The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber’

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

Online, there is a name for the experience of finding sympathy with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure.Since Kaczynski’s death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina nearly two years ago, the taboo surrounding the figure has been weakening. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology — largely the province of the left not long ago — have spread on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

My name is Charles Homans, and I'm a reporter for the New York Times. I was a teenager when the Unabomber Manifesto was first published nearly 30 years ago in 1995. In the manifesto, which was titled Industrial Society and Its Future, Ted Kaczynski shared a vision of technology as not a series of machines and devices that made our lives easier,

but actually a system that had its own priorities and intentions that were not fully aligned with the human species. This, of course, was way before most Americans had really engaged in any serious way with the Internet, let alone social media or smartphones, which didn't exist. At the time, interest in the manifesto mostly came from environmental radicals who were somewhat sympathetic to

Kaczynski and futurists who actually agreed with him on a lot of where technology was headed, though they thought that that was good. Later on, he developed the following among right-wing extremists. But today, something interesting is happening. You're seeing the Unabomber Manifesto pop up in a lot of different political spaces, especially online. Some of them are extremists,

but some of them are not that far from the mainstream. In some ways, I think it's part of this cultural desire to reevaluate these sensational figures from the 90s, whether it's OJ Simpson or the Branch Davidian leader, David Koresh. This is about how long it takes America usually to look again at its notorious criminals. Kazinsky was a notorious criminal who

murdered several innocent people and wounded or disfigured dozens more. But I thought there was something deeper going on with this resurgent interest in Kaczynski's manifesto. It's gained a unique posthumous following that really transcends political categories, especially among young people. And so for today's Sunday read, I was interested in reexamining the story. I wanted to know how is Kaczynski's prediction of the future, once considered obscure and impenetrable, become more recognizable to more people as technology has advanced?

So here's my article. Our audio producer today is Jack DeSidoro, and the original music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. Thanks for listening. Several years ago, James R. Fitzgerald, a retired FBI agent, found himself re-reading an abstruse tract of political philosophy called Industrial Society and Its Future, written by a former University of California mathematics professor named Theodore John Kaczynski. Fitzgerald first encountered Kaczynski's treatise in July 1995, shortly after Kaczynski anonymously mailed the typewritten manuscript to the Times and the Washington Post, demanding

its publication in exchange for his promise to stop killing people with package bombs. Fitzgerald's photocopy of the original was dog-eared and marked up with color-coded annotations he made while trying to discern clues to the identity of the author, then known only as the Unabomber. To this day, he has no particular sympathy for the author, but there had always been passages in Kaczynski's indictment of technological civilization that gave him pause. Boy, I don't really disagree with this comment, he recalled thinking.

And I don't really disagree with this statement, but damn it, he's a killer and we've got to catch him. When we spoke recently, Fitzgerald recited one of Kaczynski's numbered paragraphs, 173, which had been on his mind in light of artificial intelligence's rapid advance. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such

machines might behave. And there was paragraph 92, which Fitzgerald remembered and reconsidered amid the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, of which he was personally skeptical. Thus, science marches on blindly, Kaczynski wrote, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research. You know what? Fitzgerald said to himself. Old Ted was maybe on to something here.

Online, there is a name for this experience, Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read paragraph 1 of Kaczynski's Manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has quote, made life unfulfilling, led to widespread psychological suffering, and inflicted severe damage on the natural world," end quote, and think, well sure. Or to encounter paragraph 156, which says, quote, new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology, end quote, after you've

asked Alexa to order new socks and think, that's not so crazy. Or to read paragraph 174, which warns of a near future in which, quote, human work will no longer be necessary and the masses will be superfluous, end quote, while waiting for the AI assistant to whip up the PowerPoint for your afternoon meeting and think, maybe an off-grid cabin in Montana wouldn't be such a bad investment. Most of the Ted builds stop well short of Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, who gave Industrial Society and its future a four-star review on Goodreads some months before the assassination, writing, quote, It's simply impossible to ignore how prescient any of his predictions

about modern society turned out. The more judiciously Ted Billed treat Kaczynski's ideas with a wink and more than a few caveats. Of course it's true, they began, that Kaczynski was an irredeemable criminal who his own voluminous diaries suggest murdered at least as much out of misplaced revenge and spite as he did out of ideological commitment. Of course his victims did not deserve to die as three did or to live with permanent disfigurement or other lasting wounds as 23 more did.

And yet here's Tucker Carlson on his show in 2021. Quote, the Unabomber, bad person, but a smart analysis. When Blake Masters was running for Senate in 2022, an interviewer asked him to name an underrated, subversive thinker who would influence people in a good direction. I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, he said. But how about Theodore Kaczynski? It has been hard not to notice, in the years since Kaczynski's 2023 death by suicide in a federal prison

in North Carolina, the taboos weakening, the caveats growing fewer and further between. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology, not long ago largely the province of the left, have spread on the heels of the pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms. When Kaczynski died, Joe Allen, the contributor to the website of Stephen K. Bannon's War Room podcast, argued that, quote, "'It's worth reflecting on Ted's dark vision.'"

Even Elon Musk, a man whose company Neuralink, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to implant computers in people's brains, has weighed in. Considering the first sentence of industrial society and its future, quote, the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, end quote, Musk wrote on X, he might not be wrong. Carlson, Masters, and Musk all inhabit the ever blurrier borderlands between the right wing of the Republican Party and more extreme or at least esoteric political territories, Carlson, Masters, and Musk all inhabit the ever blurrier borderlands between the right-wing

of the Republican Party and more extreme or at least esoteric political territories, whose residents delight in theories about racial and societal determinism, in romanticizing past life ways and interrogating the value of our soft, entertainment-addled society. It's not so surprising that Kaczynski has found a home there. But Kaczynski has also become a kind of crossover figure, and a remarkably post-partisan one, capable of drawing nods from everyone from vaccine-skeptical Republicans to Musk-skeptical Democrats to internet-native teenagers. How many other domestic terrorists have been name-checked in conservatives' complaints

about the erosive effects of social media and also in TikTokers' videos from a bucolic weekend at the lake. His manifesto, which was dismissed in the 1990s as impenetrable, is now the subject of YouTube videos drawing millions of views apiece. It's not so hard to understand why. Kaczynski mailed off his manifesto two months before Netscape's IPO, in what were, for many Americans, the last days of the pre-internet era. Thirty years later, we occupy a disorienting moment when the visions of techno-optimists and techno-pessimists alike seem on the verge of realization, when a miraculous future and a dystopian one seem at once within our reach and beyond our control.

Industrial Society and Its Future was published by The Times and The Post 30 years ago in September at the urging of FBI investigators who wagered that giving in to the bomber's demand to distribute his manifesto would be worth it if one reader in a million recognized the writing. One did, David Kaczynski, whose tip led federal agents to his brother's small cabin in the woods outside Lincoln, Montana. Ted Kaczynski was arrested on April 3rd, 1996,

almost a year after the far-right anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. Conservatives had chafed the Democrats' attempts to link McVeigh's views to the rhetoric of right-wing talk radio, and they were quick to brand Kaczynski as the liberal's McVeigh,

as the details of his life and crimes emerged. Harvard education, a late 1960s teaching stint at the University of California, Berkeley, bombing targets borrowed from an Earth First publication. Rush Limbaugh proclaimed him a left-wing nut. The conservative columnist Cal Thomas wanted to know where were liberals quote, cries against radical extremism now that one of their own has been implicated in the horrid deed of bombs by mail.

But Kaczynski was not one of their own. His manifesto spent nearly as many words denouncing leftism as it did attacking technology. Although environmental degradation infuriated him, it was a distant secondary concern to the loss of personal liberty, which he defined in terms a libertarian would recognize. Still, Thomas's what-aboutism was not totally misplaced. Kaczynski did undeniably stir something among the segment of the liberal intelligentsia that looked ambivalently upon the social and environmental consequences of the ascendant neoliberalism and globalization of the 1990s. A liberal criminal

defense lawyer in San Francisco named Doug Horngrad told a reporter, quote, One thing I've noticed among the intellectual elite at this place is that this guy is actually kind of admired privately. Some read Kaczynski's writings sympathetically as a sort of culture critic indictment of a country amusing itself to death at the end of history, where yuppies dozed off alone in McMansion rec rooms as the Waco standoff and the O.J. Simpson car chase unfolded live across their home theater screens.

There's a bit of the Unabomber in most of us, the journalist Robert Wright wrote in Time in 1995 after the first excerpts from the manifesto were released. VCRs and microwave ovens have their virtues, but in the everyday course of our highly efficient lives there are times when something seems deeply amiss. But when it was published in full, the manifesto offered little support for this interpretation either. Kaczynski didn't believe modern society had gone wrong. He believed it was wrong.

Sean Fleming, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham, who is at work on a book about Kaczynski, describes Kaczynski's writing as Nietzsche-like in its defiance of easy categorization, a quality that explains the attraction of the Unabomber to what he calls radicals of all stripes. Most of the ideas in industrial society and its future, Fleming writes, were borrowed from a small handful of Cold War era writers,

most prominently Jacques Alul, the French sociologist whose most influential work, The Technological Society, appeared in English translation in 1964, when Kaczynski was a graduate student. Alul argued that modern civilization, in its pursuit of rational efficiency, had in effect acquired a mind of its own. The system, quote, has become autonomous, Alul wrote. Kaczynski, drawing from popular books on evolutionary psychology, argued that this technological system

was an inevitable consequence of the Darwinian pursuit of advantage, in which the survival of individual and society alike required innovation to outcompete one's neighbors. This meant that the system could not be reformed. Kaczynski wrote, you can't get rid of the bad parts of technology and retain only the good parts.

He concluded, it would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences. The notion that humanity in building the technological society had built its own prison was hardly original in 1995. What distinguished Kaczynski, obviously enough, was his conviction that technological society

needed to be demolished as quickly as possible with violence. This earned him a trickle of would-be acolytes during his long incarceration. Radical environmentalists and anarcho-primitivists at first, and later eco-fascists, the faction of white nationalists who built on Hitler's view that race war was necessary for survival in a world of finite resources. Anders Bering Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi mass murderer, plagiarized Kaczynski in his manifesto. Beyond the far fringes, though, Kaczynski was more oro. Beyond the far fringes though, Kaczynski was more or less forgotten about

in the post-September 11th decade, as Americans obsessed over a very different kind of anti-modern radicalism. With the man himself locked away in a Colorado supermax prison, the world seemed happy to disengage from the ideological component of his crimes. The troubling way they directed a familiar uneasiness

toward ghastly conclusions. Besides the anarchists and neo-Nazis, practically the only people who took Kaczynski's ideas seriously for years after his incarceration were his most direct ideological nemeses, technologists. Ray Kurzweil, the computer scientist and futurist, wrote in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, quote, I was surprised how much of Kaczynski's manifesto I agreed with. When Kurzweil showed Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a passage from the manifesto I agreed with. When Kurzweil showed Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a passage from the manifesto on the future

of artificial intelligence, Joy found himself troubled. He later wrote, quote, "'As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, "'I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage.'" The techno-optimists shared Kaczynski's view that technology was not a series of innovations, but a, quote, holistic self-perpetuating machine, as the futurist Kevin Kelly wrote in his 2010 book,

What Technology Wants. They also agreed that the near future would be one in which human existence was ruled by a system that humans did not control. Where Kelly and Kurzweil differed from Kaczynski was in viewing this future as navigable, even profoundly exciting, and inevitable no matter how many bombs you built. It's not surprising that broader interest in Kaczynski began to tick upwards in the early 2010s as the average person's daily experience of technology shifted from discrete tools and entertainment devices to near constant participation in powerful and inescapable networks, when the system that both Kaczynski and the futurists described went from abstract to concrete.

Lamenting Facebook and Twitter and, quote, the ease with which technology taps the ego and drains the soul, end quote, the Fox News contributor Keith Ableau argued in 2013 that Kaczynski was, quote, precisely correct in many of his ideas. Since then, fights over misinformation and hate speech have made those networks a polarized battleground, while evidence of their psychological and social harm becomes stark. And over the past several years of increasingly rapid AI advance, technologists have come to sound as much like Kaczynski as Kurzweil. Moguls like Sam Altman of OpenAI have brazenly redefined Silicon Valley's higher purpose,

from expanding human opportunity to forestalling an apocalypse that they insist only they, conveniently enough, are capable of avoiding. Kaczynski's vision of a species-wide rebellion against our own creations was far-fetched in 1995. But in 2025, even his personal retreat from technological society seems practically impossible. The robots will be everywhere soon enough, and only the people who build them

can afford to buy land in Montana these days. The sense that there is no escape from technology and its consequences has fostered the very loose, very online ethos known as Doomerism, an irony-mediated marriage of nihilism and utopianism in which apocalypse is inescapable, but the possibilities on the other side of it are vast, unencumbered by the constraints and cramped imaginations of politics as we have known them. It is perhaps no surprise that Kaczynski is ubiquitous in this milieu, quoted and memed and venerated on social media and message boards as Uncle Ted. In this context, Kaczynski's manifesto is less the blueprint for resistance he hoped it would be than a theoretical framework for understanding the dystopia we now must figure out how to live

in and how we got here. In the goofier corners of Ted Pilled's social media, he is invoked, tongue mostly but not entirely in cheek, as a kind of Lorax figure, a weird, feral creature to whom humanity should have listened when we had the chance. On X, his glowering image is superimposed over headlines about Japanese men marrying virtual reality brides. On TikTok, his manifesto is quoted, live-laugh-love style, and posts about wilderness hiking vacations. Scroll through enough of it, and the lines between jokey provocation and unironic aspiration

become difficult to discern. You remember that these are often people too young to remember a time before the iPhone, for whom Kaczynski's alarms come from a world not much more distant and unthinkable than Rousseau's. And you notice the phrase that accompanies many of the posts, the way it sounds more like a rueful shrug than a call to arms. Uncle Ted was right.