The Sunday Read: ‘The Strange, Post-Partisan Popularity of the Unabomber’

《周日阅读》: 《无党派异见者——炸弹客的奇异人气》

The Daily

新闻

2025-04-27

19 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

Online, there is a name for the experience of finding sympathy with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber: Tedpilling. To be Tedpilled means to read Paragraph 1 of Kaczynski’s manifesto, its assertion that the mad dash of technological advancement since the Industrial Revolution has “made life unfulfilling,” “led to widespread psychological suffering” and “inflicted severe damage on the natural world,” and think, Well, sure. Since Kaczynski’s death by suicide in a federal prison in North Carolina nearly two years ago, the taboo surrounding the figure has been weakening. This is especially true on the right, where pessimism and paranoia about technology — largely the province of the left not long ago — have spread on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic and efforts to police speech on social media platforms.
更多

单集文稿 ...

  • I'm Dane Brugler.

  • I cover the NFL draft for The Athletic.

  • Our draft guide picked up the name The Beast because of the crazy amount of information that's included.

  • I'm looking at thousands of players, putting together hundreds of scouting reports.

  • I've been covering this year's draft since last year's draft.

  • There is a lot in The Beast that you simply can't find anywhere else.

  • This is the kind of in-depth, unique journalism you get from The Athletic and The New York Times.

  • You can subscribe at nytimes.com slash subscribe.

  • My name's Charles Homans, and I'm a reporter for The New York Times.

  • I was a teenager when the Unabomber Manifesto was first published nearly 30 years ago in 1995.

  • In the manifesto, which was titled Industrial Society and Its Future,

  • Ted Kaczynski shared a vision of technology as not a series of machines and devices that made our lives easier,

  • but actually a system that had its own priorities and intentions that were not fully aligned with the human species.

  • This, of course,

  • was way before most Americans had really engaged in any serious way with the Internet,

  • let alone social media or smartphones, which didn't exist.

  • You know,

  • the time interest in the manifesto mostly came from environmental radicals who were somewhat sympathetic to Kaczynski and futurists who actually agreed with him on a lot of where technology was headed,

  • though they thought that that was good.

  • And later on, he developed a following among right-wing extremists.