The Unabomber

geraardo

I found this documentary on the Unabomber bomber very interesting, it german in parts with subtitles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr5M6oEx2j4

take everything

Malayalam wrote: »

Was recently reading Sapiens by Yuval Harari and if one believes his outline of things our ancestors had it reasonably good at the hunter-gatherer stage when we pretty much organised ourselves according to our likes in small, supportive clans, but even by the time we became agriculturalists our lives were changing for the worst. We became chained to back-breaking work in the fields, hauling water, weeding, harvesting, subject to more diseases and wars, eventually paying onerous levies no mater what corner we lived in to the controllers of emerging and often brutal empires - never quite catching up with our tails as the population increased and, consequently, food demands grew, etc.
The industrial revolution resulted in another new kind of unnatural enslavement of the lives of most people. It's a long time since the bulk of our species has had what one could call healthy lives.
Yes, we are enslaved now, and in many ways, most people chained for example to the kind of jobs and daily timetables that are not natural for the human body and psyche, and we are enslaved via technology. But it is nothing that new.
When people talk about how tech has atomised society I feel that there are a lot of even more fundamental things that do so - leaving infants and children in creches from dawn to dusk would be a bugbear of mine, but the modern lifestyle and economic models neccessitates both parents working, it seems. Tech cannot be made the solitary scapegoat for underlying cultural and political madness. And I do believe we are largely mad. Though better off in many ways than at earlier epochs.
Was just talking at home about it, hubby saying how many kids and teens are always on their tech, but I reckoned it's not as if we as societies ever really thought about and provided good, healthy occupations for our youngsters - drinking cider, smoking fags and having spitting contests down the canal walk has been replaced by social media to some extent, neither awesome by any means. There was no prior Utopia.
I think we as individuals can make better choices, rather than look to the mass culture to change to enable us to be more wholesome. Plus I also genuinely think that everything turns in circles, technology will hold waning interest eventually for a lot of people, will begin to have a more appropriate level of presence in their lives. People will go back walking, gardening, writing, painting, performing, and so on, because satiation with tech will naturally reach a climax. I think it has a potentially cool and useful place in our lives - I am involved in creative digital media and I love the possibilities of tech, the creativity, the communication, the sharing, the info-tainment, etc - just we will learn to accommodate it with more balance. More time in the woods and by the sea! Yay!

Your ideas intrigue me and I would also like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Great post.

Actually I got that book on kindle as well (only read about 20% of it but have been meaning to get back to it).

Malayalam

take everything wrote: »

Your ideas intrigue me and I would also like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Great post.

Actually I got that book on kindle as well (only read about 20% of it but have been meaning to get back to it).

Sorry if I gave the impression I have a newsletter. I certainly have a stack of unpublished books! Haha . But no, it's the art side of things very broadly speaking that I'm in now.

My husband is a voracious reader of history books and always tells entertaining stories about past times. It is a good way to have a wider perspective - an eagle eye view so to speak - on the strange unfolding of present times. It seems times have generally always been strange.