Industrial Society and Its Future
The 35,000-word manifesto formed the ideological foundation of Kaczynski's 1978–1995 mail bomb campaign, designed to protect wilderness by hastening the collapse of industrial society.
[2] A 2017 Rolling Stone article stated that Kaczynski was an early adopter of the concept that: We give up a piece of ourselves whenever we adjust to conform to society's standards.
The essay has been translated into French, remains on college reading lists, and was updated in Kaczynski's 2008 book, Technological Slavery, Volume One, which defends his political philosophy in greater depth.
In June 1995, Kaczynski offered to end his campaign if one of several publications (the Washington Post, New York Times, or Penthouse) would publish his critique of technology, titled Industrial Society and Its Future, which became widely known as the "Unabomber Manifesto".
[14] Kaczynski wrote an essay in 1971 which contained many themes and ideas that would eventually appear in the manifesto, indicating that his particular line of anti-technological thought dated back relatively early in his life prior to his arrest.
[16][17] Active Defunct Publications Works At 35,000 words, Industrial Society and Its Future lays very detailed blame on technology in and of itself for eroding individual freedom and autonomy, destroying human-scale communities, and leading to widespread psychological and physical suffering.
[8] This tendency, he says, gives rise to expansive police powers, mind-numbing mass media, and indiscriminate promotion of drugs, designed to conform to the needs of the technological environment.
[8] He argues that this industrialized system's collapse will be devastating in the short-term, although quickening the collapse—before technology progresses further—will prevent unmitigated catastrophe for humanity and the biosphere in the future.
[22] Kaczynski had not read Lewis Mumford, Paul Goodman, or John Zerzan until after he submitted Industrial Society and Its Future to The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Instead, Fleming argues, Industrial Society and Its Future "is a synthesis of ideas from [...] French philosopher Jacques Ellul, British zoologist Desmond Morris, and American psychologist Martin Seligman.
[22] The scholar George Michael of Vanderbilt University Press accused Kaczynski of "collecting philosophical and environmental clichés to reinforce common American concerns".
Cynthia Ozick likened the work to an American Raskolnikov (of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment), as a "philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose ... driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism".
[6] Part of Kaczynski's manifesto was cited by the inventor and author Raymond Kurzweil in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines,[25] and then mentioned in the article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" by computer scientist Bill Joy.
[26] As of 2000, Industrial Society and Its Future remained on college reading lists and the green anarchist and eco-extremist movements came to hold Kaczynski's writing in high regard, with the manifesto finding a niche audience among critics of technology, such as the speculative science fiction and anarcho-primitivist communities.
[29] Since 2000, the Labadie Collection houses a copy of the manifesto, along with Ted Kaczynski's other writings, letters and papers, after he officially designated the University of Michigan to receive them.
[30] In 2017, an article in Rolling Stone stated that Kaczynski was an early adopter of the idea that: We give up a piece of ourselves whenever we adjust to conform to society's standards.
It is hard to deny that these are real improvements and that they were made possible by technologies, perhaps most centrally artificial fertilizers, agricultural machinery, water chlorination, sewer systems, antibiotics, and vaccines.
It is also hard to deny that a wide range of other technologies—reading glasses, painkillers, printing presses, light bulbs, pianos, music recordings, trains—have enriched the lives of billions.In December 2020, a man who was arrested at Charleston International Airport on a charge of "conveying false information regarding attempted use of a destructive device" after he falsely threatened that he had a bomb, was found to have been carrying the Unabomber manifesto.
