Uncle Ted Would Have Been on Substack
Thoughts on the death of the fringe's favorite domestic terrorist
Ted Kaczynski dropped dead in his prison cell over the weekend.
To most people reading this, he needs no introduction. As the “Unabomber,” he was serving eight life sentences for a string of bombings over two decades that killed three people and wounded nearly two dozen more. He claimed to have committed them to bring attention to his manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, which excoriated “leftists,” claimed that industrialization and technology were innately dehumanizing, and called for a return to a more nature-centered society.
Kaczynski was one of many domestic terrorists who grabbed headlines during the 90’s. With the Soviet Union vanquished and America unquestionably dominant on the world stage, the U.S. turned its paranoia inward, as all victorious empires do, and declared “right-wing extremism” the new enemy. Randy Weaver, David Koresh, Timothy McVeigh, and Eric Rudolph replaced unpronounceable foreign names as our Emmanuel Goldsteins of the day. Russia was our bestest buddy now and two-bit genocidaires like Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević weren’t scary enough for the job. This was the “end of history.”
Unlike those names, who still get trotted out as examples of the supposed threat that white men pose to democracy, the Unabomber quickly faded from public consciousness as a boogeyman. This was possibly because his manifesto couldn’t be jammed into a convenient mold for a snarky Reddit dismissal. While Kaczynski aimed the brunt of his ire at leftist ideologies, which he argued were the result of industrialization-driven “oversocialization,” he was equally critical of the right-wing for their cheerleading of economic growth and technological advancement under the guise of the “free market.” Industrial Society and its Future is often championed by “deep ecologists” and the dissident right, but Kaczynski denounced fascism and Nazism in its pages. I suspect “Uncle Ted” would have genuinely despised most of his online fans had he been aware of them beyond the letters he received in prison.
Kaczynski’s conception of science and technology as being non-neutral and possessing a value set that innately transformed society—and not necessarily for the better—is not an idea he invented. The trope of the “mad scientist,” all-but-extinguished in modern culture with its ethos of “I fucking love science,” is a plank of Western art and culture stemming back to the Romantic era of the early 1800’s, when Britain’s rapid industrialization combined with the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars led many to believe that technological advancement was going too far. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, is arguably the seminal work of this strain of thought, encapsulating the anxieties many had that scientists were playing God with disastrous consequences. The parallel Luddite movement in Britain, arguing that labor-saving machines produced inferior work to traditional textile workers and were harming working class wages, was another manifestation of anxiety over unchecked technological progress; Lord Byron famously defended the Luddites in his maiden speech to the House of Lords.
A century later, Oswald Spengler would further develop this argument in Man and Technics (1931), while George Grant would apply it in the real world in Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965). Grant argued that technological progress was unavoidably tied to political progress, noting the inherent absurdity of Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis industrializing the province during the 1940’s and 1950’s while enforcing traditional Catholic values, which engendered a deep hatred of Catholicism and traditionalism among Quebecois that manifested in the Quiet Revolution following Duplessis’ death. To this day, Quebec has the lowest fertility rates and church attendance among all Canadian provinces and U.S. states, and its “nationalist” government has to resort to increasingly punitive measures to force its citizens to speak French.
The conclusion one comes to after reading all this, unfortunately, is that there’s little to no means of mitigating technology’s negative effects. Even when factoring in that large amounts of modern dysfunction are the result of deliberate social engineering, nobody with an interest in resisting this has the ability to do so. Grant referred to his book as a “lament” because he believed that Canada’s devolution into a regional branch of the American Empire was inevitable for geographic, political, and technological reasons. Kaczynski was a delusional maniac who thought he could turn back time by murdering people and spent the last three decades of his life rotting in a cell because of it. There have been moments in history where technological progress has been reversed, such as the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, but this is like hoping to win the lottery—and the prize is having your neighborhood napalmed.
Some anons are speculating that Kaczynski committed suicide or was the victim of foul play. Maybe, but he was also 81. He’d been transferred to FMC Butner, a federal prison for inmates with chronic, serious health conditions, in 2021. In a letter last year, he said that he had cancer. People get old and they die.
Uncle Ted’s downfall was that he was thrust into this world too soon. If he’d been born 20 years later, he’d be on Substack. He’d have an anon Twitter account with tens of thousands of followers. He’d be hustling for donos with a weekly column on the evils of industrial society. He’d have self-published books that e-girls would meme with. He wouldn’t have built a single bomb; he’d be too busy tittering over his stats page. I doubt he’d have a podcast, though. He doesn’t seem like the type.
The sad thing is that for all Kaczynski’s deconstruction of the oversocialization of leftists, he himself—and his fans—are products of that same oversocialization. 19-year-old e-Catholics are as equally dependent on the “system” as the millennial bugman excitedly Tweeting about his third COVID booster. As much as you hate ZOG/GNC/whatever, you don’t want a collapse. You’re just bored.
I refuse to believe the clods chanting “Unabomber, Burn in Hell!” on the Musk Plantation are even remotely sincere. The average Twitter user was either in elementary school then or hadn’t even been born when Kaczynski was arrested. Only GenXers or older would remember him being in the news, and given how rapidly he was forgotten compared to other domestic terrorists of the time, the only people I believe genuinely care about him are his pen pals.
The year 2023 has some parallels to 1996, the year FBI agents dragged an disheveled Unabomber out of his Montana cabin. America is unquestionably stronger than ever, having vanquished Russia yet again and reaffirmed its dominance on the world stage, yet is gripped in a psychotic fugue over “right-wing extremism,” like a madman smashing a skeleton into dust with a rock while screaming “LEAVE ME ALONE!” His death has an eerie significance against this backdrop, a ghost from the past leaving us in time for new “extremists” to fill the cells.
Goodbye, Uncle Ted. If there’s an afterlife, one hopes God has enough decency not to bulldoze the forests.