PineTwitter appeared around a time I was on an extended break from being an extremely online person. I caught the tail end of their heyday and it was quite interesting, albeit ironic. AnPrim internet networking is more common than one might think though and it seems undeniable that they helped really propel Theodore Kaczynski within the wider dissident sphere of the extremely online right.
All of a sudden it became a hip meme to say ‘ted k was right’ sort of similar to how everyone jumped on board with talking about Calhouns rat utopia experiments and using the phrase behavioral sink. The weirdest legacy of the Unabomber will be this transformation from feared terrorist into pop kitsch as Gio so eloquently states above.
All this gives me pause for thought.
Why has Ted K been sort of rehabilitated? In recent years a slew of documentaries appeared about him on services like Netflix and others. Some appear to have been surprisingly open to airing the ideas he espoused and focusing less on the maniacal attempted killing spree he embarked on. For a generation so attached to technology and the benefits of both computing and cheap air travel (targets he went after) this seems to be an unusual obsession.
It’s the duality of man broooo some might claim. I tend towards a darker explanation of the addict desperate to intellectualize his own addiction. Deeply online people hopelessly addicted to serotonin bursts from online engagement attempting to show some self-awareness or cry for help. A lot of people like to quote parts of Industrial Society and its Future but somehow everyone seems to gloss the acknowledgement that life would indeed be much harsher in this mythical retrvn.
Ted K’s ideas are at heart that variation of retrvn. We can go back through revolution, indeed his more recent book “Anti-tech Revolution: Why and How” (2nd ed) is a remarkably valuable piece of work. Most people interested in changing things would do better to read this than nod along to the quotes from Industrial Society. At the most basic level one gains an immense respect for what the man was able to put together in prison. It’s also an acknowledgement of his own failings in strategy.
Hyper anti-social recluse types don’t tend to actually be able to enact their ideas. The main thrust of that more recent work is an analysis of revolutionary movements that were successful and the conditions that people were able to leverage towards their goals. He then imagines how this could apply towards some kind of anti-tech movement. It is worth a read, it is the side of the man that people will gloss and ignore.
The cynic in me sees this general rehabilitation of Ted K as deliberate. The climate change movement will seek and absorb anything as long as it furthers their goals. Depopulation as a based goal anyone? Perhaps I’m wrong there, perhaps the rehabilitation angle is just the separation of distance, people coping harder like the right wing anons. The bottom races up as we hurtle downward. There are inherent contradictions across all spaces. We dream of techno-futurist continuation powered by magical nuclear technology and conquering of the stars whilst we pollute our oceans with plastic masks meant to prevent a virus. People talk about the evils of technology or the medical system as they pop anti-biotics and enjoy AC.
Ted K will exist as this maniac who it is acceptable to like. He’ll be ‘technically correct’ but we’ll just hand wring about everything in reality. He was too extreme, too far from that holy grail of a sensible center. It makes him easy entertainment fodder, easy meme fodder. This isn’t to say his ideas won’t linger and last but he’ll always be more acceptable than say a Pentti Linkola. Going further it is possible for us to see Ted K as that continuation of the desire for happiness - so much of what he writes about talks about how people are not happy today and his reasons for why. Surrogate activity. In some ways he’s a true son of a people who believe they have this right to happiness - his answer was radical but still within the framework. The individual still mattered. If we did this life would deliver more inherent meaning to those individuals.
Hopefully his more interesting ideas survive beyond memes, hopefully people learn that being a highly anti-social killer with a few interesting thoughts does not in fact lead to enacting meaningful change where it matters.