Three cool things to know about "Manhunt: Unabomber"

Paul Bettany as Ted Kaczynski

Tonight the Discovery Channel kicks off Manhunt: Unabomber, an eight-part miniseries on the FBI's search for Ted Kaczynski, the man who killed three people and injured 23 others in a years-long campaign aimed at sparking a revolution against technology. In the course of researching my book, Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology, I studied Kaczynski's campaign and the ideas that drove it. Here are three points to keep in mind if you're tuning in tonight's show.

1. Few would argue that Ted Kaczynski suffered from some serious mental issues. One of them was a fundamental contradiction between his personality and his mission: He was an avowed enemy of technology whose psychological orientation was decidedly technocratic. Thus he pursued his revolutionary goals in ways that were far more consistent with the character of technology than with the natural freedoms he killed to protect.

It's important to remember that, by training and profession, Kaczynski is a mathematician, not a poet. He revered and presumably still reveres logic and rationality, explicitly rejecting the more intuitive perceptions that commonly inspire artists, nature lovers, and other romantics. Ted's brother David told the FBI that he and Ted had argued for years over the sufficiency of science versus the utility of art. David argued that there are “mystic unknowables” that can’t be quantified or understood but that add immeasurably to the depth and meaning of existence. Ted would have none of it. He based his life, he said, on “the Verifiability Criterion.” Facts are all that matter, and a fact is valid only insofar as it can be proved true or false.

One clue that caused David Kaczynski to conclude that Ted had written "Industrial Society and its Future" (aka "the Unabomber Manifesto") was its use of the phrase "cool-headed logicians." David knew that was how Ted often described the superior mindset of scientists. In the manifesto Kaczynski compares their analytical rigor with the ineffectual whining of leftist intellectuals, who Kaczynski says are drawn to "orgiastic" art that encourages "throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment." (See sections 17-18 in "Industrial Society and its Future.")

The precautions Kaczynski took to avoid discovery and capture are evidence of his technocratic faith in measurement and precision. Notebooks recovered from his cabin in Montana revealed a four-grade system to classify the sensitivity of his writings and a ten-grade system to classify disposal methods for potentially incriminating waste materials. Detailed maps marked the locations of supply stashes hidden in the hills, should escape into the wilderness become necessary. Diagrams showed where in relation to the surrounding brush the stashes were buried and how deeply, measured to the inch; quantities and types of flour and other foodstuffs stored, calculated to the ounce; inventories of ammunition rounds, sorted by caliber, counted to the grain. 

It took a certain amount of technical skill to construct the bombs Kaczynski used to kill, of course, but his dedication to the task manifested a true technocratic fervor. (And yes, "cool-headed logicians" notwithstanding, technocrats can be fervent in their pursuit of rationality, which is one of the reasons their rationality so often goes off the rails.) In their hunt for the Unabomber, the FBI's profilers noted that the man they sought had assembled, disassembled, and reassembled his bombs so obsessively he must have gotten “some sort of bizarre sexual satisfaction” from the labor.

 

Kaczynski's mug shot

2. Many readers of Kaczynski's manifesto have found themselves surprised by the perspicacity of its arguments. These include the director and showrunner of tonight's miniseries, Greg Yaitanes. "It's incredibly relevant to today," Yaitanes told the New York Times, adding that the manifesto predicts "exactly" where we've come in the twenty-two years since its publication.

Another admirer of the manifesto is the technology enthusiast Kevin Kelly, who devotes more than ten pages in his book What Technology Wants to Kaczynski's ideas. "I have read almost every book on the philosophy and theory of technology and interviewed many of the wisest people pondering the nature of this force," Kelly wrote. "So I was utterly dismayed to discover that one of the most astute analyses of the technium [Kelly's word for technology as a systemic phenomenon] was written by a mentally ill mass murderer and terrorist."

For one who claims such an encyclopedic knowledge of the philosophy of technology, it's odd that Kelly is unaware of the philosopher who most profoundly influenced Kaczynski, Jacques Ellul. A French sociologist and theologian who died in 1994, Ellul's theories aren't popular among academics in the field, but he's far from obscure. David Kaczynski has said that Ted considered Ellul's masterpiece, The Technological Society, his "bible." In his biography of Kaczynski, Harvard and the Unabomber, Alston Chase quotes Kaczynski as claiming (immodestly) that upon reading the book he immediately recognized "someone who is saying what I have already been thinking." Chase says that Kaczynski corresponded with Ellul, although he provides no documentation of that correspondence.

Kevin Kelly finds common ground with Kaczynski in the latter's insistence that technology is a unified entity that behaves autonomously and aggressively. "It is not mere hardware," Kelly writes; "rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires." That's a reasonable summary of the major themes in Ellul's The Technological Society, themes Kaczynski echoes in his manifesto.

(Jacques Ellul has been the strongest influence on my own study of technology; I wrote a masters thesis based on his thought and he is cited frequently in my book. For descriptions of his philosophy and his reputation, see my profile of him in the Boston Globe, "Jacques Ellul, technology doomsdayer before his time," and my blog essay, "The Unabomber's Favorite Philosopher (and Mine)." Both pieces make clear that there is nothing in Ellul's work that endorses violence of any kind, much less murder.)

  

Kaczynski's capture as depicted in Manhunt: Unabomber

 

3. In their New York Times interview, the producers of Manhunt: Unabomber say that they wanted to avoid portraying Kaczynski as a "monster." Actually, he is, or was, a monster, but I think the point they're making is that there are reasons he turned out that way, reasons the miniseries will explore.  

Dramatic television isn't very good at exploring ideas, so I'll be surprised if Manhunt goes into Kaczynski's theories of technology in any depth. However, the idea that he isn't a monster resonates with a notion that gained surprising traction at the time he was arrested: that a lot of people in the culture, perhaps a majority, sympathized to some degree with his antipathy toward technology. As the journalist Robert Wright said in an essay for Time magazine: there's "a little bit of the Unabomber in most of us." An essay by Daniel J. Kevles in The New Yorker said the same thing, in almost the same words, under a headline reading “E Pluribus Unabomber.”

In his book, Alston Chase argues that "Industrial Society and its Future" failed to arouse as much attention as it might have not because its ideas were so foreign but because they were so familiar. Except for its call to violence, Chase says, the manifesto’s message was “ordinary and unoriginal." Its concerns about technology, he said, "embodied the conventional wisdom of the entire country...It was nothing less than the American creed.”

Chase's book is a fine work overall, but that comment seems a huge overstatement. He goes on to cite a long list of popular books that represent the anti-technological consensus he feels exists, ranging from Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance and E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful to Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature. The same message shows up repeatedly, he adds, in contemporary children’s stories and textbooks, reflecting the fact that Americans have long been “gripped by fear of, or revulsion against, the very technology the Unabomber now warned about: genetic engineering, pollution, pesticides, and herbicides, brainwashing of children by educators and consumers by advertising; mind control, cars, SUVs, power plants and power lines, radioactive waste; big government, big business; computer threats to privacy; materialism, television, cities, suburbs, cell phones, ozone depletion, global warming; and many other aspects of modern life."

That’s actually a more comprehensive list of technological worries than Kaczynski provided in his manifesto, but I doubt he'd quarrel with it. The question remains, though: Is Chase correct that these concerns place the manifesto squarely in the mainstream of American thought?

As I argue in my book, Chase is half right. Polls consistently find that Americans are both exhilarated by the latest developments in technology and fearful of their effects. Typically exhilaration has been in the lead, but with the influences of science and technology becoming increasingly powerful and increasingly disruptive, it's quite possible fear may be gaining. In any event, it's safe to say that technology produces—and has historically produced—a deep-seated ambivalence in the national psyche. Kaczynski wrote contemptuously of Americans' inconsistencies toward technology: They want, he said, to have their cake and eat it, too. To which Americans could reasonably reply, Sure we do. Who wouldn't?

I think Kaczynski is right, though, that a degree of fatalism underlies our ambivalence. As he wrote in his manifesto, "The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. Many people understand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is inevitable." 

Ted vowed that he, for one, would not go quietly, and he hoped that at least some of us would join him. Despite our reservations, most of us have, so far, declined the invitation. 

 ©Doug Hill, 2017

On the Attractions of (Technological) Disembodiment

What is the fascination so many technophiles seem to have for disembodiment?

Repeatedly those enthralled with the powers of technology have issued grandiloquent pronouncements that the bounds of physicality have been or soon will be overcome. How, exactly, this liberation is achieved isn’t explained. Paradoxically, it’s precisely this disconnection from the tangible that the technophiles believe gives them unprecedented abilities to control and manipulate the physical world. 

The startling advances of the Industrial Revolution inspired many to believe that technology would be the vehicle for fulfilling our long-held dream of corporal escape. Oswald Spengler took note of this in 1923, in “The Machine” chapter of “The Decline of the West.” “The intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and Time,” he wrote. “An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars.”

Today these ineffable longings emanate most conspicuously from Silicon Valley and other hotbeds of technological rapture, where they’re grounded (if you’ll pardon the expression) in information theory, which in turn is the cornerstone of the secular religion Jaron Lanier calls “cybernetic totalism."

Andrew McAfee

Most recently – last Thursday, in fact – I heard the disembodiment trope expressed yet again, in a webcast on the Internet of Things, sponsored by MIT Technology Review. One of the participants was Andrew McAfee, co-director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and co-author of Race Against the Machine and The Second Machine Age. One of the principal consequences of the IoT, McAfee contended, is “dematerialization.” “We are substituting code and data for atoms, for materials out there in the world,” he said, twice.  As evidence he cited energy-efficient buildings and our increasing ability to produce more food using less land. I found this puzzling because buildings and crops are demonstrably physical entities. Surely the end result of efficiency isn’t evaporation. It also seems odd that dematerialization would be envisioned as an outgrowth of an internet of things.

Early testimony to the growing influence of cybernetic totalism (not yet named by Lanier) was offered by the technology enthusiast Kevin Kelly, who said in a 2005 online debate with the technology skeptic Stephen Talbott that we are on “a collective journey toward the belief that the universe is a computer.” Already, he said, the thinking was widespread that thinking itself is a type of computation, that DNA is “software” and evolution “an algorithmic process.” Galaxies, molecules, mathematics, emotions, rain forests and genes can all be described, Kelly continued, in computational terms. “If we keep going we will quietly arrive at the notion that all materials and all processes are actually forms of computation. Our final destination is a view that the atoms of the universe are fundamentally intangible bits.”

Kevin Kelly

Note the huge leap in logic in that last sentence. Suddenly the atoms of the universe become intangible bits. Why intangible? And how intangible? The bits of information passed around by computers, or the strands of DNA in our chromosomes, may seem discarnate, but they’re not. They’re small and impossible to see with the naked eye, but they’re real. Spooky action at a distance is a phenomenon of the subatomic world; in more quotidian realms, cause and effect aren’t that mysterious. Kelly went on to call information theory a “universal metaphor,” but added that whether it’s a metaphor or a reality doesn’t matter: “the metaphor wins.” Most worshippers at the altar of information don’t bother with such distinctions.

An example is the manifesto issued (not so quietly) in 1994 by a group of high-profile, conservative tech pundits, Esther Dyson, Alvin Toffler, George Gilder and George Keyworth, a former science advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Their "Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” announced, in its first sentence: "The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter." This fustian rhetoric was more than matched two years later by John Perry Barlow, a hipster cowboy rancher and sometime lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Barlow addressed his "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” to the "Governments of the Industrial World," which he described as "weary giants of flesh and steel."

"On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone," Barlow wrote. "You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather…Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here…"

Oliver Wendell Holmes

As I say, the Industrial Revolution inspired a rash of such sentiments. In 1859, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed in an essay for the Atlantic Monthly that three technologies would free us from the surly bonds of Earth: the stereoscope, the daguerreotype and the photograph. Their introduction inaugurated, he declared "a new epoch in the history of human progress." In this new epoch the physical world could be reproduced so accurately that before long we might not need it anymore. "Form is henceforth divorced from matter," he wrote. …Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core.” 

It was the railroad that launched Ralph Waldo Emerson into what he called “the panoramic mode,” a transcendental state he’d been trying to achieve for most of his life. “Matter is phenomenal whilst men & trees & barns whiz by you as fast as the leaves of a dictionary," he wrote of his first train ride. "…The very permanence of matter seems compromised & oaks, fields, hills, hitherto esteemed symbols of stability, do absolutely dance by you.” Philosophers, too, noted a growing disengagement from terra firma as mechanization of the culture accelerated. Nietzsche wrote of the “weightlessness” of the times while Marx articulated what may be the defining perception of the modern era: "All that is solid melts into air."

Emerson, Nietzsche and Marx presumably recognized, if Holmes did not, that our arrival in the weightless, panoramic mode was only a metaphor, that everything solid hadn’t actually melted into air. It’s not clear that today’s cybernetic totalists agree.

During the MIT webcast last Thursday, Andrew McAfee described Uber in glowing terms as a paragon of where the IoT is taking us because it provides a full-service “platform” rather than simply a service or a product. The dematerialization part apparently applies because Uber has established itself as a global transportation company by assembling an app rather than a fleet of cars, because it collects terabytes of data to track every aspect of its business and because you don’t have to pay its drivers in cash. It all adds up to a uniquely satisfying customer “experience.”  Still, I’m not sure this represents a substitution of code and data for atoms. As far as I know the Uber experience still involves asphalt, stop lights, pedestrian crossings and potholes.  

The historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy wrote in 1936 that although the “otherworldly” doctrines of the great religious and philosophical teachers have consistently held that there are realities superior to those of everyday existence, when it comes down to how we live, most people “have never been able to deny to the things disclosed by the senses a genuine and imposing and highly important realness.” Those words may not be as true today as they were when Lovejoy wrote them; the readiness of the masses to surrender their grasp on reality seems to have increased roughly in parallel with the eagerness of the digerati to declare it defunct. Nonetheless, I’m sticking with the wisdom of one of our great apostles of embodiment, Madonna. “We are living in a material world,” she said, “and I am a material girl.”

Note: This essay is based in part on my book, "Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology," forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press. 

©Doug Hill 2016

Is the Future as Grim as Science Fiction Says It Is?

Looking into the future (Viggo Mortensen in “The Road”)

It’s striking the degree to which our hopes and fears for the future are tied up with technology. It’s as if we all tacitly agree that, for better or for worse, where we’re headed depends on our machines.

Therein, of course, lies the rub. Is the future toward which technology carries us for better, or for worse?

Two writers have weighed in on this question recently, both arguing that the answer should be  “better,” but that far too many people are telling us the answer is “worse.”

One is Michael Solana, who posted an essay on Wired.com a few days ago under the headline, “Stop Writing Dystopian Sci-Fi – It’s Making Us All Fear Technology.” Solana’s views echoed those expressed a few weeks earlier by Kevin Kelly, who posted an essay on Medium entitled, “A Desirable-Future Haiku: The coming hundred years, in one hundred words.”  

Kelly’s essay stemmed from a challenge he’d made on Twitter, offering a $100 prize to the person who best described, in no more than a hundred words, a technological future Kelly would want to live in. In addition to presenting the submissions received and naming a winner, Kelly's Medium essay included his own vision, which pictured a world laden with GMOs, nuclear power, robots, ubiquitous computer tracking, the quantitative monitoring of nature (whatever that means), and “mandatory” techno literacy. 

All of which caused me to appreciate that one man’s utopia is another man’s…you get the idea.

"Metropolis"

Both essays are, in my opinion, pretty silly, but the issues they address are worth responding to. A few points, then, to mention:

1. Kelly and Solana both argue that our visions of the future are being clouded by the relentless gloominess of current science fiction, in novels and in film. You can't deny that the fictional futures we’re getting these days are consistently downbeat. But that’s only in fiction.

What Kelly and Solana fail to acknowledge is that our media regularly expose us to the views of technological enthusiasts who present wildly utopian visions of the future as being completely plausible, in reality. Does the name Ray Kurzweil ring a bell? Other prominent advocates of technological deliverance include Kurzweil’s bosses at Google, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen. 

2. To wish for more optimistic science fiction ignores the fact that fiction thrives on conflict. Utopian visions of a technological Eden aren’t going to be very compelling. Murder stories play a disproportionate role in popular fiction for the same reason. Kelly acknowledges this, as do some of those who commented on Solana’s piece.

"Elysium"

3. Solana errs most egregiously when he fails to acknowledge that the purveyors of dystopia could be right. Here, too, Kelly is more forthcoming. “At the moment we have no shared positive vision of tomorrow,” he writes. 

We are unable to imagine it. I will be quick to add: that includes me. I too have difficulty in describing an exciting future for all of society in 100 years that seems plausible given what is happening today. I can imagine singular threads of the future rolling out positive — massive, continuous, cheap, real time connection between all humans, or total genetic control over crop plants, or synthetic solar fusion energy — but it is hard to see how all these threads weave into the other threads of climate change, population decrease, habitat loss, human attention overload, robot replacement, and accelerating AI.

This is a surprising, even shocking admission from a writer who has long been one of our most prominent technological enthusiasts. This is not to say that Kelly has suddenly reversed himself. The qualifications in his technophilic reveries have been gradually but discernibly increasing for years. Still, for a man who as recently as December, 2012, argued in a Wired cover story that we ought to celebrate rather than fear the replacement of jobs by automation (“Let the robots take the jobs,” he wrote, “and let them help us dream up new work that matters.”), this may well be Kelly’s most frankly ambivalent statement yet.

"The Matrix"

4. Qualifications notwithstanding, from my perspective there’s a strong element of wishful thinking in both Kelly’s and Solana’s pieces, especially given that both admit things aren’t going so great right now.

It’s hard to understand how anyone can recognize our present state of danger and disorder and at the same time fail to recognize the role technology has played in the creation of those conditions. Don’t they realize that enthusiasts have been promising for centuries that technology will save us? Does it make sense to dream of a future in which technology comes to our rescue when to a large extent technology got us where we are in the first place? 

We do our artists a disservice if we discount the futures they envision. Their scenarios aren’t made up out of whole cloth; rather they can be seen as logical extensions of conditions that currently exist. Artists also tend to be attuned to vibrations in the collective unconscious, and despite the fact that most of our fellow citizens appear to retain their faith in progress, there are also reasons to suspect their faith has been shaken. Everybody seems to be on edge, and I don't think an over-abundance of science fiction dystopias is the reason why. 

©Doug Hill, 2014