The Unabomber takes on the Internet
The serial killer, imprisoned since 1996, has never sent or received an email or seen Facebook. But he has lots to say about technology.
By Holly Bailey
January 28, 2016 12:14 AM
Yahoo News
(Photo Illustration: Yahoo News, photo: AP)
From his prison cell, Ted Kaczynski — the “Unabomber,” who terrified the nation in the 1980s and early 1990s — has carried on a remarkable correspondence with thousands of people all over the world. As the 20th anniversary of his arrest approaches, Yahoo News is publishing a series of articles based on his letters and other writings, housed in an archive at the University of Michigan. They shed unprecedented light on the mind of Kaczynski — genius, madman and murderer.
They had wanted to engage with a “deep thinker.” But when a thick envelope showed up one October morning six years ago bearing the return address of the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., professor Maureen Kendrick Murphy and her students at Huntingdon College, a small liberal arts school in Montgomery, Ala., were at first too scared to pick it up, much less open it.
It was a letter from Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.
A few weeks earlier, Murphy, on behalf of her class, had written to Kaczynski as part of a critical-thinking course in which the students, all freshmen in their first weeks of college, studied the work of public figures, then wrote to invite them to expand on their ideas. They had written to 14 people, including President Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, future Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and the rapper Eminem.
And then, at one student’s suggestion, they reached out to Kaczynski. The class read “Industrial Society and Its Future,” the 1995 anti-technology treatise commonly known as the Unabomber manifesto, and sent a letter to the convicted bomber soliciting his thoughts on how the expanding use of the Internet had affected personal freedom.
“Never in the world did I expect him to answer us,” Murphy recalled in a recent interview. “I couldn’t believe it. Why us? Why would he respond to us?”
CLICK FOR SLIDESHOW: Materials used by the FBI in its search of Ted Kaczynski's mountain cabin in Lincoln, Mont., sit outside the cabin's door, April ...
Materials used by the FBI in its search of Ted Kaczynski's mountain cabin in Lincoln, Mont., sit outside the cabin's …
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But Kaczynski had replied almost immediately — in a handwritten 12-page letter that included meticulous footnotes and used vocabulary that sent Murphy and her students scrambling for a dictionary. Now on file in Kaczynski’s personal papers at the University of Michigan, the letter was the beginning of an exchange that offers a unique glimpse into the Unabomber’s life as a man who continues to have many opinions on the impact of technology but, occupying the time capsule of a prison cell, has had almost no direct experience with it.
Kaczynski was living in a remote Montana cabin without electricity or running water when he was arrested in 1996, at the dawn of the Internet era. Now held on the most secure unit at ADX in Colorado, the toughest prison in the country, he is on lockdown 23 hours a day with access only to a television, which he refuses to watch. He has never used the Internet and knows only what he reads about in books, newspapers and letters.
But that hasn’t stopped him from writing a new book — an update of his 1995 manifesto with expanded arguments and more current references to modern technology. It’s unclear where the project stands. As of last fall, he was still seeking a publisher.
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One of Kaczynski’s arguments in his original 1995 manifesto was that the expansion of industrial society was giving a false sense of freedom to individuals, because “large organizations” could compromise people’s autonomy. The shift toward computers, he argued, was putting humanity at risk of losing its self-sufficiency, or of forgetting how to think altogether.
Writing from his prison cell 15 years later, Kaczynski hadn’t dramatically changed his viewpoint when Murphy and her class came calling. The Internet had increased “the individual’s freedom of expression in the sense that it greatly enhances his or her ability to send and receive ideas and information,” Kaczynski wrote in his first letter to Murphy, in September 2010.
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Poster Comment:
A look at the inner workings of the mind of Ted Kaczynski.