The Unabomber Manifesto: A Generation Hence

Looking back on Theodore Kaczynski's writings a generation afterwards.

It was the year 1995. Four years after the dissolution of the USSR, six years after the fragmentation of the Eastern bloc and scarcely sixteen years since the first Great Reset of the contemporary era, known as the Volcker shock. Within this ephemeral timespan, observers and commentators heaved a sigh of relief. The time, they proclaim, for ideology is over, and the human species will no longer argue nor entertain other modes of organization, for liberalism has triumphed. Politics is devolved into either cultural identifications or in standard operation procedure; the (heavily-rigged) market is foisted as the tool for central planning and for a moment, the establishment assumed that whatever disagreements that one can have in this new millennium, it will be resolvable through means-testing and the bipartisan consensus. Only a few marginal individuals desisted for what they saw as a grand delusion. Ted Kaczynski is one of them.

It is important to have a sort of a background when discussing Industrial Society and its Future, much how every single monograph is a product of its era. They tend to embody a moment in the present, mostly absent of a concrete vision of what is to come, and Ted’s opus is not exempt from it. While those who bought into the narrative of the end of history did trash the venture as screeds of a mentally ill man, they are only partially correct, and Ted himself admits this openly. He is after all, a participant in one of the most notorious experiments conducted by the Deep State in select persons; MKULTRA as they referred it. As such, it is no that surprising to deduce that Ted’s ramblings are a consequence of these processes that he himself had been subjected; for the government, he is nothing but a lab rat. As a materialist, my focus will be the unfolding of contradictions as they happen, and I do not claim that this assessment is all-encompassing; what it may give us is a sketch.

Another highlight of his essay is his virulent opposition to technology, that understandably fell on deaf ears. The postmodern West has accepted the same premise of its prior modernist mom or dad; that technology is a force of progress and goodness. Ted is not the only person to show that this is a load of bunk. The philosopher Martin Heidegger already foresaw its implications as early as his Being and Time, where the view of technology by the West is always geared for utility; utility being as pure ends. In his The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger invocated that its instruments have been converted as a standing reserve; a standing reserve in pursuit of an optimistic end, if this optimism is positive to begin with. Despite not being openly acknowledged unlike Jacques Ellul, whose conclusions on technology have trekked the same path as Heidegger, Ted’s genesis can be understood as an attempt to simplify the jargons of both; that technology, contrary to the expectation that it is value-free or a force for good that can be switched off and on, is a representation of a civilization’s priorities; it therefore correct for him to point out that conservatives and progressives in this regard are both sides of the same coin, who share a common telos and whose assumptions are hinging to the journey of technology as a replacement for human agency itself. The evidence for this turn is obvious enough, with the development of new surveillance methods to predict human behavior via the algorithm.

As for the culprit, Heidegger never named names, nor did Ellul or Ted. They have somewhat concluded that this is an all-implicating and an all-consuming enterprise, where everyone is both the victim and the perpetrator. The managerial state, if viewed through these lenses, is just a symptom, and not a bug. Deconstructing or deprogramming will be of little consequence, as these forces are already outside at least of any human endeavor; for it has been running on autopilot for a century or two. The journey of this vision of technology is therefore resistant to any reforms in its schema, nor can it be halted. We can only observe it accelerating, and try our best to respond to it. Even the elites who knows its ways and means are detached from its levers; it can only extract the copper wires at this point, and not much else.

It is therefore understandable to viciously oppose this reading, and have a natural stimulus of trying to refute its assertions. I do claim however, that this understanding is essential if we are to retrace our steps for achieving genuine human flourishing, if the cards are laid out at the right place and at the right opportunity. The realization of our technology as naturally entropic becomes a task of overcoming that entropy. Every civilizational system uses its technology in distinct and particular methods, either in harmony or in discord with its environment. The anthropologist Joseph Tainter, in his The Collapse of Complex Societies, perused through this question through historical case studies. While we can never be quite certain if this is accurate, its contents are in line with much of the evidence in store: that civilizations tend to develop intricate bureaucracies in line with their necessity of maximizing their technological efficiency in correlation with the availability of materials. What Rome, the Mauryans, the Mayans and the Greeks have in common is that their structures tend to be aligned with their energy consumption; their conquests and their innovations are often a consequence of the altered landscapes that they are into.

More recently, David Graeber argued in The Dawn of Everything that there is indeed no smooth stages of evolution nor approximations. While we can doubt the agenda and the fact that this is the default in many specialized anthropology courses, he convincingly presented the case that for much of prehistory, varied social organizations have existed, though most are of the hunter-gatherer peoples/tribes. These groups are characterized by periodic fragmentation to small bands and their coherence into a temporary settlement wherein they will distribute the loot, with the excesses immediately put into use, or destroyed in symbolic rituals. This act meant that no surplus can be rendered permanent, and that the roles and obligations of a collective are to remain horizontal. As late as the 19th century and beyond, these patterns of behavior are still evident; hierarchies do exist, but as provisional measures that can be mended or folded by circumstances.

The rise of agrarian societies would then correlate with the need of capturing the technology of the former hunter-gatherers into a consistent paradigm and practice. Still, instances of consensus driven governance and decisions have persisted as far as 9,000 years ago. This supposed default of many homo sapiens would be strained and severed in responses to climate degradations; in some locales, people simply moved out; in others, the constant rote of life has led to the subjects in those clans or confederations to merge into more centralized and vertical arrangements, concentrated in oligarchies or monarchies, with the management and imposition of coercion as their primary means to gain acceptance; the Egyptian pharaohs for instance, had their legitimacy affixed to the fortunes of the River Nile, and so did the Balinese chiefs with their trading outposts. It is also not strange that in this very ground, the seeds of currency as tools would begin to cohere, and with it, the questions of ethics, most specifically of justice or the endowment of desserts to a person or a group.

This loss of human variety is unconsciously echoed by Ted, and we must grudgingly come to terms with its significance. Rather than just an act of shitposting, the industrial revolution is indeed a harbinger of disasters upon mankind. But he does not extend this further, perhaps due to his pre-existing mental imbalances or some other factors that we may neither know or care. Not only was the industrial revolution a disaster, modernity by its very extension is a disaster, since this would be responsible for the dissolution of whatever bonds that have persisted unmolested from family to family, from generation to generation.

The process of modernity, which first reared its ugly head on the ruins of Europe in the Great Plague, is the accelerator to a train with little to no breaks. The social roles and mores, understood as customs, were put in strain. It is therefore not surprising that the managerial state, so endemic today in our institutions, both public and private, will have its first application in military terms. The diminishing role of the cavalry was made possible with the advent of more sophisticated artillery pieces, the same guns that either made castles adapt to its ways or outrightly demolished. The ideological visions of Liberalism, Socialism, Fascism, Nationalism and Anarchism would culminate in a reign of blood and uncertainty. And when Ted ruminated about these legacies, he is answering to the misguided euphoria and utopianism that characterized these frameworks. For ideology is not just a buffet on a platter; it is the very language, the very technology and the very eyes that we make sense of our reality as it has been set ablaze to make way for its place.

With these realizations, what is to be done? Before we even ask that 69 million-dollar question, we have to remove the splinters impeding our sight. Here are some of the parting observations in my part.

I will claim, as a matter of provocation, that only a few hold ‘coherent’ political views in this contemporary day and age. Most are cultural manners or aesthetic preferences. And it is nobody’s fault really. The neoliberal reforms from the top over the past 30-40 years, which included a preference for management over direct action (for it is beneficial to the functioning of a consumer economy with the credit-debt cycle as its fulcrum), have punctured the role of ‘the state’ so much that we hardly noticed it. It can explain why our relationship to the government is more negative than positive as a consequence (this is a global phenomenon as well, not just locally; though nations with strong community ties or organized labor are able to resist this effectively).

If we are political (in the modern sense of the word), we then subscribe to these 2 aspects below, and this sentiment was dominant for much of the late 19th to the 20th centuries, until its implosion in the late 70s and the entirety of the 80s:

1. That politics follows a template of tradition to a party or a group (aka their history as background), and:

2. That you are assured that the entity you adhere will take care of the distribution of resources and give you a piece of it.

Today’s current setup is bereft of the two, since if we are going to somewhat accept that Francis Fukuyama is correct, we are living in an epoch where history has ended, liberal democracy is the only path and that there is no alternative (until very recently). It is therefore in this scenario where the ‘politics’ that we claim to espouse is not that different from fandom, and the discourse, both offline and online, is specifically designed to give you hysteria, as bad faith argumentation is everywhere, and you are always put on the defense.

Therefore, nothing except your sanity changes. We are thus trapped in this matrix and stuck in Plato’s cave. It is not that far to even conclude that this is why everyone is panicking like headless chickens, for this is something that operates in our subconscious, whether we like it or not. If this premise of mine is perhaps grounded and cogent, this can somewhat explain the prevalence of cancel culture, initially in the evangelicals who are angry about He-Man being ‘satanic’, and then it got transferred to the liberals and their constant policing of language.

Realizing this may give us some clarity. Absent a class project if you are a socialist or a collective vision of anything (for everybody else) since we are living in spiritually impoverished times, every ‘advocacy’ that we hold so dearly becomes sterile and impotent, absorbed and coopted by a system engineered to do it. And so long as this is the case, it is not that surprising that we are just reckoning with the implications of this process and its effects in our social fabric.

In short, recognizing this process, this very contemporary process is integral to the objectives that we want to accomplish, if we really want to square the circle. Ted’s contribution to this revival of interest must not be underestimated. Modernity has been the apocalypse; we must push through it, and out of it, if we really want to live.

NomadicProlet is an aspiring historian and political theorist for the Philippines. He espouses decentralization and syndicalism against centralized elitism.