Getting Tedpilled about the Industrial Revolution

The NY Times published the unabomber manifesto in 1996, and now published a long favorable article about it. It is almost as if it took them 29 years to read it.

It is funny how the manifesto was dismissed as the crackpot essay of a madman at the time. Now it is considered a brilliant critique of modern society.

When we spoke recently, Fitzgerald recited one of Kaczynski’s numbered paragraphs, 173, which had been on his mind in light of artificial intelligence’s rapid advance: “If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave.”

And there was Paragraph 92, which Fitzgerald remembered, and reconsidered, amid the Covid-19 vaccine mandates of which he was personally skeptical. “Thus science marches on blindly,” Kaczynski wrote, “without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.”

“You know what?” Fitzgerald said to himself. “Old Ted was maybe onto something here.”

Online, there is a name for this experience: 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. To encounter Paragraph 156 (“new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology”) after asking Alexa to order new socks and think, That’s not so crazy.

Nobody is endorsing what the Unabomber did, but he did get his message out.

A lot of people assumed that the unabomber was a leftist, because he was an environmentalist activist. Maybe so, but his manifesto had stinging criticisms of leftism.

He got caught when his brother turned him into the FBI, and collected the million dollar reward.