Only Disconnect: the Fourth Industrial Revolution
What EM Forster and the Unabomber, and a lot of other introverts had to say about the way we’d crack
A little more than a century ago, British novelist E.M. Forster penned the novelette Howards End (1910), a philosophical and moral drama into the declining British Empire and society, and embattled classes, was steeped in the teachings of the Pre-Raphaelites. In the beginning of chapter 22, he famously voices one of the book’s central Romantic themes through the protagonist Margaret Schlegel
“She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
“Only connect,” i.e. the “Inner life” with the “Outer life <sic>, in accordance with one’s innermost convictions. Forster’s characters’ inability or failure to connect is at the root of their elemental dissatisfaction — his or her particular disconnect. Things ended tragically.
Edwardian angst
A sub-theme of Howards End — if it can be thought of as such — is the incipient disconnect with the natural world accentuated and induced by the First Industrial Revolution, which Forster perceived as a pernicious element in many of the same ways his contemporaries Henry James, Thoreau, Dickens, and D.H. Lawrence, did. For them it was the steam engine which gave rise to factory manufacturing, that ended the agrarian economy and manor driven economy as they knew it.
To be certain, in casting Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes drew out these sentiments at great length in his characters lives. The automobiles, cars, telephones, were all disruptive for them. In the despondency of the titled classes, they grew out of touch with their pedigree, each other, and even their most profound ambitions, but eventually settled in a way that doesn’t seem to emulate real life.
In the present day, ‘only connect’ generally refers to social media:
There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on- Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg’s concept of connecting is global: everyone, together, alone, because it is built on false premises: that FB friends = actual friends, and not virtual ones. Forster would automatically argue that only a tiny fraction thereof are people who have met.
More often than not, people who feel oppressed, ostracized, bullied, or otherwise marginalized by technology elect to avoid that which harms them. That can mean a physical or emotional withdrawal from society that offers at least some degree of solitude, which can lead to festering — a natural response when not checked that can lead to dire consequences. Timothy McVeigh, Theodore John Kaczynski, Adam Lanza, or James Eagan Holmes, for example, demonstrate that disconnect affects up and down the food chain — people from all walks of life.
supersize disconnect
The pessimism with this first Industrial Revolution continued well into 20th century thought, in works such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, George Orwell’s 1984, Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent, Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier, and a thread in many of Freud’s writings, and continues through to the present day fourth Industrial Revolution (AI). Had Forster been born one-hundred years later, he would have felt the same disconnect, only different manifestations or contexts that did not exist in his time. Such is the ambiguity and timelessness of his ideas.
Historian Lewis Mumford also foretold the oppression of industrialization with his warning:
“Western man has exhausted the dream of mechanical power which so long dominated his imagination. … he can no longer let himself remain spellbound in that dream: he must attach himself to more humane purposes than those he has given to the machine. We can no longer live, with the illusions of success, in a world given over to devitalized mechanisms, desocialized organisms, and depersonalized societies: a world that had lost its sense of the ultimate dignity of the person.
That could easily describe our relationship with present day technophilism — IoT, AI, social media, and Big Data: our future.
technique
If we could — for a moment — separate the man from the prosecution of his ideas — consider the manifesto writings of Kaczynski -aka the Unabomber — we would find striking similarities between his and Forster’s perception of control being wrested from the masses, and secured by the few:
“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. (Kaz, 1)
Kaczynski’s sense of disconnect appears as purely political Orwellian disgust, but was driven by a number of personal factors.
The ideas put forth in his manifesto were in large part inspired by his (post-graduate) readings of Jacques Ellul’s, The Technological Society. Examples of central themes that inspired Kaczynski’s are
“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man’s very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. … He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.
Ellul perceived the same “fragmentation” as Forster, above, fifty-years hence: technocentric driven society as a Faustian bargain in which we trade in our freedoms for slavery.
“The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional, personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.
“But, the technical society is not, and cannot be, a genuinely humanist society since it puts in first place not man but material things. It can only act on man by lessening him and putting him in the way of the quantitative.
Technocracy is both the usurper and surrogate of the natural world. We think of ourselves as masters of it when we are in fact enslaved in its thrall.
“The world that is being created by the accumulation of technical means is an artificial world and hence radically different from the natural world. It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it.
That could very easily describe the insidious mainstreaming of an Internet driven technocentric society which didn’t arrive until twenty-seven years later.
“The two worlds obey different imperatives, different directives, and different laws which have nothing in common. Just as hydroelectric installations take waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all. When we succeed in producing artificial auroras boreales, night will disappear and perpetual day will reign over the planet (and above, Ellul)
-or perpetual darkness. Clearly, in 1995, Kaczynski sees the Industrial Revolution(s) as the greatest disconnect between our natural selves and the world. He goes on to weigh in on how the government, the media, and Big Pharma create both the symptom and cure of our disconnectedness:
“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.-(Kaz. 145)
In 1995, such a system- flip-phones were cutting-edge — was only nascent or incipient, but to Kaczynski it was a fait accompli.
Kaczynski, despite his precocious intellect — his IQ 167 — led a troubled, childhood with familial stress that lead to extreme alienation at a young age. He was ostracized socially in high school, and traumatized in his close personal relationships. These experiences primed him for extreme disconnectedness later in life. But here is where the similarities with the aforementioned miscreants diverge.
In 1958, just 15, he was accepted to Harvard. In 1959, while at Harvard, he was selected to participate in a series of psychological stress experiments sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The experiments lasted three years and left him (further) traumatized.
Said the New Yorker’s Tom Finnegan of the DARPA experiments
“Murray subjected his unwitting students, including Kaczynski, to intensive interrogation — what Murray himself called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks, assaulting his subjects’ egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.
At this point in time, as Finnegan put it
“It was the confluence of two streams of development that transformed Ted Kaczynski into the Unabomber. One stream was personal, fed by his anger toward his family and those who he felt had slighted or hurt him, in high school and college. The other derived from his philosophical critique of society and its institutions, and reflected the culture of despair he encountered at Harvard and later. The Murray experiment, containing both psychological and philosophical components, may well have fed both streams.
exile
From Harvard, he went on to earn his PH.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan, taught for a short time at the University of California, Berkeley, before he sequestered himself in 1971, to a remote cabin, deep in the Montana hills, on property he owned wit his brother. He is quoted as having wrote that year
“it is argued that continued scientific and technical progress will inevitably result in the extinction of individual liberty.
In those days, his ideas for effecting change were non-violent. He still dreamed of a world order supported by
“an organization dedicated to stopping federal aid to scientific research.
But in 1978, his ongoing battles with encroaching developers who had been absorbing the area in which he lived finally convinced him that life in the wilderness was untenable under such oppression. As H. L. Mencken said in his 1922 Le Contrat Social:
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable. (HLM, 1)
All of which is consistent with the impetus to protest vehemently, a posture that is never well tolerated by governments.
© The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2018
Perhaps being pursued living on the margins is what pushed him over the edge, and is what induced him to begin his several bombing campaigns. However, his first murder bombing fatality wasn’t until 1985 — a computer store owner. The next wasn’t until 1994, and the third and final — 1995.
fetish
“Whoever controls the media, controls the mind- Jim Morrison
Not much nowadays is made of Kaczynski and his writings in the mainstream. Gone but not forgotten, his trespasses seem almost quaint compared to the number of disconnected mass-murderers who also were - by and large — both influenced by, and products of, — technocratic oppression. They festered and cracked in a way that could never be described of as moral dilemma, as it was with Kaczynski- anti-establishment.
private life
Complete social disconnect is two-fold — how people relate online, and how they communicate IRL (in real life) not in of itself, but as an extension of their online persona. For many, most of these transactions take place online, supplanting IRL transactions. A gradual diminution of intellect is plainly evident in IRL transactions as a consequence of habitual online transactions. In other words, IRL lexicons are shrunk and diminished down to the size of text messages.
In short, we have enough trouble being understood and understanding each other without the obstacle of depersonalization making things even more ambiguous. If we want to be understood we must be present: at least if the words don’t come out right, we send myriad signals to each other that are necessary to define context. Not being present, our intimate online transactions are at best ambiguous, and at worst — lack all context.
In 1910, Dreiser observes, in his Sister Carrie,
“People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.”
In other words, words alone seldom suffice to express what we really mean. This is especially so when reading mentalities peak at 12 years old. Online transactions lack the intimacy of presence, and the subtleties of gestures and mannerisms that help us communicate complex thoughts and feelings. That’s why IRL is the only way to really connect
Social media is a living museum or wasteland of (mostly) disconnected souls — some as dangerous as Kaczynski — but mostly just ordinary people. Online interaction is no replacement for IRL (in real life) anymore than texting is a empathetic way to communicate. Once these — to use Kaczynski’s word “surrogates” are accepted as natural, the cycle of disconnect is complete.
“We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal (Kaz., 39).
Sound familiar? Think about the hours of effort the average cel-zombie puts into his or her gaming apps just to … well I wouldn’t know, I don’t play any of the games. Nothing against them per se, but I never seem to have the time to waste with them. When online dating enters the virtual arena, it is as a surrogate-driven clearing-house of uninhibited unnatural selection that thoroughly demoralizes us as we objectify, disrespect, and abuse one another.
I have no plans, I have no debts
The mind is not the carefree set
I’m looking for American Valhalla
So if it passes by, give me a holler-from American Valhalla, Iggy Pop (2017)
The mistake Kaczynski made was an error in calculation: he thought by heading for the hills he could avoid the disconnect. And for a time, he did. He volunteered at a local library, and was well liked by the tiny Lincoln, Montana community in which he lived. When he discovered he could not, he struck back at the symbols of the idea of pernicious technology — and sent a computer store owner he never knew an exploding parcel.
“Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate of this order as the world of production processes us as much as it degrades and deforms every other natural system- John Zerzan (1988)
Today, Kaczynski, Ellul, and Zerzans’ anarchistic ideas seem more and more plausible and reasonable, and more people are listening. He inspired a wave of backlash against the government, in organizations such as John Zerzan’s anarchist movement, the Earth Liberation Front, Church of Euthanasia Freedom Club, Unapack, the Unabomber Political Action Committee, alt.fan.unabomber, Chuck’s Unabomb Page, redacted.com, MetroActive, and Steve Hau’s Rest Stop.
His writings were then, as now, held in high regard by many university professors, and in the press — The Atlantic, and William Finnegan’s, 2011 The New Yorker piece in the , which quoted James Q. Wilson, from a NY Times Op Ed:
“that Industrial Society and Its Future was “a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper … If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers — Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx — are scarcely more sane.
Perhaps Kaczynski was a victim who succumbed to the oppression he felt, and struck out violently — at times impetuously — which certainly caused people to regard him merely as a criminally insane person, but that would be careless and reductive. He was a product of the disconnected culture, environment, and experiences in which he evolved.
Insofar as a morality play, I believe that like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Kaczynski didn’t believe he was killing people, he was killing ideas. That motivation was a fact that was only brought on by agent Fitzpatrick, the profiler who made the connection for the feckless, bumbling, FBI agents tracking Kaczynski.
Had they listened, perhaps they would have caught him sooner.
