[D66] Uncle Ted was right | NYT

[René Oudeweg]

nytimes.com 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/magazine/unabomber-ted-kaczynski-luigi-mangione.html> 



  The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber

Charles Homans
16–20 minutes
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A photo illustration shows Ted Kaczynski’s mugshot against a blue 
background. Hearts, fires, eyes and thumbs-up emojis run down the center 
of the image.
Credit...Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

When Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto appeared 30 years ago, the internet was 
brand-new. Now his dark vision is finding fans who don’t remember life 
before the iPhone.

Credit...Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan

  * Published March 22, 2025Updated April 25, 2025

Several years ago, James R. Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. agent, found 
himself rereading 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.


      Listen to this article with reporter commentary

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 onto 
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 “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread 
psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural 
world,” and think, Well, sure. To encounter Paragraph 156 (“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”) after asking Alexa to order new socks and think, That’s not 
so crazy. To read Paragraph 174’s warning of a near future in which 
“human work will no longer be necessary” and “the masses will be 
superfluous,” while waiting for the A.I. 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.

Image

A photograph shows a wooden cabin in a brightly lit warehouse.
Kaczynski’s cabin in 1998. It was moved to Sacramento, Calif., for his 
trial.Credit...Richard Barnes for The New York Times

Most of the Tedpilled 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 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/style/unitedhealthcare-ceo-suspect-social-media.html> 
on Goodreads — “it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of 
his predictions about modern society turned out” — some months before 
the assassination. The more judiciously Tedpilled treat Kaczynski’s 
ideas with a wink and more than a few caveats. /Of course /it’s true, 
they begin, 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: “The Unabomber: bad person, but a smart analysis,” Tucker 
Carlson said on his show in 2021.

“I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this,” Blake Masters, running 
for Senate in 2022, said in response to an interviewer’s request to name 
an underrated “subversive” thinker who would “influence people in a good 
direction,” but “how about Theodore Kaczynski?”

It has been hard not to notice, in the years since Kaczynski’s 2023 
death by suicide 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/us/ted-kaczynski-dead.html> in a 
federal prison in North Carolina, the taboo’s 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, a contributor to the website of Stephen 
K. Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, argued that “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 dabbled. Considering the first sentence of “Industrial 
Society and Its Future” — “The Industrial Revolution and its 
consequences have been a disaster for the human race” — Musk wrote on X 
<https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1667627403089268739>, “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, 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, 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 I.P.O., 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.


    ‘A Bit of the Unabomber in Most of Us’

“Industrial Society and**Its Future” was published by The Times and The 
Post 30 years ago in September, at the urging of F.B.I. 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, Mont.

Ted Kaczynski was arrested on April 3, 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 at 
Democrats’ attempts to link McVeigh’s views to the rhetoric of 
right-wing talk radio, and as the details of Kaczynski’s 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 — they were quick to brand him as the liberals’ 
McVeigh. Rush Limbaugh proclaimed him “a left-wing nut.” Where were 
liberals’ “cries against radical extremism,” the conservative columnist 
Cal Thomas wanted to know 
<https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1996/04/18/did-liberalism-produce-unabomber/62357992007/>, 
“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 whataboutism 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. “One thing I’ve noticed among the 
intellectual elite at this place,” Doug Horngrad, a liberal 
criminal-defense lawyer in San Francisco, told a reporter, “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 
<https://time.com/archive/6727815/the-evolution-of-despair/> 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 
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/13569317.2021.1921940?needAccess=true> 
as “Nietzsche-like” in its defiance of easy categorization — a quality 
that explains the attraction of the Unabomber to “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 Ellul, the French sociologist whose most 
influential work, “The Technological Society,” appeared in English 
translation in 1964, when Kaczynski was a graduate student. Ellul argued 
that modern civilization, in its pursuit of rational efficiency, had in 
effect acquired a mind of its own. The system “has become autonomous,” 
Ellul 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. “You can’t get rid of the 
‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the ‘good’ parts,” Kaczynski 
wrote. 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 Behring Breivik, the Norwegian 
neo-Nazi mass murderer, plagiarized Kaczynski in his manifesto.)

Image

A photo shows a clearing in the woods with a chain-link fence.
The Unabomber cabin site, Lincoln, Mont., 1998.Credit...Richard Barnes 
for The New York Times

Beyond the far fringes, though, Kaczynski was more or less forgotten 
about in the post-Sept. 11 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.


    A Lorax for the Doomers

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.

“I was surprised how much of Kaczynski’s manifesto I agreed with,” Ray 
Kurzweil, the computer scientist and futurist, wrote in his 1999 book, 
“The Age of Spiritual Machines.” 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, “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, as the futurist Kevin Kelly wrote in a 
chapter dedicated to the manifesto in his 2010 book, “What Technology 
Wants,” a “holistic, self-perpetuating machine.” 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 
upward 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 “the ease with 
which technology taps the ego and drains the soul,” the Fox News 
contributor Keith Ablow argued in 2013 
<https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/was-the-unabomber-correct> that 
Kazcynski was “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 A.I. 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 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-artificial-intelligence-regulation.html> 
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’ve 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 Tedpilled 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, in 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 less 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/.

Source photograph for illustration above: Reuters.

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.

Charles Homans <https://www.nytimes.com/by/charles-homans> is a reporter 
for The Times and The Times Magazine, covering national politics.
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