The Sunday Read: ‘The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber’

The Daily

The New York Times

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🗓️ 27 April 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

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Summary

Online, there is a name for the experience of finding sympathy with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure. Since Kaczynski’s death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina nearly two years ago, the taboo surrounding the figure has been weakening. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology — largely the province of the left not long ago — have spread on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name's Charles Hohman's, and I'm a reporter for The New York Times.
0:13.2	I was a teenager when the Unabomber Manifesto was first published nearly 30 years ago in 1995.
0:20.7	In the Manifesto, which was titled Industrial Society
0:23.8	and its future, Ted Kaczynski shared a vision of technology as not a series of machines and
0:30.8	devices that made our lives easier, but actually a system that had its own priorities and
0:36.4	intentions that were not fully aligned with the human species.
0:40.4	This, of course, was way before most Americans had really engaged in any serious way with the Internet, let alone social media or smartphones, which didn't exist.
0:50.7	You know, the time interest in the manifesto mostly came from environmental radicals who were somewhat sympathetic to Gazzinski and futurists who actually agreed with him on a lot of where technology was headed, though they thought that that was good.
1:04.6	And later on, he developed a following among right-wing extremists.
1:08.6	But today is something interesting is happening.
1:12.5	You're seeing the Unabomber Manif pop up in a lot of different political spaces, especially online. Some of them are extremists,
1:19.5	but some of them are not that far from the mainstream. In some ways, I think it's part of this
1:24.7	cultural desire to reevaluate these sensational figures
1:28.2	from the 90s, whether it's O.J. Simpson or the Branch-Dividian leader, David Koresh.
1:34.4	This is about how long it takes America usually to look again at its notorious criminals.
1:39.8	And Kaczynski was a notorious criminal who murdered several innocent people and wounded
1:43.8	or disfigured dozens more.
1:46.2	But I thought there was something deeper going on with this resurgent interest in Kaczynski's manifesto.
1:52.3	It's gained a unique, posthumous following that really transcends political categories, especially among young people.
1:59.8	And so for today's Sunday read, I was interested in re-examining the story.
2:05.1	I wanted to know how is Kaczynski's prediction of the future,
2:08.9	once considered obscure and impenetrable, become more recognizable to more people as technology has advanced?
	...

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