<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#f9f9fa">
<p> </p>
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <a
class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/magazine/unabomber-ted-kaczynski-luigi-mangione.html">nytimes.com</a>
<div class="domain-border"></div>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of
the Unabomber</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Charles Homans</div>
<div class="meta-data">
<div class="reader-estimated-time"
data-l10n-args="{"range":"16–20","rangePlural":"other"}"
data-l10n-id="about-reader-estimated-read-time" dir="ltr">16–20
minutes</div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div id="fullBleedHeaderContent">
<header>
<div data-testid="imageblock-wrapper">
<figure aria-label="media" role="group">
<div data-testid="imageContainer-children-Image"><picture><source
media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 3),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 3dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 288dpi)"><source
media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 2dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 192dpi)"><source
media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 1),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 1dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 96dpi)"><img
alt="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."
src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/03/22/magazine/22idea-unabomber-copy/22idea-unabomber-copy-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"
width="600" height="718" class="moz-reader-block-img"></picture></div>
<figcaption data-testid="photoviewer-children-ImageCaption"><span><span>Credit...</span><span><span
aria-hidden="false">Photo illustration by Pablo
Delcan</span></span></span></figcaption></figure>
</div>
<div>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
</header>
<p aria-hidden="true"><span></span><span><span>Credit...</span><span><span>Photo
illustration by Pablo Delcan</span></span></span></p>
<div>
<ul>
<li><time datetime="2025-04-25T16:05:35-04:00"><span>Published
March 22, 2025</span><span>Updated April 25, 2025</span></time></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<section name="articleBody">
<div data-testid="companionColumn-0">
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="AudioBlock-1">
<figure><figcaption>
<p></p>
<h3>Listen to this article with reporter commentary</h3>
<p></p>
</figcaption></figure>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-1">
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>this</em> comment,” he recalled
thinking, “and I don’t really disagree with <em>this</em>
statement — but damn it, he’s a killer, and we’ve got to catch
him!”</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-2">
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“You know what?” Fitzgerald said to himself. “Old Ted was
maybe onto something here.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="ImageBlock-5">
<figure aria-label="media" role="group">
<div data-testid="photoviewer-children-figure">
<p><span>Image</span></p>
<picture><source
media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 3),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 3dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 288dpi)"><source
media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 2dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 192dpi)"><source
media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 1),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 1dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 96dpi)"><img
alt="A photograph shows a wooden cabin in a brightly lit warehouse."
src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/03/23/magazine/23mag-Unabomber-images/23mag-Unabomber-images-articleLarge-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"
width="600" height="475" class="moz-reader-block-img"></picture></div>
<figcaption data-testid="photoviewer-children-caption"><span>Kaczynski’s
cabin in 1998. It was moved to Sacramento, Calif., for his
trial.</span><span><span>Credit...</span><span><span
aria-hidden="false">Richard Barnes for The New York
Times</span></span></span></figcaption></figure>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-3">
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/09/style/unitedhealthcare-ceo-suspect-social-media.html"
title="">four-star review</a> 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. <em>Of
course </em>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. <em>Of course </em>his
victims did not deserve to die, as three did, or to live with
permanent disfigurement or other lasting wounds, as 23 more
did.</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-4">
<p>And yet: “The Unabomber: bad person, but a smart analysis,”
Tucker Carlson said on his show in 2021.</p>
<p>“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?”</p>
<p>It has been hard not to notice, in the years since
Kaczynski’s 2023 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/us/ted-kaczynski-dead.html"
title="">death by suicide</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1667627403089268739"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote on
X</a>, “He might not be wrong.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-5">
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2 id="link-1972b599">‘A Bit of the Unabomber in Most of Us’</h2>
<p>“Industrial Society and<strong> </strong>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/1996/04/18/did-liberalism-produce-unabomber/62357992007/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wanted to
know</a>, “now that one of their own has been implicated in
the horrid deed of bombs by mail?”</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-6">
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://time.com/archive/6727815/the-evolution-of-despair/"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote in
Time</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>was</em>
wrong.</p>
<p>Sean Fleming, a research fellow at the University of
Nottingham who is at work on a book about Kaczynski, <a
href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/13569317.2021.1921940?needAccess=true"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">describes
Kaczynski’s writing</a> as “Nietzsche-like” in its defiance
of easy categorization — a quality that explains the
attraction of the Unabomber to “radicals of all stripes.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-7">
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.)</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="ImageBlock-15">
<figure aria-label="media" role="group">
<div data-testid="photoviewer-children-figure">
<p><span>Image</span></p>
<div data-testid="lazy-image"><picture><source
media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 3),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 3dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 288dpi)"><source
media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 2),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 2dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 192dpi)"><source
media="(max-width: 599px) and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 1),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 1dppx),(max-width: 599px) and (min-resolution: 96dpi)"><img
alt="A photo shows a clearing in the woods with a chain-link fence."
src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/03/23/magazine/23mag-Unabomber-images-02/23mag-Unabomber-images-02-articleLarge-v2.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale"
class="moz-reader-block-img"></picture></div>
</div>
<figcaption data-testid="photoviewer-children-caption"><span>The
Unabomber cabin site, Lincoln, Mont., 1998.</span><span><span>Credit...</span><span><span
aria-hidden="false">Richard Barnes for The New York
Times</span></span></span></figcaption></figure>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-8">
<p>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.</p>
<h2 id="link-48e7870f">A Lorax for the Doomers</h2>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-9">
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/was-the-unabomber-correct"
title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">argued in
2013</a> that Kazcynski was “precisely correct in many of
his ideas.”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-artificial-intelligence-regulation.html"
title="">forestalling an apocalypse</a> that they insist
only they, conveniently enough, are capable of avoiding. </p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div data-testid="companionColumn-10">
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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: <em>Uncle Ted was right</em>.</p>
<p>Source photograph for illustration above: Reuters.</p>
<p>Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.</p>
</div>
</section>
<div>
<p><span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/charles-homans">Charles
Homans</a></span> is a reporter for The Times and The Times
Magazine, covering national politics.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>