The Unabomber's Three Dystopias

Introduction. Ted Kaczynski, a math genius, hated modern technology so much that he sent mail bombs to computer store owners and airline CEOs. He did this from a mountain hut. FBI nailed him after 20 years. Here are the interesting and disturbing ideas of a truly singular man 👇

In the past, there was a ceiling to how much a society could bend a person against his will: “When the limit of human endurance has been passed, things start going wrong: crime, corruption, evasion of work, depression, an elevated death rate…the society breaks down.”

But today, antidepressants dilute our rightful frustration at the modern world, people’s attention spans are destroyed via screens, and the surveillance state takes care of any rebellion that does burst out into the streets.

Ted Kaczynski’s dystopia: “Individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large organizations armed with super-technology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for manipulating people, besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion.”

Kaczynski lays out 3 future scenarios. Dystopia 1: Machines become smart enough to run civilization; humans turn complacent. The danger is that the human race gets so dependent on the machines that “it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions."

Second dystopian possibility: A tiny elite controls tech and unleashes Brave New World on everyone else. Kaczynski: “Life will be so purposeless that people will…be biologically or psychologically engineered to make them sublimate their drive for power into some harmless hobby.”

Third dystopian possibility: Most people become jobless and live off welfare because they can’t “acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves useful.” The cognitive elite will also need to become “reliable, conforming and docile” to stay employed.

The alternative to our civilization is nature, not some doomed utopia: “It’s not necessary for the sake of nature to set up some chimerical utopia or a new kind of social order. Nature takes care of itself: It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before humans."

Kaczynski’s on how our bodies and brains aren’t built for this era: “We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved.”

Modern life steals your sense of agency: “Primitive man, threatened by a fierce animal, can fight in self-defense…the modern individual is threatened by many things against which he is helpless: nuclear accidents, carcinogens in food, increasing taxes.”