*Why a series on the Unabomber now?*The same week Theodore Kaczynski pled guilty to murdering three people and injuring many more, the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted in Washington. Even without a sensational Presidential crisis, it's doubtful that Kaczynski would have captured the media's imagination for long after the conclusion of his case. But with the emergence of a scandal involving sex, the US president, and a young intern, the story of the reclusive bearded murderer, bombs, and technology's value vanished almost instantly.
But the Unabomber and his story are still stuck in my mind and in my imagination.
Kaczynski, in his murderous rampage and rambling manifesto, hoped to raise issues about technology and its complex, controversial role in all of our lives. He intended for his trial to be a forum, even to the extent that he was prepared to face the death penalty rather than declare his ideas and writings to be the work of an insane person.
The reporters covering the trial were never interested in that debate, however, and once he struck a deal with the government, he vanished completely from sight, probably never to reappear. It's hard to picture him chatting with Barbara or Diane anytime soon. Enough time has passed since his arrest and conviction to give us some perspective on him and on the issues he so rashly tried to raise.
I wrote this series haunted by the idea that the Unabomber business was unfinished, both for the sake of his victims and for the many issues raised by his dreadful work. This is as good a place as any to bring some of it into focus, especially since that isn't likely to happen anywhere in our so-called mainstream media.
In 1995, in an astounding act of media manipulation, a serial killer identifying himself as a member of an anarchist faction called the Freedom Club prevailed upon The Washington Post and The New York Times to publish a 35,000-word essay, "Industrial Society and Its Future," that came to be known as the Unabomber Manifesto. If the papers published his tract, he promised in an accompanying letter, he wouldn't kill any more.
From his manifesto, and from the extended murderous rampage that preceded it - three dead, more than a score injured - it's clear that Theodore Kaczynski hoped that his campaign of terror would finally focus attention on the subject he cares most about: the damage that technology causes.
As rambling and convoluted as the manifesto is, its message is simple - the world is being destroyed, and technology is the means with which human beings are destroying it. Technology and the people who create, advance, and use it must, therefore, be halted by any means, including maiming and murder.
"Many people understand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude towards it because they think it is inevitable. But we don't think it is inevitable," the manifesto says. "We think it can be stopped."
Despite his isolation, in some ways Kaczynski had his finger on the public pulse: there is enormous unease about technology. We sometimes seem obsessed with technology's manifestations - from fertility drugs and cloning to pornography on the Internet. But Kaczynski was wrong if he thought we wanted to talk about it.
Sandwiched between those other media explosions, the death of Diana Spencer and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the captured Unabomber was on the public stage only briefly. Though he'd succeeded brilliantly for years in avoiding arrest and punishment for the pain and suffering he'd caused, he stumbled badly when it came to grasping the ethos of modern media and the American public's short attention span.
In the journals FBI agents found in his tiny Montana cabin, modeled after Thoreau's, Kaczynski wrote of his fear that his campaign against the technologically driven industrial society would ultimately be trivialized as the work of a "sickie." Had Kaczynski known as much about media as he did about bombs, he would have seen that such a fate was inevitable. It was the chase, not the message, that fascinated the press.
Kaczynski was so determined to avoid being marginalized that he pled guilty to murder without any chance of parole, rather than pursue the only option that might conceivably have freed him one day - an insanity defense.
But when Kaczynski finally agreed to the plea, eliminating the need to stand trial, he left not only the stage but our consciousness. He never did get to make the argument begun in the manifesto, to launch the national debate about technology he desperately wanted to have - and that we sorely need.
Ironically, that may have been the most severe penalty our society could have inflicted. Kaczynski seems certain to languish in near-obscurity for the rest of his life as our culture rushes forward, scoring one technological breakthrough after another, spared the tedious business of having to ponder their consequences.
We can't seem to get comfortable with technology. Movies from The Net to Terminator to Dark City portray bleak futures ruined by technology and its evil uses.
One book and article after another warns that our society is becoming de-civilized, our culture demeaned, our children endangered by the Information Revolution. "The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown," the Unabomber wrote in one passage. Plenty of anxious parents, uneasy academics, and moral guardians in Washington share that sentiment.
Technology's impact on any one of these issues - medicine, media, family, education, environment, economy - could occupy platoons of scientists, ethicists, and historians for months. Kaczynski was ready to engage them all.
In his monomania, he thought his existence in itself might be important enough to spark such discussions. Once he was in custody, however, he was not nearly glamorous enough to excite journalists for long.
One of Kaczynski's victims even argued that to permit the Unabomber to argue about technology was to reward him for homicide.
In his book Drawing Life, Surviving the Unabomber, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter, permanently injured by one of Kaczynski's bombs, bitterly criticized the media's portrayal of the Unabomber as in any way thoughtful or interesting.
He cited People magazine's naming Kaczynski as one of "the most fascinating people" of l996, and a newspaper's running Gelernter's and Kaczynski's views on technology side by side, as examples of Unabomber coverage pushing beyond obnoxiousness into the realm of evil.
In his book, Gelernter complained that "the payoff this particular criminal sought (and it's the same with other terrorists) was attention for his ideas, in hopes of our dignifying them with serious discussion. It was up to us: Would crime pay or not? We thought it over and decided yes."
From his perspective, Gelernter's views are entirely understandable. But they leave us without the means or opportunity to focus on technology and whether it is a good witch or a bad witch, or both.
As political scientist Langdon Winner reminds us in Autonomous Technology, from medieval times to the rise of the Industrial Revolution to the Hiroshima bombing, technology has always provoked puzzlement, disorientation, and fear. In England, the Luddites took up arms to try to halt the impact of the onrushing Industrial Revolution.
In a much less rational way, Kaczynski saw himself as taking up arms to stop technology and what he deemed its devastating effect on human and ecological life. It's understandable why the bomber's victim might not care to kick around the rationale behind these murderous assaults. But the question for the rest of us, is who, precisely, will?
Next: Kaczynski as both Dr. Frankenstein and monster.
Related links:
David Gelernter interviewed on HotSeat
HotWired's Unabomber Special Report
Katz's Netizen column after Kaczynski's capture
This article originally appeared in HotWired.
