was a fantasy, but it's an appealing fantasy that also finds expression in the popularity of comic books, pseudo-medieval fantasy epics, and other forms of escapist fiction.
I think what it boils down to is that we are not neurologically wired for abundance, huge scale societies, or the types of labor that pay the best in the modern world. We're not built to sit in front of screens and solve puzzles all day, and without something to struggle against parts of our emotional nature seem to go haywire. I've speculated that the immense paranoia and prevalence of all kinds of neuroses might be an emotional analogue to the hygiene hypothesis for allergies. Without real traumas and existential struggles, our emotional system starts attaching the coping mechanisms that exists for these things to other more mundane aspects of existence like politics and relationships.