The Unabomber Is Dead. Unabomberism Is Not.

Ted Kaczynski, the domestic terrorist known as the “Unabomber,” was evil. Anyone who mails bombs to innocent people is evil, and perhaps also mentally ill. But simply dismissing Kaczynski as a madman is too easy: He was also an early and extreme representative of an American anti-technology movement that has since become considerably more mainstream.

U.S. federal law enforcement is increasingly concerned about anti-technology terrorism, understandably so, given the rise in violent threats against tech executives and AI companies. Some have unfortunately spilled into real-world incidents, including two attacks at Sam Altman’s home this April. And while anti-technology extremism does not always take Kaczynski’s violent form, the movement’s underlying ideology still poses a serious threat to the nation.

Kaczynski saw modern technology as the root of all evil. Only by returning to a simpler, quasi-Thoreauvian existence, he believed, would humans regain their freedom and dignity. He was unquestionably intelligent, but he also hated being told what to do, possibly reflecting oppositional defiant disorder. To Kaczynski, living in a technologically advanced society meant submitting to institutions, obligations, and rules that constrained his precious freedom.

Talk about a knucklehead. If you don’t like technology, retreat to the woods and eat berries. Do not murder people or wage a yearslong terror campaign, threatening further violence unless major newspapers publish your anti-technology manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” But Kaczynski could not settle for personal withdrawal; he demanded the destruction of the system.

His vision is becoming more widely held, generally without mass violence, although the growing severity of today’s anti-tech rhetoric indicates such violence could follow. Even when the manifesto appeared in 1995, numerous prominent intellectuals took Kaczynski’s ideas seriously. They condemned his violence, of course, but insisted that his arguments deserved serious consideration.

James Q. Wilson, an influential social scientist and former chairman of the Council of Academic Advisors at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a January 1998 New York Times op-ed that the manifesto was “a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper,” adding that, if it was the work of a madman, “then the writings of many political philosophers—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx—are scarcely more sane.” He was certainly right about Marx.

In 2000, Bill Joy, cofounder and then chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, quoted Kaczynski’s manifesto at length in his famous essay, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” While Joy did not endorse Kaczynski’s actions or broader program, he treated part of Kaczynski’s argument seriously enough to use it as the foundation for a warning about the potential risks of 21st-century technologies.

Then, in 2009, Kevin Kelly, the fame-seeking founding executive editor of Wired, published a post titled “The Unabomber Was Right.” You get the idea: The Unabomber’s vision had become radical chic. And that was only the beginning.

Today, we are witnessing a Kaczynski revival. Most decry the violence, but simultaneously embrace the supposed genius of his arguments. The emergence of AI has only intensified the phenomenon, which extends well beyond anonymous social media trolls. Commentators across platforms are increasingly willing to portray Kaczynski as a prophet who understood where technological progress would lead.

PC Magazine published an article titled “The Unabomber Was Right: How a Terrorist’s Warning Has Become Our Reality” in October 2025. In 2021, Tucker Carlson called the Unabomber a “bad person” but said he had written a “smart analysis.” YouTube videos circulate with titles like “The Unabomber Tried to Warn You This Would Happen.” In 2023, responding to the opening sentence of the manifesto, Elon Musk tweeted that Kaczynski “might not be wrong.”

TikTok creators have used trends and hashtags, including #TedPill, #TedK, and #TedKaczynski, to elevate the terrorist’s ideas and attract millions of views. An article analyzing Kaczynski’s popularity among these influencers explains: “To swallow the ‘Ted pill’ is to embrace the romance of a return to a pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer lifestyle… It offers a dystopian diagnosis of modern life, embracing a utopian fantasy of some prelapsarian state-of-nature.” (It is laughably ironic that people are using a culturally dominant, Chinese-owned social media platform to campaign for an anti-tech movement.)

More than 30 years after its publication, the manifesto remains an Amazon bestseller in the “Radical Political Thought” category. There is even a thriving online market for Unabomber merch, because nothing says “revolution against the industrial system” quite like ordering a Ted tchotchke to display alongside your mass-produced Che Guevara poster and “We Believe” yard sign.

One academic article states:

Several commentators have argued that Kaczynski’s reasoning is sound. Indeed, many of Kaczynski’s observations about technology and the environment have proven to be prescient. Accordingly, a new generation of followers have adopted his anti-technology philosophy. If Kaczynski was correct about technology and the environment, this might warrant a reevaluation of his socio-theoretical writings and reconsideration of his constructed persona as a mad genius.

To better understand what these people are legitimizing, consider the opening of Kaczynski’s manifesto:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering.

I will not spend pages cataloging the wonders of technologically advanced societies or thanking my lucky stars that I was not born 100 years earlier. But consider the basics: vastly higher incomes, medical treatments that would have appeared miraculous to earlier generations, instantaneous access to enormous stores of information, the ability to travel almost anywhere in the world, and countless other improvements in material well-being.

The simplest rebuttal to Kaczynski is this: Who in their right mind would voluntarily return to the world to the right?

This romanticized nineteenth-century harvest scene may resemble the life Kaczynski wanted humanity to recover. To be sure, it looks pastoral enough. But the pre-industrial world was defined by arduous labor, economic vulnerability, and isolation. The illustration doesn’t show the grueling manual labor required from sunup to sundown simply to survive. No thank you.

Or how about the image below?

Pre-industrial Europeans depended heavily on grain-based diets, leaving communities vulnerable to recurring harvest failures, famines, disease, and local mortality spikes. But hey, at least people supposedly enjoyed freedom and autonomy. Except, of course, that many did not. Millions lived as tenant farmers, servants, or agricultural laborers bound by rigid social hierarchies and economic necessity.

Technological and economic progress might not have eliminated human suffering, but it dramatically expanded humanity’s capacity to prevent famine, treat illness, transport food, communicate across distances, and survive environmental shocks.

Kaczynski nevertheless wanted to overthrow advanced technological society:

We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a political revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.

So, smash the computers, machines, and tractors. Burn down the factories, laboratories, and infrastructure. And then, live free.

At the center of this “worldview” (if you can even call it that; a better term might be psychological disorder) is a delusional demand for autonomy: The individual must be liberated not merely from political oppression but from nearly every institution, technological system, social obligation, and constraint. Certain people on the right, such as Ayn Rand, appear to have suffered from a similar malady.

Kaczynski wrote: “But for most people it is through the power process—having a goal, making an autonomous effort and attaining the goal—that self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired.”

Industrial society, in his telling, reduces individuals to drones and deprives them of meaningful autonomy. One section of his screed is titled “Restriction of Freedom Is Unavoidable in Industrial Society.” Yes, Teddy, it is. I cannot drive 100 miles per hour down my neighborhood street. I cannot dump my trash on my neighbor’s lawn. I have to work. Ah, what a straitjacket.

And had Kaczynski formed any meaningful, lasting human relationships, he might have discovered that restrictions on individual freedom are unavoidable in families and communities too. I did not climb Mount Everest because I did not want to risk my children growing up without a father. That was a restriction on my freedom—and one I willingly accepted because mature adults balance autonomy against responsibility to others.

So, what the hell is the matter with the people now legitimizing “Unabomberism”?

In his remarkable book Double Lives, which examines covert Soviet operations to transform gullible Western intellectuals—dubbed “innocents”—into unwitting channels for Soviet propaganda, Stephen Koch writes: “It is quite true that once a fashionable opinion was properly launched, it would quite spontaneously develop and grow among the ranks of enlightened people.”

One Soviet operative reportedly called this ripple effect in cultural politics “rabbit breeding.” Today, we are breeding anti-AI rabbits.

Koch captures the underlying psychology exactly right:

They needed to believe. In order for this to happen, the apparatus had to seize on the most salient moral claims of the adversary culture from which almost all these people emerged, and make it theirs.

An increasing number of people today, including elites, embrace an adversary culture. Their identities are built around opposition to one or more central features of American life. In this case, the target is technological progress itself. Every technological advance is interpreted not as a tool that may be improved or deployed responsibly, but as another mechanism for constraining personal freedom.

Koch went on to observe that the net effect of Soviet facades (efforts to hide the true nature of Stalinism and Soviet communism) was to “bind Stalinism to the self-evident truths of a given adversary culture, and make that Stalinism feel indispensable to an enlightened life.”

Substitute Unabomberism for Stalinism—not as a claim of moral or historical equivalence, but as a description of how intellectual orthodoxies reproduce themselves—and one gets a reasonably accurate picture of the current dynamic. To live an enlightened life, one is expected to decry technology. Everyone else is doing it, after all, and no one wants to appear unfashionably optimistic about technological progress.

The Chinese Communist Party unquestionably has an interest in amplifying American social divisions and weakening public support for advanced technologies essential to U.S. economic strength and national security. While it’s too early to tell whether Beijing is spurring on the revival of Kaczynski’s ideology, as the Soviet Union once actively promoted communism in the United States, it’s clear that America is in a dangerous place.

Maybe we need new McCarthy hearings to root out the Unabomberists. (Just kidding…) But we certainly do need a more concerted effort to identify foreign attempts to spread anti-technology extremism in the United States. More importantly, we need more Americans willing to say that the emperor has no clothes. Thinking critically and independently about technology and its economic and societal impacts sometimes means rejecting the day’s fashionable opinions and conventional wisdom.

It might be easier to go along with the dominant narrative or nod quietly when people make absurd claims: We should oppose all data centers; AI will inevitably cause mass unemployment; social media is wholly destructive; autonomous systems deprive us of freedom; yada, yada, yada. But members of the non-adversary culture need to stand up and tell the anti-AI rabbits exactly what they are—enemies of progress and of the nation.

As I write on the first page of Technology Fears and Scapegoats:

Technological innovation is the most important factor determining not only America’s future, but the world’s… Only technology can deliver the necessary growth, productivity, and scale to create a world with higher wages, clean and inexpensive energy, advanced health care, 24/7 support for the elderly, enhanced education for the young, and so much more.

Who wouldn’t want this future? Well, as it turns out, a lot of people. The biggest barrier to achieving today’s technological imperative is the growing animus against an innovation-driven future. This animus can be seen in the many falsehoods that demonize advanced technology and the people and companies that bring it to market.

Unless these falsehoods are challenged, the West will struggle to restore the optimism and ambition required for a robust innovation ecosystem. That would make it easier for China to dominate the advanced industries that underpin economic power and national security in the 21st century.

Romanticizing a terrorist’s dream of dismantling industrial society is not a serious way to address concerns about new technology. And those who indiscriminately oppose technological development are not harmless nostalgists. Whether they understand it or not, their agenda would weaken economic growth, erode U.S. competitiveness, constrain military capabilities, and deny future generations the benefits of continued innovation.

Look, I get it. I would love to live in Hobbiton too. But Tolkien neglected to mention that such a life would require backbreaking labor and result in considerably shorter lives. The only way to achieve something resembling a real-world Hobbiton—a prosperous, peaceful community with abundant leisure and time for family, friendship, and food—is through vastly more technological innovation and automation, and the productivity gains they generate. That will give people more time and freedom without reducing them to impoverished peasants.

It is time to denounce Unabomberism for what it is: a profoundly dangerous and unserious ideology masquerading as enlightened concern for humanity.