Did Ted Kaczynski have some legitimate points?

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Many people have similar ideas.....

In my personal experience on the quest for the truth, Kaczynski's manifesto was my first exposure to such ideas. Regardless of the source it's worthwhile to discuss them which I would rather discuss than the source in which I found them initially.

Read up on the Luddites. They’re radicals....but they don’t send bombs to people.

The Lusdite riots were violent affairs and the revenge taken on them was even bloodier.
They were also merely workers who lost their jobs to machines and had to retrain.

That's not the cost of technological progress Kaczynski is talking about.
His point is: technology gives you lots of cool advantages, in life but also against enemies. So you need technology, or your life is worse than it could be and/or you will be colonized.
But as technology gets mire complicated, you need to devote more of your society to making it, expand supply chains, have your workers work longer hours etc.
So, to get technology, you have to give up the freedom to structure society and personal lives as you'd wish, and work in highly complex social organisation to make the technology.
And it only gets mire complex and unfree, the more elaborate the technology gets.

The Luddite issue us merely about how to cope with the social changes a specific technology brings with it, once it's introduced.
Kaczynski sums up the inherent dynamic that unfolds from technology itself, i.e., the arms race and the sacrifice if freedom necessary to participate in it.

While the Luddite argument can be circumvented with social mechanisms (say, state sponsored retraining or a basic income, etc), the Kaczynski argument is not easily countered.

Not only that but he brings up the way in which our strive to provide ourselves and achieving our basic needs of food, water, shelter, ect used to be a task that required much more work and dedication and thus accomplishing security in those respects gave a strong sense of satisfaction in life. For example a man hunting and foraging and building a homestead for his family. But technology has rendered the pursuit of those things so menial, repetitious, and easy that it no longer gives such satisfaction in life and thus man is forced to pursue activities and goals invented in his own head that are abstractly invented to compensate the lack of satisfaction he gains just off pursuing basic means. These are called surrogate activities. And the pursuit of surrogate activities often proves to be far less gratifying than the pursuit of man's needs were back when it took tangible work for a more tangible gain. This has caused modern man to live a comparitively unsatisfactory life and experience great quantities of stress, which of course impacts society as a whole on the macro scale negatively.

Kaczynski is a murderer and a terrorist, convicted of 10 counts of transportation, mailing, and use of bombs and 3 counts of murder, he pleaded guilty to all charges, and is now serving 8 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.  He should not be anybody's 'hero' in any sense of the word.  Any admiration for him is severely misplaced.

Just because I agreed with some of the ideas in his manifesto doesn't mean I consider him a personal hero. I think you're working very hard to make me look like I support or "admire" his actions, which I don't at all. I support the *ideas* he wrote of, of which have nothing to do with mailbombing people. I haven't seen you discuss one word about the concept of surrogate activities or the effects of modern industrial society as of yet.

Apart from the person in question, I believe anarcho-primitivism - while understandable as a sentiment - is unsustainable on multiple levels.
Most simply: technology and organisation give way too much advantage - so even in an unlikely scenario of an anarcho-primitivist world, organized societes using technologies would emerge spontanously and take over.

Yes, I agree.
But just like Hitler was obsessive about healthy eating, it doesn't mean we should not talk about healthy eating (obsessively or non-obsessively). Obviously, healthy eating wasn't Hitler's own invention either. Yet, if he had written explicit rules on how to eat to become the master race, we could discuss the value of his diet regimen without sharing any other sentiments or a belief in a master race.
Let me state clearly: I don not believe in race theory, but I acknowledge that a varied, largely plant-based diet is woth discussing.

I feel this is one of the few situatiins where the argument ad hitlerum is legitimate.

Kaczynski suggests that it would need a very, very conservative religion to prevent technology from developing. But of course, the culture developing such a religion would be easily destroyed by a culture that didn't develop such a religion.

yes, he says that. Personally, I think providing for a family and owning a home are still respectable achievments.
But then, I am a professiinal artist, I could neither provide fir a family nor pay a mortgage or build a house,but I very much enjoy my surrogate activity. I think most people don't realise that the dopamine is awarded for trying to solve a puzzle of some sorts, not for finding the solution. -it's why videogames are fun to play, not to have finished.
so you just have to find a surrogate goal that is hard, or allows you to find harder ones following any immediate achievement.
I also think in hunter gatherer societies, depressed peopke would have been eaten by tigers, yet the genetic disposition for reflection and uncertainty is valuable, so it was advantageous to have some introverts in your group.
Who knows, maybe science will find the genetic markers for depression and there will be a social norm to abort pregnancies, as is now the norm with fetuses with severe disabilites - which I consider a form of eugenics that developed out of our social technique of capitalist individualism, so, is in a way a priduct of technology and the social structures technology creates.
I do not endorse it, but under the given social structure, I think a moral argument is moot.

There was a religion like this in the Metro Exodus game...
These shooters nowadays can contain quite a portion of philosophy.

Some of America's greatest heros are slave owners and/or mass killers.

"Columbus day" honors Christopher Columbus who is suspected of doing barbaric things to thousands of American Indians.

"George Washington's Birthday" is a holiday that honors a slave owner and victor at British battles.

yes, but unlike with Kaczynski, you can argue that these two achieved postively associated historical significance besides the negative aspects.