HUMANKIND BE BOTH SERIES

Though he could never have imagined such horrors as TikTok in the Nineties, the society he describes - atomised and materialistic, one that has forfeited freedom in favour of technological progress we’ve been tricked into wanting - chillingly resembles our own. They’ve grown up in an era marked by mounting terror about climate change, and in which conventional politics seems woefully insufficient to solve any problems. Surrounded by screens from early childhood, addicted to near-constant media consumption, often lacking basic in-person social skills, many sense a broader problem in their own individual capture by the tech borg. Gen Z and younger millennials see the truth in Kaczynski’s central critique of technology, and its deleterious effects on society. Conservatives weren’t much better: they were “fools” who failed to understand that technology was destroying the traditionalism they prized. Though Kaczynski repeatedly emphasises the non-political nature of his revolution, he has a lot to say about political movements, particularly Leftist ones, which he saw as cadres of over-socialised do-gooders preoccupied with irrelevant identity concerns. The only option remaining, in Kaczynski’s view, was to overthrow it completely through revolution - by any means necessary. There was no hope of fixing the current system. Zombified in this way, people blindly applauded technological advances which spelt societal and environmental doom. Stripped of their autonomy by a faceless, unaccountable system, humans endured psychological suffering as they were forced into “over-socialization”, Kaczynski’s term for a state of being in which the industrial society’s codes and mores have replaced a person’s innate selfhood. Kaczynski’s manifesto argued that technological progress - the “Industrial Revolution and its consequences” - posed an existential threat to humankind by turning people into “engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine”. While the recent Unabomber retrospectives mostly rehash his life and the facts of his case, the current zeitgeist revolves more around his ideology.

HUMANKIND BE BOTH SERIES

Kaczynski’s online popularity has coincided with a flurry of Unabomber-related content in recent years, including three separate TV or film projects: a four-part Netflix documentary, a dramatised Manhunt series on the FBI’s investigation, and Ted K, a feature-length biopic set on location near the infamous Lincoln, Montana cabin where Kaczynski built the bombs he used to kill three people and injure 23 more. Spend enough time online and you’ll stumble across the ‘ Ted-pilled’ community, where “Uncle Ted” is a prophet who predicted the Silicon Valley-created dystopia we live in. But so they have.Įighty years old and serving eight consecutive life sentences in federal prison for his career as the Unabomber, Kaczynski has been revived as an online folk hero. “The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn an entire genre of memes.

Humankind be both