The Unabomber Was Right (And That’s the Problem)

There’s a 35,000-word essay sitting on the internet that more people should have read before we built the world we’re living in now.

The problem is, it was written by a terrorist.

Ted Kaczynski – the Unabomber – killed three people and injured twenty-three others between 1978 and 1995. He sent bombs through the post to academics, airline executives, and computer scientists. People opening parcels and losing hands, eyesight, and lives. He was a domestic terrorist, full stop, and he died in prison in 2023, where he absolutely deserved to be.

But in 1995, as part of a deal to stop the bombings, The Washington Post and The New York Times published his manifesto: “Industrial Society and Its Future.” It’s a sprawling, meticulously argued critique of technological progress and what it’s doing to human freedom. And here’s the uncomfortable bit: large chunks of it read like they were written last week.

Not the bits about violence being justified. Not the paranoid fantasies about leftists ruining everything. But the core argument – that we’re building a world where technology controls us rather than the other way around, where we’re trading autonomy for convenience, where we’re becoming psychologically dependent on systems we can’t escape – that bit?

He nailed it.

And that creates a rather awkward problem for anyone who wants to talk about it honestly.

The Brilliant Mathematician Who Went Into the Woods

Ted Kaczynski wasn’t some ranting lunatic scribbling manifestos in crayon. He was a genuine prodigy. Got into Harvard at sixteen. Completed a PhD in mathematics at Michigan. Became the youngest assistant professor Berkeley had ever hired. By all accounts, he was extraordinarily intelligent.

He was also, by all accounts, deeply damaged. Harvard subjected him to psychological experiments as an undergraduate – part of a study that involved attacking participants’ core beliefs and measuring their stress responses. Whether this broke something in him or just accelerated something already broken is anyone’s guess, but by his mid-twenties, he’d retreated from academia entirely.

In 1971, he bought land in Montana and built himself a tiny cabin with no electricity or running water. He wanted out. Out of modern society, out of technological dependence, out of what he saw as a system designed to strip people of their autonomy and self-sufficiency.

And for a while, he just lived there. Grew vegetables. Read books. Presumably felt quite pleased with himself for escaping.

But escaping wasn’t enough. He wanted revenge. Or maybe he wanted to wake everyone else up. Or maybe – and this is where it gets dark – he just wanted the world to know he was right.

So he started building bombs.

The Manifesto: What He Actually Said

“Industrial Society and Its Future” is long, repetitive in places, and occasionally veers into the kind of ranting you’d expect from someone who’s spent too much time alone in the woods. But strip away the violence apologetics and the weird tangents about leftists, and you’re left with something genuinely disturbing: a clear-eyed analysis of what technological progress costs us.

His central thesis is this: technology doesn’t give us freedom. It creates dependence. Every convenience we gain makes us less capable, less autonomous, more reliant on systems we don’t control and can’t escape.

He argued that the industrial-technological system has become self-perpetuating. We can’t opt out because modern life requires participation. You need a job to earn money. You need money to buy food. You need food to live. And the job requires you to submit to the system’s demands – to show up when you’re told, to perform tasks you didn’t choose, to organise your entire life around structures someone else designed.

He called this the “power process” – the human need to work towards meaningful goals and achieve them through our own effort. Technology, he argued, disrupts this process. It either makes things so easy that achievement feels hollow, or it creates problems so complex that we need specialists and systems to solve them, removing our sense of agency.

And crucially, he predicted that as technology advanced, the psychological damage would worsen. We’d become more anxious, more depressed, more alienated from ourselves and each other. We’d fill our lives with “surrogate activities” – things that feel like meaningful goals but are actually just distractions from the fact that we’ve lost control over the things that actually matter.

Reading this in 2025 feels like finding a weather forecast from thirty years ago that accurately predicted today’s storm.

Where He Was Right (And It’s Uncomfortable)

Let’s start with the obvious one: we are psychologically dependent on technology in exactly the way he predicted.

Try going a day without your phone. Not just turning it off – actually leaving it at home. See how long it takes before you feel that phantom buzz in your pocket, before you reach for something that isn’t there. Notice the anxiety creeping in. What if someone needs you? What if you miss something important? What if you’re just… disconnected?

That’s not freedom. That’s dependency on better branding.

Kaczynski argued that we’d become reliant on systems we don’t understand and can’t escape. Look around. How many people know how their phone actually works? How does the algorithm decide what they see? How is their data collected, processed, and sold? We’re entirely dependent on technologies we treat like magic, controlled by companies whose interests don’t align with ours.

And we can’t opt out. Try existing in 2025 without a smartphone. Try getting a job without email. Try maintaining relationships without social media. You can do it, technically, but you’ll be swimming against a current so strong that most people just give in.

He predicted we’d fill our lives with surrogate activities – meaningless goals that simulate the power process without actually giving us autonomy. Scroll through Instagram. Look at people optimising their morning routines, their productivity systems, their wellness rituals. Look at the endless pursuit of followers, likes, and engagement. These aren’t real goals. They’re simulations of achievement, packaged and sold back to us by platforms that profit from our engagement.

He warned about increasing rates of depression and anxiety as people felt more powerless and alienated. Well, here we are. Mental health crises across the developed world. Teenagers having breakdowns over likes and comments. Adults feel perpetually inadequate because they’re comparing their lives to everyone else’s highlight reel. We’re more connected than ever and somehow lonelier than we’ve ever been.

Kaczynski said technology would concentrate power in the hands of those who control it. Look at the tech giants. Five companies essentially control the internet. They decide what you see, what you buy, who you talk to, and what information you have access to. They’ve got more power than most governments and approximately zero democratic accountability.

And perhaps most uncomfortably: he predicted that people would defend the system even as it harmed them, because they’d become too dependent on it to imagine alternatives.

Tell someone they should delete social media and watch them explain why they can’t. “I need it for work.” “All my friends are on there.” “I’d miss out on everything.” They’re not wrong, exactly. But they’re also proving his point.

The Bit About AI (That He Didn’t See Coming But Would Have Loved)

Kaczynski died before AI really kicked off, but Christ, he would have had a field day with this.

Here’s what we’re building: systems that can write, design, code, analyse, decide. Systems that will eventually do most cognitive work better and faster than humans can. And we’re rushing headlong into it because it’s profitable and impressive and because – here’s the kicker – we’ve collectively decided that efficiency and convenience trump every other consideration.

His whole argument was that technology creates dependence by making us less capable. Well, what happens when AI can do your job better than you can? When can it write better than writers, code better than programmers, and diagnose better than doctors?

We keep being told this will “free us” to do more creative, meaningful work. But that’s the same promise we’ve been sold for two centuries. Machines will do the boring stuff, and you’ll be free to flourish. Except every time, what actually happens is: machines do the stuff you used to do, and now you’re either unemployed or doing something even more alienating than before.

And the people building these systems? They’re not asking whether we should. They’re asking whether we can, and then doing it anyway because someone else will if they don’t. The competitive pressure is so intense that stopping isn’t really an option. We’re locked into a race that nobody consciously chose but nobody can afford to lose.

That’s exactly what Kaczynski was warning about. The system becomes self-perpetuating. Individual choices don’t matter because the structure demands certain behaviours. You can’t opt out without sacrificing your ability to participate in society.

The Stuff He Got Wrong (Because He Definitely Got Some Things Wrong)

Look, I’m not about to pretend the man was some misunderstood prophet. He was also a paranoid extremist who blamed “leftists” for everything and thought bombing people was an acceptable form of protest.

His understanding of political movements was shallow and borderline conspiratorial. His proposed solution – essentially, abandon industrial society and return to primitive living – was never realistic and would likely involve mass starvation and suffering on an unimaginable scale.

He underestimated human adaptability. Yes, technology creates dependency, but humans have always adapted to new tools and systems. We’re not helpless. We’re just… slow to recognise the trade-offs we’re making.

And crucially, he couldn’t see any middle ground. For him, it was either complete rejection of industrial technology or total enslavement to it. That binary thinking is seductive but ultimately useless. The real world requires nuance, compromise, and the messy work of building better systems rather than burning everything down.

But here’s the thing: being wrong about the solutions doesn’t make you wrong about the diagnosis.

What We’re Supposed to Do With This

So here we are. A terrorist wrote a manifesto that accurately predicted significant parts of our current technological dystopia. What exactly are we meant to do with that information?

We could ignore it. Pretend that because the messenger was morally bankrupt, the message must be too. That’s certainly the easier option. But it’s also intellectually dishonest.

Or we could engage with it. Acknowledge that someone can be both a murderer and correct about certain things. Accept that uncomfortable truths don’t become false just because we don’t like who’s saying them.

The difficult bit is figuring out how to learn from the analysis without endorsing the conclusions he reached. How do we take his warnings seriously without sliding into his nihilism and violence?

Because here’s what I think he got fundamentally wrong: he assumed the problem was unsolvable within the system. That the only option was destruction and retreat. But that’s giving up before you’ve even tried.

Yes, we’re building systems that erode autonomy. Yes, we’re becoming dependent on technologies we don’t control. Yes, the power is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. But unlike Kaczynski, I don’t think the answer is to blow it all up and live in the woods.

The answer is to build different systems. To demand accountability from tech companies. To teach people to understand the technologies they use. To create spaces where human autonomy isn’t sacrificed for convenience. To recognise that every technological advance is a trade-off, and we get to negotiate the terms.

It’s slower. It’s messier. It requires collective action and political will and all the boring, difficult work of actually changing things rather than just raging against them.

But it’s better than bombs.

The Uncomfortable Questions We’re Left With

Why do people keep reading this manifesto? Why does it resonate with alienated young men who feel lost in the modern world? Why does it keep finding new audiences decades after it was written?

I think it’s because Kaczynski articulated something people feel but struggle to name: the sense that we’ve built a world that doesn’t fit humans properly. That we’re being shaped to serve systems rather than systems being shaped to serve us.

He gave voice to the quiet desperation of feeling like a cog in a machine you didn’t design and can’t escape. And when people read his words and think “yes, exactly, someone finally gets it,” they’re not endorsing terrorism. They’re recognising a truth about their own experience.

The danger is what comes next. Do they take that recognition and channel it into building something better? Or do they slide into his nihilism, his rage, his certainty that the only solution is destruction?

This is why we can’t just dismiss the manifesto as the ravings of a madman. It’s not. It’s a coherent, carefully argued critique that happens to have been written by someone who did terrible things. And pretending it has no value just because of who wrote it means we miss the warning signs it contains.

Where We Go From Here

We’re living in the world Kaczynski predicted. Not completely – he was wrong about plenty – but enough that reading his manifesto in 2025 feels like finding a note from the past warning us about exactly where we’ve ended up.

We’re psychologically dependent on technologies we don’t control. We’ve traded autonomy for convenience. We’re anxious, depressed, and alienated in record numbers. The power is concentrated in the hands of a few massive corporations. And we keep building systems that make all of this worse because the competitive pressure to do so is overwhelming.

So what now?

I don’t have a neat answer. I don’t think anyone does. But I know what doesn’t work: pretending everything’s fine, or giving in to despair and nihilism, or deciding that because one man resorted to violence, his warnings must be invalid.

What might work: actually taking the critique seriously. Demanding that technology serve human flourishing rather than just efficiency and profit. Building regulations that distribute power more evenly. Teaching people to understand and question the systems they’re embedded in. Creating spaces – both physical and digital – where human autonomy isn’t constantly under assault.

And maybe, just maybe, recognising that every technological advance comes with trade-offs, and we have the right to negotiate those terms rather than just accepting whatever Silicon Valley decides to build next.

Kaczynski thought the system was too powerful to reform, that violence was the only language it would understand. He was wrong about that. But he was right that we’re in trouble. And the longer we ignore that, the more people will keep finding his manifesto and thinking: “Christ, he saw this coming.”

The question is whether we’ll do something about it before things get worse, or whether we’ll just keep scrolling, clicking, and telling ourselves we’re free while the cage gets smaller.

I know which option I’m hoping for.

But I’m not particularly optimistic.

Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham