It is safe to say that, despite public “concerns” about Internet privacy or the international legali

On December 10, 1994, an advertising executive named Thomas Mosser returned from a business trip to his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey and began sorting the mail that had piled up in his absence. Scanning vans warped tour locations through the unopened letters, he noticed a neatly wrapped package addressed to his old employer, a public relations firm called Burson-Marsteller. Despite the fact that the sender, whose address Mosser did not recognize, had misspelled the company's name, he decided to open it. Instantly, a violent explosion shook the house. The force of the blast nearly severed Mosser's head; the nails and razor blades inside the bomb shredded open his stomach. As his wife Susan, who was home at the time, described it: "A thunderous noise resounded through the house… a white mist was pouring from the kitchen. My husband's body was on the floor, vans warped tour locations face up. His face was partially blackened vans warped tour locations and distorted. I dialed 911 and screamed, 'I need an ambulance!'"
Upon analyzing the bomb, the FBI discovered that it bore the trademarks of a mysterious bomber vans warped tour locations they had been tracking for nearly fifteen years. Because his chosen targets were university vans warped tour locations professors and airline officials, they had taken to calling him "UNABOM." Since 1978, he—it was presumed that he was male, likely an academic vans warped tour locations or an intellectual, possibly a blue collar aviation worker—had mailed or placed fifteen bombs. Some failed to detonate properly, and their intended vans warped tour locations targets came off unscathed. (One such bomb, planted on an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., would have killed all one hundred fifty passengers on board had its timing mechanism not malfunctioned.) vans warped tour locations Others lost fingers vans warped tour locations and suffered severe burns or nerve damage. Besides Mosser, the only other fatality so far had been Hugh Scrutton, the owner of a computer store in Sacramento. Based on seven-year-old testimony from Scrutton's secretary, the only eyewitness in the case, the police circulated a sketch of Mosser's presumed killer: a mustached man of indeterminate race, his face obscured by aviator sunglasses, a hood covering a crop of curly hair.
From the beginning, the apparent lack of motive behind the attacks proved a major stumbling block for the Bureau. But, as it happened, vans warped tour locations "The Unabomber" provided the explanation himself. In a letter to The New York Times the following April, he wrote: "We blew up Thomas Mosser last December vans warped tour locations because he was a Burston-Marsteller [sic] executive. Burston vans warped tour locations Marsteller helped Exxon clean up their image after the Exxon Valdez incident." (In actual fact, Mosser was not connected to the Exxon Valdez incident. He had been misidentified by an environmental newsletter.) "Burston-Marsteller is about the biggest organization in the public relations fields. This means that its business is the development vans warped tour locations of techniques for manipulating people s attitudes." UNABOM's anti-technology position vans warped tour locations was expounded more fully that September in a 35,000 word essay called Industrial Society and Its Future , which was published jointly by The New York Times and The Washington Post after another bomb killed timber industry lobbyist Gilbert Murray. "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," began "the Manifesto," as it was referred to in the press. "They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in 'advanced' countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings vans warped tour locations to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world." By hastening the onset of the breakdown, the Unabomber argued, we might reduce the extent of the disaster. And while it was impossible to know what way of life would follow after the collapse, whatever it was, it would have to be better than the world we live in now.
As the FBI hoped, the publication of the manifesto led to the capture of the Unabomber in 1996, when a social worker named David Kaczynski vans warped tour locations recognized the writing as that of his estranged older brother, Ted. The elder Kaczynski, vans warped tour locations the press soon learned, was a Harvard graduate vans warped tour locations and brilliant mathematician who had given up his position as the youngest faculty member at Berkeley to live in a cabin in the Montana wilderness. His arrest photo showed an unkempt man with wild eyes. Doctors for both the defense and the prosecution vans warped tour locations claimed, upon examining him, that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and that his fears of technological oppression were "non-bizarre delusions." vans warped tour locations Accordingly, Kaczynski's views received little serious consideration in Time , Newsweek , or any of the nightly news broadcasts covering the case. As far as the media was concerned, he was yet another in a line of violent separatists that grew longer with each passing year: the Branch Davidians, Randy Weaver, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph—all ordinary citizens who hit the eject button on mainstream society just as Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the pharmaceutical vans warped tour locations industry vans warped tour locations promised to spackle vans warped tour locations over the last cracks in the American edifice.
Even during his trial, however, a not-insignificant number of voices on the left quietly vans warped tour locations praised Kaczynski's actions. Though perhaps he had taken his principles too far, at least he had taken a stand against technological alienation in a time when once-critical voices vans warped tour locations gushed about the personal computer, the modem, the mobile phone, and other corporatized intrusion into the last vestiges of private life. Kaczynski's reception was particularly warm among the demonstrators outside the World Trade Organization Ministerial vans warped tour locations Conference in Seattle. The anarcho-primitivist vans warped tour locations philosopher vans warped tour locations John Zerzan, who participated in the protests, visited Kaczynski in jail. "I felt a real spiritual connection with him, almost in a mystical way," he told Harper's in 1999.  Of Kaczynski's victims, he said, after a pause: "They ain't innocent. Which isn't to say that I'm totally at ease with blowing them into pieces. Part of me is. And part of me isn't."
It is safe to say that, despite public "concerns" about Internet privacy or the international legality of drone assassinations, the technological optimism of the nineties vans warped tour locations has grown, not lessened since Kaczynski was last in the public eye. After all, Twitter and Facebook toppled the Mubarack vans warped tour locations regime. And WikiLeaks has ushered in a new era of government transparency. And new media has given any American with access to a computer a voice in the public sphere. Nonetheless, with the memory of the nineties' domestic terrorism wiped from the public consciousness by the attacks on the World Trade Center, the last ten years have seen something of a re-evaluation of his ideas. Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired Magazine, has published a much discussed article crediting the Unabomber with his analysis of technology as a "holistic, self-perpetuating machine." The novelist William T. Vollmann, who was himself vans warped tour locations briefly on the UNABOM suspect list, has written approvingly of Industrial Society and Kaczynski's isolationism. Meanwhile, on the far right, Keith Ablow, author of The Psychology of Casey Anthony , took to the Fox News website this summer to denounce the narcissism of social media and wonder whether the Unabomber might not have been onto something. ("Kaczynski, while reprehensible for murdering and maiming people , was precisely correct in many of his ideas.") Even the art world has taken notice. vans warped tour locations Kaczynski is the subject a recent film by James Benning, vans warped tour locations and his collected vans warped tour locations writings are now available for purchase at the New Museum on Bowery Street. The book, published by Feral House, comes with a strident introduction by Dr. David Skrbina, a non-tenured professor of philosophy at the University vans warped tour locations of Michigan. On its cover is a photo of one of Kacyznski's bombs, uncovered and waiting to explode.
All of which raises, once again, some hard questions. Like whether Kaczynski's alienation from American society was a rational vans warped tour locations response to an increasingly catastrophic society or the result vans warped tour locations of inner turmoil and poor socialization. Or whether his reasons for murder can be taken as cogent philosophical principle. Then there is the big question of whether it is possible to sanely vans warped tour locations and credibly murder in service of a humanitarian cause—a dispensation usually reserved in America for institutions, not individuals. Now these difficulties are joined by still harder questions about his supporters, and by extension, us. What does it mean, morally, that ideas held by many educated Americans have led to murder? In short, what does society want with a man who wants nothing to do with society?
Unlike vans warped tour locations the lives of most famous murderers, whose ordinariness generally offers an ironic counterpoint to the grisliness of their acts, Ted Kaczynski's life can genuinely vans warped tour locations be called exceptional. Born in 1942 to second generation vans warped tour locations Polish immigrants in Chicago, it quickly became clear that Ted was an exceptional child. At the age of ten, his IQ was tested in the 160-170 range. As a result, Kaczynski skipped the sixth grade and began high school one year early in suburban Evergreen Park, where the family had relocated.
Many of the students at Evergreen Park found it difficult to keep up with the curriculum, much of which was at the college level. Kaczynski, on the other hand, excelled. He was a member of the clubs for chess, biology, German and mathematics. He collected coins and wrote musical vans warped tour locations compositions for a family trio. The administration was so impressed by Kaczynski's performance that he was encouraged to skip the eleventh grade as well. In a letter of recommendation to Harvard, who accepted Kaczynski at age 16, Lois Skillen, his high school vans warped tour locations counselor, wrote, "Of all the youngsters I have worked with at the college level, I believe Ted has one of the greatest contributions to make. He is reflective, sensitive, and deeply conscious of his responsibilities to society."
Academic success failed, however, to win Kaczynski any friends among the student body. Everg