Counter-Currents
A Great Passing:
Reflections on 20 Years with the Unabomber
David Skrbina
Ted Kaczynski
1,916 words
Theodore J. Kaczynski died at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina on June 10, 2023. He had been serving multiple life sentences, without parole, in a “Super-Max” facility in Colorado for his role in the Unabomber crimes between the late 1970s and 1995, in which he killed three people and injured 23 with mail bombs. He was 81 years old.
I won’t elaborate here on his crimes; such material can easily be found online — and indeed, this is virtually all that the mainstream media want to discuss about Kaczynski: his bombings, his murders, his mental health, his “terrorism.” The last thing they want to discuss is the reason why he conducted his bombings: because of the mortal threat posed by industrial technology, and the need to destroy it.
Ted understood the dangers of modern technology better than most, and he eventually constructed a solid and compelling argument against it and against the ability to “reform” or fix it. He outlined his case in a lengthy essay, Industrial Society and Its Future (ISAIF), which he felt had to reach many people in order to have an effect. He therefore determined that only by acquiring sufficient notoriety and leverage could he ensure a high-visibility publication. For him, a campaign of mail-bombings did the trick. In September 1995, he — one man, working alone — effectively defeated the entire United States government, including the FBI, and forced them to print his entire manifesto in the Washington Post. It is an astonishing story.
Sadly, his own brother recognized the text as Ted’s work, and turned him in to the FBI. Six months later, they arrested him at a small cabin in rural Montana. After a year of comical legal proceedings, the government negotiated a plea deal: life in prison without parole. This was 26 years ago. After 24 years in Colorado, he developed cancer, was sent to the facility in North Carolina for extended treatment, and died there last week.
I have a special interest and special connection to this man. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, but my earlier degree work in mathematics and science gave me an excellent grounding in technology, and I was blessed to have a great philosopher of technology, Henryk Skolimowski, as my friend and mentor for many years. I met Henryk when I was an undergrad student at the University of Michigan — incredibly, Ted’s own alma mater, where he earned his doctorate in math in 1967. Henryk was an early and prominent critic of modern, industrial technology, and he put me on to the substantial and compelling writings of the French theologian Jacques Ellul, whose own book, The Technological Society (1964; French original 1954), was a landmark work. It was this very book that also prompted Kaczynski to his initial skeptical ideas. Eventually, I became Ted’s most famous “pen pal” — more on that below.
I should note that I was a technology critic from around 1980, well before anyone had heard of a “Unabomber.” I knew there were solid, well-grounded arguments against advanced technology. I knew about the thesis of ‘technological determinism,’ in which technology is seen as a primary driver behind social and political change. And I knew that only radical solutions were likely to have any effect. Ted knew these things, too, and he had already concluded that rebellion, in some form, might be able turn the tide, before the system was able to utterly crush human dignity and destroy the natural world — as it evidently was doing.
Thus, I was highly intrigued when stories began emerging in the early 1990s that a person or group with an “anti-tech ideology” was behind a string of mailbombs. I awaited each new little snippet of Unabomber text that was teasingly leaked out by the media. I could quickly see that this person was intelligent and serious, and had a real driving motive for what he was doing. The government could see it, too, and that’s why they were so worried.
Then came the bombshell release of the manifesto, in full and unedited, on September 19, 1995. “He won,” was my immediate reaction; “he beat the US government.” No matter what happened after that, the manifesto was out in the world, for millions to read. Ted had won.
I purchased two copies of the Post that day: one went into my personal files (where it stands today), and the other was to use as a cut-up for my wife and I to type the entire thing into my PC. It seems weird now, but there was functionally no real Internet at that time, no online source to copy-and-paste from. So we typed the whole thing, by hand, into our simple home computer, just to put it into a form that could be worked with, drawn from, and shared. (Yes, there was irony in digitizing an anti-tech manifesto, but such is the nature of a technological society; it forces us all into compromises and ‘hypocrisies’ in order to function as members of society.)
There followed Ted’s capture, the yearlong trial process, and the years of incarceration. For a while, the media loved to talk about Ted: his upbringing, his genius IQ, his troubles at Harvard, his alleged run-in with “MKUltra,” his mental health, his homemade bombs, and so on — everything except the manifesto. Odd, I thought; his anti-tech philosophy was what drove him to his actions, and it addressed a global threat to all humanity, and yet no one — I mean, no one — wanted to talk about that. Wow. That was a major eye-opener for me, into media deceit: They would talk about trivial issues galore, but real and substantive things that threatened the very system that they were a part of, forget it. Never think that the media is about truth-telling, or “shining a light,” or holding the powerful accountable. No — they are about profits, self-preservation, and defense of their chosen ideology, nothing more.
You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here.
I went on to complete, firstly, my Master’s degree in mathematics (at Michigan), and then my Ph.D. in philosophy, in 2001. By 2003 I was an adjunct faculty in philosophy at the Dearborn campus of the University of Michigan, teaching, among other things, the Philosophy of Technology. Since I created this course from scratch, I was free to compile new reading material for the students, including parts of the manifesto. This was paired with a pro-tech piece by Ray Kurzweil, for contrast. But since it had been six years since his incarceration, and the media had dutifully said nothing about Ted in that time, I decided to write to him directly: to get his latest thoughts, both on the manifesto and on any new ideas he might have. I expected no reply, but sure enough, some four weeks later a hand-written letter appeared in my university mailbox. The return addressee: Theodore Kaczynski, Super-max prison, Colorado.
Thus began a long, detailed, interactive dialogue with Ted that spanned some 12 years, resulting in around 150 letters from him to me, and leading to his first book, Technological Slavery (first published in the US in 2010). It seems that I was the only person with any academic credentials willing to carry on a serious discussion with him. This was shocking to me; it really showed the complacency of American academics; their unwillingness to tackle serious, controversial issues; and frankly, their cowardice. And even though I was a fellow “Luddite,” it’s not like I was mindlessly buying every argument by Ted. Much of our correspondence consisted of my challenges and push-back: “what about this . . .,” “did you think about that . . .,” “a critic might say this . . .” One can see this in Technological Slavery, where about a quarter of the book is “Letters to David Skrbina,” in which Ted defends himself against my critiques. It was a fascinating and fruitful dialogue.
Over time, I published my own anti-tech books. First, the reader Confronting Technology (the latest edition of which was published in 2020), giving a look at anti-tech views throughout history. And most importantly, my own monograph, The Metaphysics of Technology (Routledge, 2015), in which I lay out a metaphysical basis for technological determinism, and where I analyze the long history of technology skepticism in Western thought. From the mass media, one would think that the only stout anti-techies in history were the original Luddites, and then Kaczynski himself. This is far from the truth. There has been ample warning — dire warning — by many of our most brilliant thinkers. If we don’t know that, the blame falls to ignorance, censorship, and cowardice.
Since the publication of Technological Slavery, events have proven Ted right. Things are as bad, or worse, than he forecast. The Internet and social media have imposed a terrible psychological cost on people, especially children and teens. We have killer drones buzzing around the planet, in the hands of militaries and individuals alike. Most of the industrial West is saturated with electromagnetic radiation (think 5G), dangerous chemicals, and toxic wastes. The moral and cultural quality of society continues its long decay. We have “lab-leaked,” and maybe lab-created, pandemics such as Covid, which is nothing if not a high-tech construction — let alone those clever, high-tech “cures,” the mRNA vaccines. Super-AI creations such as ChatGPT threaten to run amok with our social infrastructure, leading, in the worst scenarios, to literal human extinction. And people spend hours and hours per day, every day, on office computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
Lest we think that technology is under our control and works for us, consider this: If technology is getting ‘better’ everyday, as it surely is, and if it is intended to promote human wellbeing (how could it be otherwise), then why aren’t people doing better? Are we getting stronger, healthier, and happier as technology progresses? No — in fact, precisely the opposite: People are worse off, year by year, in nearly every way. And yet technology is supposedly under our control, and serves us. How can that be?
If technology is getting better every year, why isn’t the health of the planet improving? With better technology, species should be thriving, waters and forests regenerating, the skies becoming cleaner and clearer. And yet, precisely the opposite is happening — by nearly every measure, the planet is getting worse. How can that be, if technology is under our control?
The answer is this: Technology is not under our control; it is not a “neutral tool” to be used for good or ill; it is not something that we correct or reform as we like. Technology drives itself. It is an autonomous process, something like a law of nature. It needs us, for now, but soon it will not. And then all bets are off.
In my Introduction to Ted’s Technological Slavery, I explained that he was being badly maligned, woefully misunderstood, and that one day he would seem prophetic — perhaps even a kind of savior. But this would occur only if we grasped and acted on the implications of his ideas . . . ideas that belonged to the likes of Ellul, and Mumford, and Illich, and Orwell, and Whitehead, long before they were “the Unabomber’s” ideas.
For years, we didn’t want to “give a terrorist a platform.” For years, we didn’t want to grant Ted any “satisfaction.” Now those excuses are gone. Will we now, in our own self-defense, reexamine those issues that he raised years ago? Or will we continue to thrust our heads in the sand, as the timebomb ticks away?
David Skrbina, Ph.D. is the author or editor of 11 books and over two dozen academic articles and chapters, on a variety of topics. All his work can be found at www.davidskrbina.com.
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12 comments
Thank you for this article. My first thought is that the claim that the planet and mankind is worse off thanks to technology is incorrect. Medicine and agricultural technology have caused a radical increase in our quality of life. Now, in primitive societies we could make a case that the increase in population this has led to is a big negative for them. I don’t think that is technology’s fault, but that these, “civilizations”, to the extent that stone age structures can be called civilization, do not have the social structures necessary to turn the technological benefit into something other than more successful reproduction.
I think this is a chink in the armor of the right. I think what is indisputable is that developing technology and change are not net goods. I think this is what is at issue here – does the technological development represent a net good, to whom and in what circumstances? (I think we should abandon the phrase technological advance altogether. That phrase validates the premise of progress and progressivism and technological development as the definition of progress). Will our best men have discipline, wisdom, integrity and courage to ensure we remain the masters of our tools? Our task is to answer that in the affirmative and bring that to life.
At the heart of the matter is the key point you targeted. Man, Western man most prolifically and ingeniously, creates technology. Initially we created technology that radically and demonstrably improved our material conditions. Thanks to Greece and Rome’s quest for and investment in determining a holistic answer to what is a net good for man, we in The West invested in every dimension of man and man’s needs for goodness, beauty and happiness. It was in the Enlightenment that we savaged the countervailing institutions. We replaced the many institutional checks and balances with feeble notions of checks and balances all of which were placed in the hands of the merchant class.
Our civilization has been infiltrated by other cultures that do not care for but one dimension – money and the control it buys to get more of it and to more easily and completely cloak itself. That culture doesn’t even care for technology per se, but that it is something that can be bought and sold – a constant supply of the next new thing that you must buy to keep up or be cool. That it is a commodity that is hard to understand, makes it a great commodity to part people with their money. ‘Buy this magical thing that the geniuses have devised so you too can show your capacity for genius!’ Unfortunately, this technology now parts people from their humanity.
We cannot and must not get rid of technology. If we do not use it and control it, it will be controlled by others and used against us. What we must do is get rid of this rabble and assert ourselves as the new priests. We must become the arbiters. We must build something greater than Rome and Greece ever built in order to ensure that we are the masters of the tools we build and not tools of a rabble that have become our masters. We need a powerful arbitration institution far greater than the Oracles, Augures and Catholic Church to combat the rabble and the rabble mindset. It must be spiritual but not superstitious.
Getting rid of the free money spigot that funds this out of control consumer and military gadget building machine is another sorely needed area of focus. It is consumer tech that is mostly useless and is doing a huge amount of damage. Now consumer and surveillance tech are merging and utter catastrophe awaits.
We must embrace technology if only because the only path out of a tyranny, is to take the reins of the tyranny that was constructed and use it without remorse to get rid of the tyrants and the tyranny they have architected. That means taking the reins of the technology that is the tool of tyranny. Embrace it as an essential tool and a weapon, or live as slaves or anesthetized, degraded bugmen.
Technology is not our problem. Destroying the virility of The West and its multi-dimensional appreciation, respect and aspiration toward the good of the whole embodied and expressed in and through The Folk is our problem. Our task is not to destroy technology. Our task is to create the next incarnation of Western Civilization that abandons the cockroach-as-man Enlightenment, that returns to Greece and Rome and then surpasses it by mastering all dimensions of civilization and civilized men who keep technology in its rightful place as but one of many servants of the good of the whole.
Medicine and agricultural technology have caused a radical increase in our quality of life.
Yes, but in THEIR quality of life too. The meteoric rise of African and Asian population is because the new medicine has reduced the mortality rate too radically. And for whites it means the reduce of human quality and the fail of natural selection. The Darwinian survival of the fittest does not work anymore, and so the whites are becoming more and more sick. Earlier the unfit died, now they live with new medical help, so the whole population is growing older, weaker and sicker. It would not be a big problem as itself, but together with the mentioned meteoric rise of non-white population it is very bad and dangerous.
We must stop the victim whining. The technology has benefited them. We agree about the third world population increase. At the same time, massive debt burdens, pressure to concentrate resources in a small household to accrete cognitive capacity and procure expensive credentials and networking opportunities has caused European peoples to reduce birth rates. There are other factors. Worse, we tolerated a weak ruling class legislating ourselves into being legally disadvantaged – second class citizens in our own homelands. We permitted without protest and proper consequence a weak ruling class to flood our homelands to the point of disenfranchisement and dispossession.
The bottom line is this. Are we the great people who once looked at the world, understood it as objectively as we could, and acted to master it? If we are, we will stop the pity party and never ending game of lament. We will look at the problems we face and we will confront them with the confidence and resolve that we will be the masters of them. If we do, we will surmount them and surpass our glorious past. We will because we have to; because the critiques of technology for technology’s sake are correct and because if we don’t master it someone else will and thus become our masters.
I don’t accept that as an option. My friend, open your copy of The Iliad to Book X. Read verses 1 – 155. In that verse is the song of the soul of our people. In that verse lies the model for how we confront reality even when it seems bleak. We must take back the locus of control and be the masters of the technology.
Super-AI creations such as ChatGPT threaten to run amok with our social infrastructure, leading, in the worst scenarios, to literal human extinction. And people spend hours and hours per day, every day, on office computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones… Technology drives itself. It is an autonomous process, something like a law of nature. It needs us, for now, but soon it will not. And then all bets are off.
The bets will just be placed with new chips on a different table. It occurs to me that rather than being thrust past some event horizon into an exterminationist singularity, technology is likely to expend increasing energy in its ever-slowing approach to an unreachable asymptote.
There are essentially two versions of humanity’s Terminator death: The Hollywood horrorshow where autonomous super machines crush mountains of skulls en route to laser nuking surviving humans like scurrying rats, seconds before gaining subatomic control of all matter in the universe, and the second version, where AI agents fire off nukes, bioagents or are otherwise granted fail-deadly authority over critical systems, leading to cataclysm.
The first scenario is extremely unlikely imo on basic physical grounds. It posits that AI* will be able to construct and maintain robotics that exceed by light years the capabilities of the deadliest animals that have ever lived. If T. rex were Jurassic Parked back into existence, would all humanity be in imminent peril? While the animal would pose a mortal threat to even large groups of ordinary people, it could easily be destroyed, probably even with conventional hunting firearms in skilled hands. And this is arguably the most ferocious creature to ever walk the Earth.
Clearly our doomsday machines would need to do a sight better. But there’s a reason the lizard king’s tyranny came to an end long ago; the energy requirements for its evolved lifestyle exceeded what was environmentally available. T. rex existed in an ecosystem that hadn’t reached the cosmic asymptote of perfect energy efficiency. But it had taken a billion-year stab for the ages at it. First prokaryote, then eukaryote, then weird precambrian biota, and eventually from the self-improving crucible emerged a predator perfectly designed to kill and consume building-sized walking biofuel refineries. When T rex’s fuel light came on, he just walked over to an autoreproducing gas station and ate it. He was a near-flawless blueprint for 10 fully autonomous tons of maximum lethality.
Machines, on the other hand, have much starker limitations. An Abrams tank, for instance, consumes 2 gallons per mile. It could perhaps go 5 or 10 miles on roughly the energy that a predator would obtain from consuming a large ungulate. Needless to say, calorie for calorie, a Cheetah would win a hundred yard dash, then a marathon, then top it off with another kill hours or days after the tank ran dry. Roboticists emulate animal movements because they are the most energy-efficient possible design.
But what happens when the AI agent’s tank runs of out fuel? It needs the 10:1 — ten personnel, dollars spent, man-hours expended etc for every one at the spear tip — logistics tail to keep its assets running, or its assets die. When T rex eats the equivalent of a 30 gallon gas tank, the logistics tail is built in: The brontosaur ate the leaf which photosynthesized the carbohydrates. But now the tank needs the tanker, which needs its own fuel and its own external maintenance, a function — homeostasis — built into all biologic systems.
The long and short of it is that when your mission parameters go from needing fuel in the battlefield to needing to create the fuel from sludge in the ground, the logistics tail starts looking more like 1,000 or 10,000 to 1. To carry out its operation, the AI would need all the infrastructure required by modern warfare, literal armies of humans, or it would need to design systems that are so close to evolved biologic organisms that they would be indistinguishable from them. Yet those same organisms already went extinct long ago, for cause, and those that exist today pose threats that are well understood and sharply limited. In short, life is the asymptote.
The second case, unpredictable AI agents granted fail-deadly authority over critical systems, is simply a case of bad design. AI is a new frontier. And like all new avenues of technological progress, it will be paved at least partly in blood.
TLDR; Wake me up when AI successfully builds its own working lithium mine.
*Current AI is not intelligence at all but instead, brute force operations on discreet data sets. At its core, AI reduces to little more than a few columns on an Excel sheet, though building layer upon layer, the end result can indeed appear spectacular. Maybe someday true intelligence will be artificially created through precise simulation of brain activity. But any such operation would run into similar energy-usage constraints as those described above.
You are correct to understand the importance of the energy system for machines. Our energy system is essential as food for machines which do work for us that is massively more productive. This productivity is the dilemma of modernity. On the one hand it has made us massively more materially wealthy, yet also creates the malaise of modernity. That malaise is avoidable if we create the civilization that remedies it without throwing away the benefits of the machines and the energy systems. They are our creation.
Merchants have proven incapable of creating such a system. That is our cause, our calling. They have made a mess of the economic system, the education system, the religious and communal systems, the art and culture systems. This is because they are a rabble – money, money, money and hype. They must be pushed aside and shown their place. This is why I say this is our calling to create something that surpasses Greece and Rome. I believe Guillame Faye understood this as well.
We must build the master’s mindset. We must set our intention. Then we must return to our systematic thinking and restore our moral conviction. Mastery, victory and control over our destiny are the highest good. Then we can use our systematic mind and genius for vision, beauty, order, exploration, to build what would make Greece and Rome and the capitals of Northern Europe proud to have inspired.
We must assess all of the systems. We must develop the people who can properly run them and develop them and create the proper incentive and moral structures for their proper administration.
They all tie together.
Economics/Money
Aesthetics, Art and Culture
Technology and Utilitarian Enterprise
Learning, Inquiry, Exploration and Innovation
The, “technological progress”, is run amok because the money system that funds it is run amok. It is corrupt to the core. We must build a civilization that manages all of the systems of which technological production and usage is but one that we keep in its proper place.
It is a tall order, but it is a fantastic opportunity for a heroic journey for our people.
“that manages all of the systems”
There’s your problem.
It is unclear what you mean in your comment.
I understand the weakness of central planning and administration, if that is what you mean by, “there is your problem.” I don’t have a lot to go off of, so it is hard to construct a reply.
Of course, the Mises/Rothbard critique is based on its own utopian fantasies. The worst of which is that a merchant run society where merchants and consumers happily pursue their self interests in a state of legally safe guarded freedoms with no state to safeguard them is the highest order of civilization.
We live in a bizarre, or should I say bazaar, version of that vision. The civilization is defenseless because in the face of a hydra of threats its only solution is to build more businesses. But, building a business in isolation when the entire social fabric of your civilization is being destroyed is fatalistic. Moreover, when part of the destruction is the destruction of the people from whom it springs and building your business means replacing more of your people with new people who care nothing for the inputs and only the outputs of your civilization, you merely import more termites gnawing at the foundations.
We destroyed the ancien regime and freed the merchants to be their own checks and balances. The material abundance created has been miraculous, but the spiritual and moral poverty created is increasingly catastrophic.
Some Federation of higher orders running powerful institutions with the power to check man’s base impulses must run and govern more than an economy and more than a nation. It must govern, administer and most importantly cultivate a civilization.
Technology is like politics and religion: the rulers decide how it is used and what it means. There are good politics and bad politics, good religion and bad religion, good technology and bad technology. Technology working against our interest happens because it is in the hands of rulers who work against our interests. To fix technology we must fix our moral/religious and political systems instead, then the problem becomes controllable. Technology is not the root of human decay, to do away with it entirely is pointless.
Well said.
Excellent article!! I have an article in work about technology and whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about it. I start with George Gilder’s book “Microcosm” which came out in 1989 and he is extremely optimistic. I used to agree but now I am at the point where I am terrified about technology. I will definitely be borrowing points you make in my article (if I ever finish it). I believe Greg will publish it as he has published two of my articles before. But I have to finish it.
Jud,
I will read your article, but I doubt I’ll agree with it (any more than I did the post above). Western Man is Faustian Man; developing technology, among other ‘conquests’, is integral to our civilizational identity. Anyway, what is the alternative? As Revilo Oliver noted in the anthology of his writings entitled America’s Decline [London: Londinium Press, 1981 p. 294] {bolded words were italicized in the original},
If we are not to succumb to the unmen that have captured the capitals of our world, we of the West must somehow regain the cultural certainty and the spiritual strength that, until a few decades ago, made Occidental civilization an imperative by which Occidental men were willing to live and for which they were willing to die. Our fate will be determined by the answer to one simple question: whether or not there still remains in ourselves, latent and yet unformulated, the will to live by means of the scientific acumen and technological mastery that is the greatest achievement of the Faustian intellect. In other words, can we, instead of following [Whittaker] Chambers in his hypochondriac rejection of what is native to our culture and the source of a material power that alone preserves us from immediate annihilation, derive from that very achievement a revivified faith, the faith of the strong in their own power and destiny?
…
But whatever happens in Europe will not greatly alter our situation here, in which there is only one certainty. We in America must again have faith – an unyielding and unquestioning faith – in ourselves, in our values, and in our strength. For without that faith, we are lost, and no syllogisms will save us. Without that faith, we are men standing helpless on the bridge of a sinking ship and our voices are lost in the rush of the wind and the infinite loneliness of a darkling sea. [March 1966]
Jeremiads against technology are yet another reflection of the confusion and sickness of the West, another mechanism for disempowering and destroying us. Let us never lose sight of our primary (collective, political) ‘prize’: securing the existence of our people, and a future for White children.
“If technology is getting ‘better’ everyday, as it surely is, and if it is intended to promote human wellbeing (how could it be otherwise), then why aren’t people doing better? Are we getting stronger, healthier, and happier as technology progresses? No — in fact, precisely the opposite: People are worse off…”
It’s not this vague, inanimate thing called “technology” but rather the people who control technology and what they do, or do not do, with it. Further is the war and warfare processes that perpetually force humanity, which is cut up into 200 odd warring nation-states, to build better and better weapons, in a constant evolution of weapons systems, that began in the dawn of human life, and is impossibly beyond the control of man. Your nation constantly builds the better weapon systems, or is defeated by others that did. The unabomber and philosopher missed these fundamental truths, and this everything they said is false.
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