Theodore Kaczynski, known infamously as the Unabomber, gained notoriety for his DIY mailbombing campaigns. Throughout the late 20th century, his handmade bombs killed three and injured 23, including many academics, business executives, and the prominent theorist of technology David Gelernter. Bent on radical opposition to the unchecked advance of revolutionary postindustrial innovation, which he believed threatened human dignity and autonomy, he was at last captured in 1996. Last summer, at age 81, Kaczynski took his own life in prison.
Beyond his trail of terror, Kaczynski left little behind but a lengthy manifesto, the 35,000-word “Industrial Society and Its Future,” and a 2008 follow-up, “Technological Slavery.” A brilliant mathematics student and scholar before his turn to the dark side, Kaczynski’s critiques of technologized society have, over time, come to be seen as increasingly accurate. Now, amid growing fears that control of AI could swiftly become excessive or inadequate, even some experts in and around the tech industry are wrestling with Kaczynski’s warnings — and his legacy.
Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, joined James Poulos to reconsider where and why Kaczynski went so wrong yet proved so prescient.
Critical of self-styled optimists measuring progress today by our comparably high living standards, Hammond acknowledges the risks of rapid technological innovation. But Kaczynski’s mistake, he argues, was to believe we could force ourselves backward into a great regress. “I’ll be the first person to go up against those degrowthers and population bomb people,” said Hammon, “to say no, you were just totally wrong … there are still many degrees of freedom in how we design … and what futures we choose.”
To hear more of what Samuel Hammond has to say about the Unabomber, the secret globalist and Marxist agendas, and more, watch the full episode of “Zero Hour with James Poulos.”
America was convinced tech would complete our mastery of the world. Instead, we got catastrophe — constant crises from politics and the economy down to the spiritual fiber of our being. Time’s up for the era we grew up in. How do we pick ourselves up and begin again? To find out, visionary author and media theorist James Poulos cracks open the minds — and hearts — of today’s top figures in politics, tech, ideas, and culture on “Zero Hour” on BlazeTV.
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