Uncle Ted, pt. 1

You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it. Seldom do you have to exert yourself seriously, and in any case you have hardly any autonomy in work, so that the need for the power process is not well served.

 —Industrial Society and Its Future, §61

Theodore John Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber) took his own life on June 10, 2023, in North Carolina, where he was undergoing cancer treatment while serving a sentence for murdering three people and injuring twenty-three others using homemade bombs that he mailed to his victims.

Diagnosed with late-stage rectal cancer, he refused further chemotherapy treatment given the grim prognosis. Like another infamous prisoner, Jeffrey Epstein, he chose to hang himself using what was on hand. Both men died in federal custody and have dwelled on the periphery of the American consciousness for different reasons.

The Unabomber was, according to the autopsy report, observed to suffer from depression in the weeks leading up to his death and was referred for psychiatric treatment, a referral he did not take, perhaps because he didn't live long enough. Details here are sketchy. His father, Theodore Richard (aka "Turk"), had also been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he too took his own life in 1990 rather than suffer the ravages of disease.

I remember reading the Unabomber manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, in 1996-97. The Washington Post, in conjunction with The New York Times, published it in September 1995, but with the advent of the Internet, it's had several second winds and has remained a staple of online reading across the political spectrum. Kaczynski was captured the following year, in April, after his brother David contacted the FBI with information linking the manifesto's style to his brother Ted's.

Trying to recall what he wrote decades later, I realized it needed another pass. Maybe I never finished it, just talked about it with my brothers, who were also my roommates then. Memory is feeble, but not so feeble that I'd forgotten it held real insights into what was coming.

Thirty years have passed; technology has continued to wind its way through hearts, minds, and institutions. Were the issues Kaczynski raised in his manifesto ameliorated, sharpened, or weakened? Are humans happier and more prosperous than they were in the 1990s because of the period's technological advances?

The hermit's writing career did not end with the manifesto; he followed up with The Road to Revolution (2008), Technological Slavery (2010), and Anti-Tech Revolution (2016). In one video snippet I saw online, he admitted he had become something of a cult figure and received letters from admirers. This post will stick to the manifesto, but understand that the Unabomber remained an active writer after his incarceration in federal prison.

As of this writing, Kaczynski's titles average 4.6 out of 5 stars on Amazon, and his manifesto is listed number 1 in the Radical Political Thought genre. His criminal acts are appalling, but the force of his arguments still draws people dissatisfied with the limited critical discourse on technology qua technology. Worker productivity has increased for decades with no corresponding growth in wages; vacation days have remained limited, too. If technology makes us freer, more efficient, more accurate at our work, then where is the payoff? What are we doing exactly with the gadgets?

In response, Kaczynski predicts that satisfying technical demands only produces new ones, creating an eternal treadmill of problems that require ever more esoteric applications of technique to solve. As the quip goes: "Modern man knows more and more about less and less." In the quantum age, the specialization becomes so refined that physicists working in string theory sound like madmen. And they produce nothing tangible.

His manifesto is anthropological, though not in the value-neutral sense academics intend. It makes specific biological claims about what humans need to live up to their evolutionary inheritance and, in turn, find something like fulfillment and well-being. In the Unabomber's view, technology actively works against these natural drives and leaves modern humans frustrated, depressed, unchallenged, oversocialized (leftists especially), and powerless to manage their own fates. The anthropological basis for his critique of technology means it can be tested empirically, but the author confines himself to generalized observations that follow from his premises.

Kaczynski was a math prodigy who entered Harvard University at 16, but he expressed no interest in social statistics and offered only a few citations in his manifesto's review of techno-society. He never presented formulas or spreadsheets because his arguments were qualitative. When FBI agents went through his cabin following his arrest on April 3, 1996, near Lincoln, Montana, they found a collection of books on various topics. These, along with his library visits, provided him with the few references that appear in his infamous essay.

In those days, Starlink and WiFi weren't options for someone living in the rugged isolation of the Northern Rockies, the last continental remnant of the American frontier, because they didn't exist. The nearby town of Lincoln, which the Unabomber would bicycle to for library visits and shopping, was not an Internet hub, and the World Wide Web was still very new at the time. Netscape Navigator was less than two years old when he was arrested.

His research and writing were strictly analog, and, in the 2026 Netflix movie Unabomber (Netflix, 2026, dir. Janus Metz), a fictional FBI agent claims it found no grammatical errors in the typewritten pages, an odd aggrandizement. (This is not entirely accurate, as he uses "to" instead of "too" in §119. Either that, or the mistake is an editorial oversight in my ebook edition)

What stands out is that he used analog tools like old-school newspapers, books, and typewriters to diagnose and predict the trajectory of information systems and their further suppression of human autonomy. If anything encapsulates his manifesto, it's that technology and human autonomy cannot coexist; the former inevitably strangles the latter in the name of improving human life.

How well does his critique measure up now, in 2026?

Oversocialization and Woke

Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society.

 —§24

The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our society as a whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism are not restricted to the left. Though they are especially noticeable in the left, they are widespread in our society. And today’s society tries to socialize us to a greater extent than any previous society. We are even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise, how to make love, how to raise our kids and so forth.

 —§32

Social media has completely altered and amplified the power of socialization, producing hypersensitivity to the slightest divergences from the newfangled Woke ideology through endless streams of views and opinions shared by grudge bearers online. Woke is really a collection of older sources found in postcolonial theory, critical race theory, queer theory, and postmodernism, repackaged for ready dissemination on social media. It has been likened to a mental virus since it spread so quickly, particularly among the young.

Woke isn't a systematic, rigorous ideology at all, but rather an expanded category of "identities" often (but not always) arbitrarily defined, involving special terms ("microaggressions," "triggering"), niche taboos, and moral preening. Even the term itself, "Woke," is a mental tripwire: it's a past-tense verb used as an adjective, coerced into doing a noun's job.

The Unabomber's manifesto refers to the (now) older politically correct standards in law reviews and academic publications, where speech codification and monitoring were adopted to remove the psychological harm caused by words like "oriental."

I recall one incident around 2004, when a group of colleagues debated what to eat for lunch. I suggested something "oriental" (§11) – Thai, sushi, Vietnamese, Korean – rather innocently since our office was located in an area abundant with literally dozens of ethnic cuisines. A Japanese coworker immediately complained about the insensitivity of such a word and stomped away, as if I meant to offend.

Needless to say, group lunches became much rarer.

I learned from the incident that "oriental" carries a strong negative connotation that causes emotional harm, but as a turn-of-the-century white male with a college education, I was not aware of its pejorative sense. To me, the term was respectful since it was precise – it referred to the Far East and Southeast Asia, but it also had racial baggage (Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism). Indians are Asians too, but it seemed improper to me at the time to lump them all together.

Still, "Asian" would've been preferable in hindsight, but the Unabomber's point remains that outsiders – people who either are or feel as such – are especially susceptible to negative feelings over words and conventions. Kaczynski points out that oversocialization includes self-monitoring for deviations from exacting "moral" and speech codes; politically correct language is the product of a well-heeled class of overwhelmingly white academics who absorb benighted minorities into their collective, becoming patrons of their wards in the process. (Recall the Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation, who traveled throughout the galaxy adding various species to their collective hive mind.)

Political correctness invited people to perform a secularized version of the Jesuit particular examen of their conscience, to locate flaws, tendencies, and subtle expectations which made life harder for minorities (§25). The founder of the order, St. Ignatius of Loyola, advised keeping a journal of these throughout the day, as a self-report on one's spiritual progress towards unity with Jesus. It seems like a portent of the Unabomber's oversocialization.

In other words, the left sought domestication so the system could keep functioning smoothly by erasing the hard edges of visible minority groups. The educated leftist academic, the professional oikophobe (Scruton), adds to the strength of the collectivist cause by recruiting those who will be indebted to him later for their seat at the table. He shares his distaste for his own civilization with outsiders. He is, like the early Christian apostles, sent out to convert, to bring into the fold those forgotten, left at the margins.

No one cares if you, as a black person, like Miles Davis or cook African dishes (§29). The system does care if you struggle to integrate into the economic system and become a contributing member of the technical society, rather than ending up as a net drain. The political correctness movement implicitly expected eventual ideological conformity. Corporate America and academia are, if nothing else, elaborate sets of social rituals and observances; strong non-conformist identities tend to hamper the market's efficiency. The Woke inherited an intolerance of deviation from their revised doctrines, reminding some of the religious fervor shown at various points in Christian history.

Woke keeps the speech code and extends it, but it also recognizes what the earlier whites who created politically correct language were really doing – blotting out minority identities, erasing definitional lines in the name of making another functioning, fungible economic unit for the West. It was neo-colonialism of the mind, and this realization gave their cause an angry energy.

Woke sensitivity, grievances, social rituals, and boundary testing (e.g., the proliferation of neo-pronouns), and, most importantly, the demanded recognition of confabulated identities carried the threat of cancellation – social ostracism of those ensconced on the inside of the machine. Criticize a Woke cause or challenge its strict rules, as Jordan Peterson did, and you risk unemployment, public shaming, and losing secondary income. Peterson came out the other end a wealthy man, but most did not, since they lacked his academic stature, education, and public-speaking ability.

J.K. Rowling and Richard Dawkins also had run-ins with the Woke movement, with the latter having his 1996 Humanist of the Year award, issued by the American Humanist Association, withdrawn in 2021 over his online rejection of certain transgender claims.

In some ways, Woke was a hard reaction to the feeling that people who already felt marginalized were losing themselves to an amorphous system that had no real interest in them as people. The Woke were invisible and ignored; the difference between them and the normie is that they knew it. Kaczynski predicted (§28) that this kind of leftist rebellion would fail to change the system and that, at best, it could only be absorbed into it. This happened, much as it did to the gay rights movement. In the Aughts, gay pride parades were corporate-sponsored events and same-sex domestic partner benefits were handed out in the compensation packages.

By the early 2020s, HR departments were incorporating Woke doctrine into DEI programs and mandatory training classes; LinkedIn users, many of whom had worked for decades, suddenly began adding their preferred pronouns to their bios in 2021 as a sign they accepted the new ideology's etiquette. How had these successful professionals ever made it during the pre-Woke times? Was America, the melting pot of immigrants, also the mother of a late-period abstract blending and leveling process of minds?

The Wokester was but an extreme case of social media's reach and what it could do to a population. The manifesto notes that all are susceptible to oversocialization (§32) to some degree, but it could not foresee just how potent the delivery mechanism via smart devices would become, or how widely the net could be cast. Normies were pulled in by it. The system can collect personal data on billions of people and monitor, censor, and react in real time to potential threats to itself. The traffic goes both ways, however: we watch it, it watches us.

High-definition, hand-held supercomputers with high-speed wireless connections transmit endless streams of enticing attractions, reminding one of the Unabomber's later points in his manifesto: Technology starts niche, becomes ubiquitous, then turns obligatory (§127). Trying to function now in 2026 without a smartphone is socio-economic suicide for any individual, unless he wants to live apart from the collective, a digital version of Ted Kaczynski in a remote cabin.

On social media, society and its discontents can vent their frustration, anger, and paranoia while selling coffee cups, baseball caps, and T-shirts in their merch stores. The ability to tip content creators on YouTube – a division of Google (which is owned by Alphabet) – means the "alternative media" is made possible by global capitalism's team captain. The more egregious habitual dissenters lose their bank accounts and payment processors. They are "de-platformed," a word that probably made the Unabomber smile in his prison cell.

The firebrand regenerative farmer who posts online survival tips is earning part of his income from views, product promotions, and tips, courtesy of the very system he wants to change. But the system's technology cannot be used against itself when it's also paying the bills; it just absorbs creators, ranks, and monetizes them. Socially conscious viewers of whatever ideological camp get their Two Minutes Hate over whatever outrage du jour is dangled in front of them by "the algorithm." Nothing changes for the better. Or, as the kids used to say, "Nothing ever happens." Would-be pitchfork-bearing reformers turn into de-energized, empty husks.

Oversocialization: The COVID Case Study

There is no better demonstration of the techno-system's power and flexibility than in its response to COVID. Whatever one's personal feelings, it showed that social media, at the system's behest, could misinform an entire planet about the scale, severity, and risk to humans of a flu-like virus, non-stop, in harrowing terms that could not help but do lasting damage to the social psyche.

To this day, many who were adults at the time believe that the pandemic was biblical in scale; it wasn't. The total death rate was higher than a conventional flu season, but once all the "died with COVID" rather than "from COVID" are removed, the "pandemic" looks far less terrifying. Doctors and hospitals are not exactly eager to see their fraud investigated, and for the near future, we will still read about the vast numbers of people who died from the disease. Motorcyclists with their brains splattered all over a tree were COVID victims too.

In Exterminations: Preparing for the Unthinkable, Ugo Bardi writes:

The available estimates from WHO show that, in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused less than two million confirmed victims worldwide, a number most likely heavily overestimated because of false positives and a lack of discrimination between people dying because of the virus or by other causes. But even taking the WHO data at face value, consider that the world’s population is nearly 8 billion today. So, we can calculate that the chance of dying from the virus for an average person (also called the “mortality rate”) was less than 0.04% yearly.

A member of the Club of Rome, which produced The Limits to Growth, Bardi sees clearly that COVID was anything but a civilization-ending plague, yet, at least in my view, it provided the pretext to test the legal, political, and social power of the global medical industrial complex. It would be interesting to know the Unabomber's thoughts on this period given his skepticism of the scientific establishment and politicians.

Yet social media, including LinkedIn, painted dire pictures of overflowing hospital rooms and showed hillbillies lined up out the door to buy "horse dewormer" – a reference to Ivermectin. An acquaintance of mine would jump into his car and drive to the nearest hospital and film it whenever local TV news claimed there was an overflow of the sick and dying happening in his city. Needless to say, the footage always showed the hospitals he visited to be anything but slammed.

Recall Kaczynski's complaint that

We are even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise, how to make love, how to raise our kids...

 —§32

The COVID regime went further still: we were told how far apart to stand in public, how to breathe, what to wear, whether we could visit a dying Nana, whether it was okay to slip forks under our N95 masks to feed ourselves or our children in restaurants. The pandemic forced a whole new set of social protocols – really, control points – as a kind of loyalty test on the entire planet.

Joe Rogan, after a sit-down with Sanjay Gupta, called the CNN mouthpiece, Don Lemon, who repeated this line about Ivermectin, "a dumb motherfucker." Lemon, with the latest tech marvels in hand, could not be bothered to look up the drug's use cases and was happy to berate science-deniers, as they were called. COVID turned into an orgy of moralizing and social grandstanding from all sides.

Whether Ivermectin worked or not, the establishment was intent on burying anyone who suggested it as a cheap, safe alternative. Joe Rogan was abused for stating that he used it and other novel therapies to treat his bout with COVID.

Meanwhile, states where marijuana is legalized got a pass despite the dispensaries selling ever more potent forms of cannabis, the kind that can lead to increased paranoia and psychosis. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, "Weed is good." During lockdown, dispensaries and liquor stores were declared "essential businesses" in some places, while nearby places of worship were closed.

Many people still believe Ivermectin is purely a horse dewormer, not realizing its safety profile is comparable to aspirin and that it has saved untold human lives in the Global South for decades. Doubters and skeptics of the orthodox science narrative quickly lost their YouTube channels, including long-time creators like James Corbett (2020), over various thought crimes against the social media-based groupthink. (To be clear, I am not endorsing Corbett or anyone else; I am only pointing out the system's ability to quickly shut down critical inquiry in the name of science and public safety.) He was eventually reinstated by YouTube, and his videos now appear regularly.

The social unease and partisan venom were amplified because people believed that the unmasked dog walker in front of their house was spreading death to them and their loved ones; or maybe it was just a healthy, uninfected guy showing agency, taking his pup for a poop?

The binary was so stark and the stakes so high that it invited partisan rage. COVID was an invisible force that introduced us to the "asymptomatic" patient, the disease bearer who never manifests so much as a sniffle while obliviously weaving a path of destruction with every step through a grocery store. Everyone was a potential Typhoid Mary-style super spreader.

Stated more plainly: The deeper cause for bitterness was the loss of bodily autonomy. Whatever side you took, you believed that you were powerless over the one thing you should control – yourself. Gay and trans rights activists and pro-abortion feminists all clamored for bodily autonomy, but when governments issued blanket draconian mandates over entire populations, it became a global battle for everyone's right to own themselves.

A priori commitments and allegiances were scrambled as "my body, my choice" became "you are a homicidal infectious spreader if you don't take the vaccine!" Anti-mandate protesters – many pro-life, probably with some gleeful irony – waved signs that said, "my body, my choice."

Right-wing rebels bristled at the idea of being told to wear this, move like this, breathe like this, take this injection (or forfeit your job). Dr. Fauci's devotees believed that faceless mobs of MAGA followers were playing fast and loose with the "rules," leaving the devotees' health to the mercy of strangers. In their own way, they too had lost personal agency.

You can find no better social test of technocracy's power and scope than the 2020 pandemic.

Both sides of the COVID wars believed they were losing what they cherished most— their own bodily autonomy. Kaczynski's opening quote points to the problem, however: you cede bodily autonomy the moment you let a boss tell you where to stand, where to sit, and how to spend your day.

Biden shoehorned OSHA's regulatory power to require most workers in organizations with 100+ employees to take the COVID jab or face weekly testing – a move designed to force eventual vaccine compliance since weekly testing is onerous. His bid failed on legal grounds, but it served as a dry run for the forced gene-therapy programs the Unabomber predicted.

In SEC filings, Moderna noted that the FDA saw its mRNA platform as a "gene therapy." The FDA said that its use of the phrase "gene therapy products" included the "transcription and/or translation of transferred genetic material," which covers mRNA vaccines by definition. However, the FDA regulated them as vaccines.

Some have even claimed, incorrectly, that mRNA vaccines were, in fact, the first mandated gene therapy introduced for public health and safety reasons. The vaccines do not alter DNA, but people can be forgiven for thinking this since, in a world marked by specialization and technical complexity, it's hard to know what is true. This is one way people feel they've lost personal autonomy, and they try to reclaim it by adopting the paranoid style and embracing conspiracy theories. Technical experts issue diktats through public officials and elected representatives – we, the people, comply.

If Kaczynski is right that eugenics and/or forced gene therapies are in our future (§§122–124), then the planners will have the pandemic as a handbook for what to do and what not to do.

In 2026, it's clear to many of us that public trust and social cohesion, which were already under stress, broke completely. Today, a palpable unease hangs over social interactions, which have become much rarer.

Science and technology didn't bring us closer together: they tore us apart.

This ends part 1. In part 2, Uncle Ted looks at our new robot overlords.