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Notes -
Ted Kaczynski - the Unabomber - is dead.
I always found it interesting how, when I first learned about this guy, he was mostly portrayed as an ecoterrorist. The spectre of ecoterrorism and animal rights terrorism actually probably loomed larger in the 90s and early 00s than now, which might explain this. There was even a popular quiz with Unabomber and Al Gore quotes, purporting to demonstrate that the former American VP was just as extreme as the Unabomber.
However, if one actually reads the manifesto, or his other work, it soon becomes fairly clear the ecological aspect was not the central point of his critique, and didn't actually feature in it too much at all. He clearly felt some sort of a connection to the anarchoprimitivist and eco-anarchist movements, but mostly in the way of believing they might be allies and converts to his cause, not in the way of actually being one.
No, Ted K.'s true problem with the technological society was that it made people leftist. Since this is immediately obvious when one actually reads the manifesto in even a cursory way, and since during the last decades, parts of the extremely online right seem to have adopted "Uncle Ted" as some sort of a prophet, I don't suppose this actually needs much demonstrating, but to quote it:
Not that this criticism is INVALID, of course, as such - I just always found it interesting how, despite the fact that Ted K. got what he wanted and his manifesto was printed very visibly in newspapers - the actual contents then went pretty much ignored until recently, and even now are acknowledged mainly in small and fringe circles. I don't suppose his death will ameliorate that situation.
An aspect of this whole thing I haven't seen touched on yet is that TK mostly did his thing in the pre-internet age. It seems that he started his bombing campaign before he actually wrote his manifesto, but he did indicate that he was willing to stop it entirely if a sufficiently "respectable" publication was to publish it. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that he basically carried out a mail bombing campaign to get his manifesto published.
Doesn't it seem at least a little bit crazy that in the modern but pre-internet age, if you have a viewpoint that's severely heterodox but not inherently dangerous, you basically have to carry out a terrorist bombing campaign to actually get it distributed. (Or at least a pretty smart guy could come to think that this was the only practical thing to do.) Yet nowadays, you can post every conceivable variety of batshit insane stuff on the internet for the whole world to see, basically for free. We get some pretty damn heterodox stuff posted on this very forum every day. I can go pull up his manifesto right now, for free, and it doesn't actually matter whether it was published on the Washington Post's website or some random free blog somewhere.
On the other hand, maybe it was fame and readership he was really after, which still doesn't come for free. Sure you can post anything you want on a random blog somewhere, but you won't necessarily get any more readership or engagement than you would if you made a few hundred photocopies and started handing them out at public events in the 80s. I guess if you were doing it now, you could post a URL in your bombs and presumably you'd get a lot more readers, along with an aggressive FBI investigation of where you posted it and who had been posting things there etc.
Anyways, there's gotta be something to the fact that anyone can post anything for the whole world to see now, whether it's strictly conventional, heterodox but reasonable, or completely bonkers.
Kaczynski could have self-published his manifesto or gotten a small independent press to publish it, and it would have sunk like a stone. The only reason any of us have heard of it and him is because of the notoriety his bombing campaign afforded him.
If you're unsympathetic to his cause, you might accuse him of being a narcissistic glory hound, only interested in the pursuit of personal infamy. If sympathetic, you might say that his message was so important, urgent and heterodox that he needed to use extreme measures to reach a mass audience.
he could have used his smarts and math cred to get a good position at a university and then that would have increased his visibility. gone on a campus speaking tour, gone on TV
Inadvisable given his analysis of the system. The academics that do this he saw as pawns that just get used to further the goals of industrial society.
Given the way the green movement has been used to get free money for solar panels we don't know how to recycle, I can't really say he's wrong.
Gaming ways of him not having to kill people is pointless anyways.
Ted, like most terrorists, didn't have the feminine disposition or respect for the status quo that would make him see killing as an unacceptable price to further his goals. From his vantage point the system was and is constantly doing much worse things to others and himself anyways.
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