Unabomber manifesto

Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski engaged in a mail bomb campaign[1] against people involved with modern technology. His targets were universities and airlines, which the FBI shortened as UNABOMB. In June 1995, Kaczynski offered to end his campaign if one of several publications (the Washington Post, New York Times, or Penthouse) would publish his critique of technology, titled Industrial Society and Its Future but better known as the Unabomber manifesto.[2] Kaczynski believed that his violence, as direct action when words are insufficient, would draw others to pay attention to his critique.[3] He wanted his ideas to be taken seriously.[4] The media debated the ethics of publishing the manifesto under duress. The United States Attorney General Janet Reno advocated for the essay to be shared such that a reader could recognize its author.[2]

During that summer, the FBI worked with literature scholars to compare the Unabomber's oeuvre against the works of Joseph Conrad, including The Secret Agent, based on their shared themes.[5][6]

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times published the manifesto in full on September 19, 1995, within a supplement.[2]

Kaczynski had drafted an essay of the ideas that would become the manifesto in 1971: that technological progress would extinguish individual liberty and that proselytizing libertarian philosophy would be insufficient without direct action.[4]

The author, 1996

The 35,000-word manifesto blames technology for destroying human-scale communities.[2] Kaczynski contends that the Industrial Revolution harmed the human race by developing into a sociopolitical order that subjugates human needs beneath its own. This system, he wrote, destroys nature and suppresses individual freedom. In short, humans adapt to machines rather than vice versa, resulting in a society hostile to human potential.[4]

Kaczynski credits technological progress with the destruction of small human communities and rise of uninhabitable cities controlled by an unaccountable state. He contends that this relentless technological progress will not dissipate on its own because individual technological advancements are seen as good despite the sum effects of this progress. Kaczynski describes modern society as defending this order against dissent, in which individuals are adjusted to fit the system and those outside it are seen as bad. This tendency, he says, gives rise to expansive police powers, mind-numbing mass media, and indiscriminate promotion of drugs.[4] Combining elements of the political left and right, he criticizes both big government and big business as the ineluctable result of industrialization.[2] Kaczynski holds scientists and "technophiles" responsible for recklessly pursuing power through technological advancements.[4]

To broaden his popular appeal, he includes a variety of ideas, especially those from ecology. As one scholar put it, the manifesto collects philosophical and environmental clichés to reinforce common American concerns.[2]

He argues that this industrialized system's collapse will be devastating and that quickening the collapse will mitigate the devastation's impact. He justifies the trade-offs that come with losing industrial society as being worth the cost.[4] Kaczynski's ideal revolution seeks not to overthrow government but the economic and technological foundation of modern society.[7] He seeks to destroy existing society and protect the wilderness, the antithesis of technology.[4]

Reading the manifesto, David Kaczynski suspected his brother's authorship and notified the FBI.[4] Even after Ted Kaczynski's April 1996 arrest, he wanted to use the trial to disseminate his views.[2] Instead, his court-appointed lawyers planned an insanity defense that would discredit his manifesto. The judge denied him permission to represent himself. Instead, he took a plea bargain for life imprisonment without parole in May 1998. From his Colorado jail,[4] he continues to clarify his philosophy with other writers by letter.[2]

While the manifesto was widely spread via newspaper, book reprints, and the Internet, few followed the manifesto itself closely and ultimately Kaczynski's ideas did not spark serious public consideration,[8] even among anti-government activists.[9] Kaczynski had intended for his mail bombing campaign to raise awareness for the message in his manifesto. He wanted it to be seriously regarded.[4] While Kaczynski's effort to publish his manifesto, more so than the bombings themselves, brought him into the American news,[8] ultimately, the manifesto found a niche audience among critics of technology, such as the speculative science fiction and anarcho-primitivist communities.[10]

Initially, the 1995 manifesto was received as intellectually deep and sane. Writers described the manifesto's sentiment as familiar. To Kirkpatrick Sale, the Unambomber was "a rational man" with reasonable beliefs about technology. He recommended the manifesto's opening sentence for the forefront of American politics. Cynthia Ozick likened the work to an American Raskolnikov (of Doestoyevski's Crime and Punishment), as a "philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose ... driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism".[4] Numerous websites engaging with the manifesto's message appeared online.[4]

But by the trial's opening in 1997, public sentiment had shifted. The prosecution's psychiatrists cited the manifesto as evidence of the Unabomber's lucidity, while the defense used the same manifesto as symptomatic of mental illness and paranoia. Kaczynski's sanity was tried in court and in the media. Beyond this genius-or-madman debate, Kaczynski's biographer argued that it was more shocking to view the manifesto in-between: that the manifesto reflected normal, common, unexceptional ideas shared by Americans, sharing their distrust over the direction of civilization. While Americans abhorred his terrorist violence, adherents to his anti-technology message have tolerated his violence as a means for preserving the wilderness.[4]

As of 2000, the manifesto remained on college reading lists and the green anarchist and eco-extremist movements came to hold Kaczynski's writing in high regard.[4][11]