Tag: technology

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Greg Johnson is teaching a five-week course on Plato’s Gorgias on Counter-Currents Radio, which will continue on three Saturdays later this month (July 15, 22, and 29). The second lecture, which dealt with Socrates’ discussion with Polus from 461b to 481b, can be heard below. A visual aid that accompanies the lecture is here.

The theme of the course is “Might vs. Right.” Dr. Johnson is using Donald J. Zeyl’s translation of the Gorgias published by Hackett as both a separate book and as part of their Plato Complete Works volume. (more…)

Ted Kaczynski outside his Montana cabin in 1972.

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Rich Houck: There’s also other parts I find a small problem with. Ted Kaczynski seems to think that without these modern technologies, people cannot be controlled or subverted or treated poorly, but it seems to me that throughout history that’s not been the case. He talked about some of these movements. He mentioned Communism and Nazism in in the same line, as mass movements, but it seems to me that even if we can imagine a society where there’s no modern technology, you could still have a group of people come that is hostile to your interests for various reasons. (more…)

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In Greece in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, the sophists were highly-prized teachers of the art or craft (techne) of rhetoric. (The Greek word techne is the root of our words technique and technology.)

Socrates was widely seen as a sophist, for instance in Aristophanes’ Clouds. To a naïve bystander, Socrates certainly looked like a sophist. Like the sophists, Socrates spent a great deal of time arguing about ideas. Moreover, Socrates was seen arguing with known sophists, including the greatest sophists of them all, Gorgias and Protagoras, as depicted in the Platonic dialogues which bear their names. (more…)

Ted Kaczynski teapot by Charles Krafft

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

The following is an edited transcript of the conversation between Greg Johnson and Richard Houck on the subject of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, that was broadcast on Counter-Currents Radio in April 2021. You can listen to the recording here.

Greg Johnson: I’m Greg Johnson. Welcome to Ted Talk. I am joined here today by Rich Houck, and we’re going to be talking about Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future. Rich, welcome to the show. (more…)

Ted Kaczsynski

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Greg Johnson welcomed David Skrbina, Ph.D. to the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio to talk about the life and ideas of Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. Dr. Skrbina is the editor of Kaczynski’s book Technological Slavery, which includes excerpts from their correspondence, and recently penned an obituary and memoir about their relationship that was published here at Counter-Currents, “A Great Passing: Reflections on 20 Years with the Unabomber.” This is the first part; the second part of the interview is here. (more…)

Ted Kaczynski

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Theodore J. Kaczynski died at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina on June 10, 2023. He had been serving multiple life sentences, without parole, in a “Super-Max” facility in Colorado for his role in the Unabomber crimes between the late 1970s and 1995, in which he killed three people and injured 23 with mail bombs. He was 81 years old. (more…)

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Ted Kaczynski: 1942-2023

Theodore John Kaczynski, the Bedraggled Genius Prophet of Techno-Doom, was found dead in his North Carolina prison cell in the early morning hours this past Saturday. He was 81 years old. The cause of death is currently unknown, and I wouldn’t trust the federal prison officials to be honest about it, anyway. The New York Times is already spreading rumors that he committed suicide. (more…)

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?

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Smoking cigarettes
And writing something nasty on the wall.
You nasty boy!
— Stevie Wonder, “I Wish” (more…)

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By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter — one book. This was the book of the Machine. – E. M. Forster

Welcome, my son.
Welcome to the machine.
— Pink Floyd

Writers of fiction are obviously not bound to set their work in their own times. (more…)

Alex Karp

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Greg Johnson held an impromptu Ask Me Anything on the latest broadcast of Counter-Currents Radio with special guests Gaddius Maximus and Pox Populi where they discussed current things, and it is now available for download and online listening.

Topics discussed include:

00:01:26 On Alex Karp and Palantir
00:35:51 On the bad side of technology
00:39:32 On TikTok (more…)

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Introduction here, Chapter 11 Part 3 here, Chapter 12 here

Translated by F. Roger Devlin

Biopolitics, in this context, is defined as that force immanent to the social realm which creates relations and forms of life through a cooperative form of production. (more…)

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In early March of this year, I wrote “Ukraine and Epistemic Failure Analysis” as a response to the Right’s collective failure to predict that Russia would invade Ukraine and initiate what has become the largest European war since that bit of unpleasantness with the Germans in the 1940s. That essay concerned itself with that very narrow failure of the nationalist Right to accurately predict the onset of war. Since then, that conflict has developed and expanded, and so have the Right’s reactions to it and its predictions as to its ongoing course. (more…)