Ted Kaczynski and the Paradox of the Postwar Predicament
Reflections on 'The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet'
Truth often reveals itself as paradox. To grasp paradoxes, it follows, is to get closer to the truth.
The death of Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, on June 10, 2023 at a federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina presented a complex set of paradoxes. Not his death, per se, but the meaning of his life, which ended at a moment when the dangers of high-tech society—especially artificial intelligence—have become the topic of mainstream public discussion and debate.
Kaczynski was sentenced to life without parole in 1996 following his conviction for murders tied to a mail bombing campaign between 1978 and 1995. Following his death, many media outlets depicted Kaczynski as a “notorious, vengeful, reclusive” terrorist. However, others touched on the recently revived interest in Kaczynski’s thought. For example, The New York Times concludes its obituary with a discussion of the University of Michigan’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection, where Kaczynski’s prison letters are held:
According to New York magazine, Mr. Kaczynski’s papers became one of the collection’s most popular offerings. In an interview with the magazine, Julie Herrada, the collection’s curator, declined to describe the people so intrigued by Mr. Kaczynski that they visit the library to look through his archive. She said just one thing: “Nobody seems crazy.”
Paradox abounds and begs the question: What explains the fact that sane people are attracted to a man whom many consider the embodiment of insanity? Kaczynski risked the death penalty by refusing to plead insanity after his arrest. Rather than a sign of psychological illness, the Unabomber believed that direct confrontation with modern technocracy was a rational outgrowth of the philosophical and social critique outlined in his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future.
Kaczynski’s death and the paradoxes it presents prompted me to re-watch the 2003 film, The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet, by German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck. The film is less about the Unabomber as much as it is about the post-World War II social transformations in which he came of age. As Marx famously wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already.” Without denying his agency, The Net investigates the circumstances of post-World War II America within which Kaczynski’s critique of industrial society developed.
By framing the discussion of the Unabomber as a response to what we might call America’s postwar predicament, Dammbeck’s film gestures toward a panoply of paradoxes that shaped the way the Unabomber made history. We learn not simply what Kaczynski did but also why he did it. The why is not simply discussed in terms of individual psychological motive, but, rather, in response to pivotal developments in postwar intellectual history. The writing that follows began as a straightforward film review and then morphed into a freewheeling essay. I will use some of the paradoxes presented in The Net as a jumping off point to explore a range of broader political, philosophical, and technological issues surrounding the Unabomber and postwar America.
Hippies and Techies
The Net investigates a series of paradoxes to generate the questions which animate its circuitous trajectory through the technological and cultural landscape of postwar America. One key question the film seeks to answer is the following: “What brings computers, LSD, and hippies together?” To get closer to an answer, Dammbeck interviews Stewart Brand, hippie icon and founder of the Bay Area-based Whole Earth Catalog, a highly influential countercultural periodical. While the Catalog was only published consistently for three years between 1968 and 1971 and intermittently thereafter, The New Yorker reports that it “garnered a cult following that included founders of Airbnb and Stripe and also early employees of Facebook.”
How come these techies were drawn to the work of a hippie like Brand? Brand’s candid commentary in the film indicates that there was a division within the 1960s counterculture between technological pessimists and optimists. While both camps were concerned with self-sufficiency, the decentralization of knowledge, and the emergence of new social relationships, they did not agree on the role of technology in achieving these idealistic ends. A goat in each backyard or a personal computer in every home? The visions, though both informed by the utopian imaginary of the 1960s hippie movement, looked radically different in practice.
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The Net depicts Brand as the central figure in the techno-optimist camp which ultimately emerged victorious in its struggle with the Luddite wing of the hippie movement. Brand represents himself as an “alternative cyberneticist,” a reference to Norbert Wiener’s midcentury manifesto, Cybernetics, or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cybernetics is a notoriously slippery concept with a wide variety of definitions. That said, most definitions revolve around concepts like control, communication, information, systems, efficiency, and feedback. Mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov’s definition of cybernetics as “a science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control” gets to the heart of the cybernetic worldview.
Wiener, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was ensconced in the ivory tower where the abstract ideas of cybernetics were developed. The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics held in New York City between 1946 and 1960 helped popularize cybernetic thinking among a broad range of academics from multiple fields and disciplines. But The Net suggests that it took Brand—with his existing reputation among “Merry Pranksters, communards, [and] hippies”—to connect these late-1960s burnouts to the burgeoning community of “hackers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and futurists” congregating in the Bay Area.
In 1985, Brand formed the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (better known as the WELL) alongside Larry Brilliant, a medical doctor whose role in the global public health establishment I have discussed previously on Handful of Earth. The WELL was one of the first online communities and served the pivotal role of translating the early Internet—which Dammbeck’s film traces back to a Cold War U.S. Defense Department project called ARPANET in the 1970s—to a broader audience. Brand fully embraced his techno-hippie identity (with an emphasis on the techno) in the 1990s when he become a consultant to the computer industry in Silicon Valley. Just as he repackaged the cold, calculated logic of cybernetics for acceptance within the hippie counterculture, The Net describes how Brand took the technology of the warmongers and marketed it to the peaceniks.
The upshot of Brand’s alternative cybernetics was a blurring of familiar 1960s political lines. By the post-Vietnam era in the late 1970s, it became difficult to discern who was a warmonger and who was a peacenik. Brand’s promotion of techno-optimism in the counterculture obscured the militaristic origins of computing technology in an effort to “reframe” (in classic Silicon Valley fashion) the existing technology for a new audience. By softening the antagonism between the dominant culture and the counterculture, Brand pioneered what is now a familiar phenomenon in the United States: the co-optation of yesterday’s counterculture into today’s dominant culture.
The Net tells a story of hippies and techies not as opposing forces in 1960s America but, rather, as allies whose values have mutually informed the cultural transformations of the subsequent decades. This paradoxical alliance was, in many ways, facilitated by Stewart Brand, whose social facility in hippie and techie milieus alike enabled him to serve as a bridge between two worlds.
As of 2018, Brand is “concerned about climate change but bullish on nuclear energy, urbanization, and genetic modification.” His current longtermist nonprofit organization, the Long Now Foundation, has garnered support from tech luminaries including Peter Norton, Pierre Omidyar, and Jeff Bezos. Brand’s current vision represents a fusion of the environmentalism of the 1960s hippie movement with the technocratic fantasies of the dominant postwar paradigm. The Net demonstrates that grasping this paradoxical alliance of hippies and techies is essential if we wish to understand the broader trajectory of the United States after World War II.
Possibility and Impossibility, Part 1: The Boomerang Effect and the Authoritarian Personality
The Net provides the following account of the cybernetic worldview: “Man now appears to be no more than an information-processing system, thought is data processing, and the brain is a machine made of flesh.” Upon watching the film for a second time, I began to understand that the development of this worldview was closely related to another paradox of the postwar predicament: possibility and impossibility.
What do I mean? With the rise of Nazism in Europe, the impossible was made possible. Though not mentioned in The Net, Martinican poet and revolutionary Aimé Césaire’s theory of “the boomerang effect of colonization” sets the stage well for the film’s investigation of American social science after Nazism. Césaire argued in his 1950s essay, Discourse on Colonialism, that Europeans had “tolerated…Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” In other words, Nazi Germany represented something that was supposed to be impossible: the application of colonial logic within Europe.
European intellectuals were irrevocably transformed in the wake of the Holocaust. The exiled Theodor Adorno of Frankfurt School fame was no exception. Known for his Marxist writings on music and culture, The Net chronicles Adorno’s move into the realm of political psychology after World War II when he co-authored a 1950 book entitled The Authoritarian Personality. The film identifies The Authoritarian Personality as a turning point in the political perspective of the postwar left. Instead of looking for revolutionary possibilities latent in the masses, Adorno and his colleagues focused a psychoanalytical gaze on their inherent potential for fascism.
This psychoanalytic view echoed the models of social psychologist Kurt Lewin, a member of the Macy Conferences, according to whom “new balances and values” must be created through “re-education and self-education.” To many readers today, this idea will sound familiar. The liberal disgust with "deplorables" and identitarian zeal for purification rituals can both trace at least part of their intellectual genealogy to Lewin's ideas and Adorno's book, among others.1 In each of these contemporary cases, the mass politics of the left are transformed into a psychological project to root out camouflaged fascist tendencies in the masses. If Césaire’s boomerang effect clarified the causal connection between colonialism and Nazism, Dammbeck’s interrogation of the intellectual reaction to the Holocaust helps us understand the trajectory of the Western left following World War II.
After the boomerang effect of colonization rendered the impossibility of fascism in Europe possible, the left intelligentsia began to find fascists lurking in every nook and cranny of American liberal democracy. The working class was no longer a revolutionary force that would lead the masses in the struggle against an exploitative and decadent ruling class. Rather, workers—now reframed as an assemblage of isolated neurotic individuals—were authoritarian personalities waiting in the wings, personalities to be re-educated and then self-re-educated through the methods of modern psychology.
Possibility and Impossibility, Part 2: Cybernetics and the New York Avant-Garde
The Authoritarian Personality was published at the same time as cybernetics was gaining traction as a novel means to predict and control human behavior in the political climate of the Cold War. As we have seen, the intellectual legacy of cyberneticist Norbert Wiener was reframed for the West Coast counterculture by Stewart Brand in the 1960s and 1970s. On the East Coast, The Net tells the story of how investment banker-cum-literary agent, John Brockman, popularized the cybernetic worldview in the artistic avant-garde.
After his short stint in the banking industry, Brockman became involved in the multimedia arts scene in New York City in the 1960s. This scene centered around Fluxus, an interdisciplinary community of composers, performers, poets, designers, and other artists based primarily in New York. In The Net, Brockman recalls that it was the experimental composer and Fluxus member, John Cage, who first gave him a copy of Wiener’s Cybernetics. He was hooked. By the 1980s, Brockman had entered the science and technology publishing industry, where his cyberneticist colleagues had already come to dominate. He, in turn, has come to dominate the industry, serving as a key gatekeeper for famous scientists who wish to share their ideas with a broader public.
Brockman epitomizes the cybernetic worldview during his interview in The Net. He declares: “Your brain isn’t like a computer, it is a computer, until the next thing comes along. Now you’re a neural net, or now you’re an information system.” Dammbeck adroitly connects Brockman’s cyberneticism back to the artistic zeitgeist of Fluxus and the 1960s New York avant-garde, which the narrator sums up with the following slogan: “Everything is possible. Reality can be altered at will. You are what you want to be.” What unites the seemingly oppositional worlds of art and science—what creates the interdisciplinary “Third Culture” that Brockman wrote about in the 1990s—is a shared rejection of objective reality. In the view of both movements, reality is infinitely flexible and can be bent to the will of its creator, be he artist or scientist.
While Brockman believed that literary thinkers had monopolized intellectual life in 1970s America, he still held tight to the magical power of narrative. Indeed, he conflates—or even substitutes—narrative for reality. You are the narrative, as Brockman would have it, “until the next thing comes along.” Brockman’s position has become all the more common in recent decades. As
writes at :“Woke” and other variants of postmodernism identify language and narrative as the central domain of human struggle and control of it as the essence of power. Indeed, with his subjectivist rejection of any objective truth, the postmodernist sees narrative as reality [my emphasis]. And if narrative—or abstract theory—is “truth,” then it is observable material reality that must be false, amenable to change by sheer will.
Though this paragraph was written in the context of recent discussions surrounding the professional-managerial class, the ideology it describes is nearly identical to Brockman’s cyberneticism. Indeed, one of the lessons from The Net is that postmodernism—in the sense that Lyons characterizes it—did not only emanate from the Francophile literary studies of the 1970s but also from the literary establishment’s self-declared enemy of the 1980s: the close-knit scientific and technological intelligentsia attached to Brockman’s publishing ventures. Thanks to Brockman, this group of thinkers began to drastically increase its representation among American public intellectuals from the 1980s onward.
Inspired by the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, The Net describes how Brockman fused the iconoclasm of artistic experimentalism with the postwar imperative of technological control. This was a world in which possibility and impossibility were not opposed but, rather, mutually constitutive. The possibility of bending reality to one’s will was enabled precisely by the impossibility of true human freedom in an increasingly technocratic society. To borrow philosopher Michel Clouscard’s pithy phrase, this was a world in which “everything is allowed, but nothing is possible.”
And everything was, indeed, allowed. Following the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein on federal charges for sex trafficking of minors, long-overdue investigative reporting revealed Brockman’s close association with the disgraced financier. This was not a passing or tangential association but, instead, a close partnership. Science and technology writer Evgeny Morozov—whose literary agent is John Brockman’s son, Max—suggests that the elder “Brockman was acting as Epstein’s PR man—his liaison with the world of scientists and intellectuals that Brockman had cultivated.” Lest this sound hyperbolic, Morozov reproduces emails he received from Brockman in 2013 in a New Republic article entitled “Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler.” Morozov’s conclusion from re-reading the emails in 2019? Brockman was “trying to capitalize” on Epstein’s “sexual escapades” in order “to recruit yet another useful idiot into Epstein’s network.”
Truth and Paranoia
But what of Ted Kaczynski? How does the paradox of his life relate to the paradoxes of the postwar predicament? To help answer this question, let us return to the film. The Net asks with reference to the Unabomber:
When does his flight from mathematics and logic become a flight into paranoia, as the media assume? Into paranoia like that of his fellow mathematician Kurt Gödel, who, with his "incompleteness theorem," posed one of the questions that cannot be answered and also reached a limit beyond which there was only paranoia...or truth.
The film then proceeds to explore the mind control experiments conducted by Harvard University psychologist Henry A. Murray between 1959 and 1962 as a part of the CIA’s MK-Ultra project. The Harvard experiments targeted “highly gifted male college students” who would be subjected to extreme forms of psychological stress by way of what Murray called “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks. Ted Kaczynski was one of the 22 Harvard undergraduates selected to participate in these experiments.
One 1990s U.S. government report notes that:
Because most of the MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then-Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, it is impossible to have a complete understanding of the more than 150 individually funded research projects sponsored by MKULTRA and the related CIA programs.
However, from the information available, NPR reports that MK-Ultra experiments included “psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD.”
Some commentators have explained the Unabomber’s violent post-academic proclivities with reference to the trauma he endured as a participant in Murray’s Harvard experiments. There is certainly something to such an explanation. However, this line of reasoning often plays into the dominant narrative of Kaczynski as a paranoid schizophrenic whose actions were devoid of rational thought or political meaning.
Though Kaczynski was undoubtedly harmed by Murray’s research, it does not follow that he was driven insane. Rather, the Unabomber’s participation in CIA mind control experiments provided him with first-hand knowledge of the inner workings of the American security state. Kaczynski’s intimate understanding of the dark side of America’s postwar prosperity brought him closer to the truth about America as a whole. It was from this understanding that he developed his critique of the secular religion of technology, a religion which had come to dominate the postwar America in which Kaczynski came of age.
Dammbeck’s film asserts that technocratic elites wished to transform “national citizens” into “world citizens” following World War II. Much of this project was couched in the lofty cosmopolitan language of the global postwar intelligentsia. Indeed, from the title alone, it seems plausible that one publication in which Murray’s work appeared, What Can the Social Sciences Contribute to Peace?, could have come out of a Soviet press. But Murray’s florid facade was stripped away by the Harvard mind control experiments. Kaczynski’s role as human guinea pig for this research ensured that he would be immune to the global ruling class ploy to disguise its technocratic agenda in what Césaire called “pseudo-humanism.”
For Césaire, only a “sick civilization” could peddle a pseudo-humanism like Murray’s. Murray spoke of a “harmonious world community,” “science for the development of man,” and “spiritual good for all men and women of this earth.” At the same time, he was carrying out CIA-sponsored torture of young men at Harvard. This ruling class pseudo-humanism is based on a lie—the lie that human beings should be tortured and humiliated for their and society’s own good. For this reason, those who begin to approach the truth about the sick civilization that pseudo-humanism is used to prop up are often deemed insane. Kaczynski, like the mathematician Gödel, was no exception. When the lies of a sick civilization became too much to bear, these thinkers reached “a limit beyond which there was only paranoia...or truth.”
There is much more I could say about The Net twenty years after its release, but let me conclude by returning to the film’s opening. The Net begins with an encapsulation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem: “The truth is superior to provability.” Only by the end of the film do we start to grasp the significance of this short sentence. Dammbeck’s formulation of Gödel’s revolutionary insight illustrates one of the most important paradoxes raised by the film: Our ability to apprehend the truth was severely diminished at the very moment when scientific empiricism began to penetrate every facet of American life following World War II. In other words, in the postwar effort to reduce reality to provability—to the cybernetic control of information—the greatest casualty was the truth.
Many invoke the Unabomber’s violence as “proof” of his insanity. However, if we are to understand the paradoxes of the postwar predicament—paradoxes which continue to shape the present moment—we must understand Kaczynski’s thought beyond the limits of his “provable” insanity.
The Net portrays the Unabomber as a devastating critic of industrial society whose message we ignore at our own risk. By studying—rather than dismissing—Kaczynski’s thought we may, like him and his fellow mathematician Kurt Gödel, become overwhelmed by paradox and even flirt with the ever-present danger of paranoia. Nevertheless, and perhaps paradoxically, it is only by taking that risk that we stand the chance of approaching the truth.
Correction: The original version of this essay stated thta “According to The Net, the message of The Authoritarian Personality was that ‘new balances and values’ must be engineered through ‘re-education and self-re-education.’ This statement has been corrected to reflect that these quotes came from Kurt Lewin, not Theodor Adorno, though Adorno’s views coverge with Lewin’s in many ways.
We tread between two aspects of human nature; mania sophron or "controlled inspiration" in Greek: reason and instinct, or what the Greeks embodied in Apollo and Dionysus.
Some artists implore Apollo the god of reason while others are followers of Dionysus the god of drunkenness and insanity, - the bacchic chorus of satyrs mocking the Apollonian hero. The Greeks understood the tragic muse.
Today, the followers of Dionysus were able to grab the trappings of the mystery cult. They are now the high priests, dressed in black, speaking a distinct language, using words like "deconstruction," "site-specific," Dada, "fluxus" and waving them around to enhance power. But its power at its core which is nihilistic, cold and inhuman. These artists lack grandeur. Their work requires reams of words to explain and mystify. They are, in a word, petty, like the bureaucracies they spawn.
I liked your article. Thanks.
Thanks for introducing me to this movie! Definitely will see it. Never heard that take on the incompleteness theorem before. I don't really understand the theorem myself, but it always seemed like it's a huge discovery.