His terrorism had been principled, rational, his Weltanschauung outlined in his manifesto. To suggest medical illness and disturbance was to give into the pathologizing agenda, something that would render him mad and therefore illegitimate as a thinker.
Far from being mad, the dystopia of Kaczynski’s industrial society has found solid roots. And the forces behind it, be they the myriad of social networks, data hungry platforms and the increasingly agitated discussion about Artificial Intelligence and its generative properties, implicates us all.
Kaczynski defied the authorities and the technological state he so despised, eluding capture for almost two decades. Being incapable of summoning the forces to destroy technology, he eschewed it, becoming a rustic version of the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the man who “ate civilization”, and in so doing ate his own wickedness.
He lived in a cabin near Lincoln, Montana, a place in every sense off the grid: no electricity, no television, no telephone. He moved about with a bicycle. He took an interest in regeneration in nature. He even foraged. This was his way of romancing the notion of the “pre-industrial city”, as he termed it, where the “19th century frontiersman” could create “change himself, by his own choice.” Change for the “modern man”, in contrast, was “imposed”.
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