Ted Kaczynski’s Timing Was Not Random

Ted Kaczynski has passed away in prison where he was incarcerated for attempting to stop the rise of tech fascism. Reports indicate suicide.

Terrorism is a common thing to see in the rise of extreme human rights catastrophe and extreme threat to humanity. To pretend it is a random phenomenon that doesn’t have a direct tie to an issue of existential threat, is a profound insult to the long history of resistance to war, sexual violence, civil rights abuses, colonization and human rights abuses, that exists and that in many instances have served humanity’s greatest causes.

It is not controversial to state that terrorism rises against vast oppressors where there is vast power asymmetry, and regardless of anyone’s morale conceptions about if terrorism is “valid”, it is a known player on the board of the game of games that emerges in very specific circumstances. 

Everything comes from somewhere. 

Ted came to a knowing, conscious and deliberant strategy that, in his estimation, would be the most effective in stopping a machine of this magnitude. We can agree or disagree with the trade-offs that Ted made, but we cannot deny that he came to these conclusions as a matter of principle. And his actions were a faithful representation of a path that he had fully laid out and a logic he has explained in exquisite detail. 

People are pretending that the timing of Ted’s death is a total accident, in keeping with ongoing attempts to chalk up his extremely principled work to mental illness. Literally anything but admit that he is a rationale actor with material dimensions. They want to believe this has absolutely no connection to this moment in technology development, specifically the dawn of AI and VR/AR, and EXTRA specifically, the global launch of Apple’s virtual reality platform just days prior to Ted’s death.

Massive cope. 

Apple is a master at marketing, and Ted was too. He orchestrated a highly complex, global media campaign against the nascent tech industry and against technological development, at a key moment of technological change, the rise of personal computing, anticipating and crossing into the internet age, for 20 years, from a shack in the woods. He has changed the world dialogue again and again, out of careful planning and strategy and strong contributions to theory. And he has been successfully able to present a resistance and revolutionary analysis that holds up to today’s technological moment. 

So this man, who again, orchestrated a global media campaign for 20 years from a shack in the woods, with knowledge that his death would bring an overwhelming audience and even new audiences, just “happened” to leave the mortal plane at this time, days after the Apple launch? I don’t think so. 

Reports are saying it was suicide. 

This was a final sacrifice.  

Ted was a radiantly intelligent human being but he was a deeply committed man, a very principled man, a very thoughtful man. A very serious man. Please do not insult the severity and implications of this by pretending that his death is somehow not a commentary on what is happening at this societal moment. Every breath he breathed was a resistance to tech fascism. 

Including his last. 

It is utterly absurd to suggest that it is a “coincidence” that the most effective revolutionary leader against tech in history, who coordinated the largest global media dialogue on the topic before or since, just happened to die out of fate within days of the Apple AR/VR launch. Please do not disrespect the dead so soon. This was his life’s work and what he gave his life to. 

Perhaps the most relevant and urgent matter coming out of the conversation on Ted’s passing: “RIP King” has been trending on Twitter since. There has been a public embrace of him in a way we have never seen. There was a documentary out not so long ago that told the story of what happened, and in his own words, laid out the structural analysis and theory that he had. I think this is auspicious as the mainstream has recently had contact with these ideas. 

Now, there is a tremendous shift underway in AI/VR and his ideas are surfacing again, and people have a lot more context here both in Ted’s work but also in seeing that the analysis he produced has accorded perfectly with the actual events that have transpired in technology since that time. I.e., the foundation for his work has proven totally accurate and no longer holds up to claims about wild conspiracy theories. His work was materialist analysis leading to the conclusion that intervention was a moral imperative, even at the cost of violence. 

Indeed the reception of Ted’s death has been one of the only signs of hope we have seen so far this year and in this AI/VR epic yet. There is a very public discussion happening about him, about what he did, and his beliefs; and you can see that there is a receptiveness to Ted’s work that we have never seen in his lifetime. Many people are reading it as we speak.

Many years have intervened since Ted’s initial work in this area; and time has bourne out all of his analysis and it holds up as an analysis, and it also presents a framework for thoughts and feelings about technology that people have but don’t fully understand. We have had new generations grow up with this technology which was only in its very early stages while Ted was operating prior to his arrest. Ted predicted with brilliance and accuracy, many of the things which had come to pass; things that could be quarreled about have now become inarguable.

And perhaps most importantly people have had enough experience dealing with technology and with the technology empire to realize how high the stakes actually are and the stakes for all of humanity, as well as have seen the worst futures realized — killer drone swarms, immersive surveillance, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Ted was living in a world of mass casualty and the downfall of humanity. That is the weight that he was measuring against. That weight has grown heavier and heavier and heavier. 

This is not to endorse his actions, but I think it is worth pointing out that the people who are threatened by Ted are tech executives and people working on the most foundational parts of the tech empire. The People are not the ones who are scared now that his work is being read. His work was targeted at them, at the enemy. And as we speak they are increasing security measures and there are strategy meetings about the possibilities of copycat crime. 

The people who are scared of this are the ones that hold the height of power and are worth multi billions of dollars and hold more power than almost any person in existence.

Is this truly terrorism if those are the only people who are afraid? 

A lot of marketing work has gone into the last few months in tech as they ease the new technology into the market and start going into consumer wide scale adoption, of which Apple’s launch of AR/VR is our major first mover, officially launching the bubble. They have been doing a lot of work hoping that we will adopt all of this with no meaningful dialogue with the public and with no regulations and with no guarantees to the people about what the results of this are and how it will affect them. 

In fact, Ted’s timing is perfect.

This event, and the public refocusing on Ted’s work, undoes a lot of this recent jubilant marketing fest, including VCs writing long screeds about the virtues of AI, and provides a theory of technology and humanity that actually accounts for the PEOPLE in this situation. 

Each revolutionary, even if he has no other thing in his possession, or nothing left to offer, has his life. It is a most prized asset. There are so many ways to spend one’s single coin. In the end, we choose that which we have access to. 

This was a message.