Anti-Tech: The Ideas and Influence of the Unabomber

Anti-Tech explores the ideas and influence of a figure who terrorized America for nearly two decades: Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

From a cabin in Montana, Kaczynski waged a seventeen-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured twenty-three. From a prison cell, he spent the next twenty-seven years building a movement. His manifesto outsells Foucault, Freud, and Nietzsche. Ecofascists call him "Saint Ted." And a new generation of anti-tech radicals has revived his war against the modern world, torching cell towers, sending bombs to scientists, and plotting to take down the electric grid. Yet three decades after the Unabomber Manifesto was published in The Washington Post, almost no one has seriously studied it. Sean Fleming has—and what he finds upends nearly everything we think we know about the man in the cabin.

Delving into Kaczynski's journals, letters, and unpublished essays, Fleming reconstructs the Unabomber's intellectual world. The result is a portrait of a thinker far more disciplined than the "madman" of popular legend. Kaczynski was no mystic. He was a rogue social scientist who welded ideas from ethology and psychology into something new: a Darwinian critique of technology that attacks the modern world from inside the scientific worldview. Fleming calls this ideology bioprimitivism and tracks its mutations across the political spectrum and the globe. Kaczynski's enduring appeal, it turns out, is not in spite of his scientism, but because of it.

Rigorously researched and unsettling in its implications, Anti-Tech is at once an intellectual biography, a study of dangerous ideas, and a warning of the techlash to come.