Wild Nature, Wired Nature
The Unabomber Meets the Digerati

Increasing intolerance for transgressions against the rule of biology.

—Kevin Kelly, “Characteristics of the Emerging Network Economy,” Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biologicol Civilization[1]

In his transformation from hooded cipher to Op-Ed essayist and explosive social critic, the Unabomber has undergone a mediamorphosis—a profusion of readings and rereadings that have turned him into a pop-culture palimpsest.

But the most obvious reading is conspicuous in its absence: the Unabomber as the Log Lady’s dysfunctional cousin. For those not versed in TV trivia, the Log Lady was an eccentric minor character on the cult show Twin Peaks. In much the same way that Twin Peaks’s resident crackpot legitimated her cryptic revelations by invoking the higher power of her ever-present log, an oracular prop whose telepathic transmissions only she could hear, the Unabomber underpins his social critique with the incontrovertible authority of a mute, inscrutable Nature.

Like the Log Lady, the Unabomber (a.k.a. Ted Kaczynski) is filed, in the popular imagination, under “Wood.” His infernal machines employed tiny homemade wooden levers rather than traceable electronic components; one even incorporated a twig from a cherry tree. They came packaged in lovingly (if somewhat inexpertly) handcrafted wooden boxes whose fake return addresses allegedly involved puns on wood, and one of his early victims, the president of United Airlines, received a bomb hidden in a book published by Arbor House, whose symbol is a leaf; the executive’s name, too coincidentally, was Percy Wood.

Both Kaczynski and the Log Lady lived near small towns in the rural Northwest, the Unabomber in Lincoln, Montana, close by the largest expanse of uninterrupted wilderness in the continental United States, the continental divide. The symbolic conflict in Twin Teaks, which can be read as an environmentally unfriendly commentary on the confrontation between the logging industry and environmentalists, is literalized in Lincoln, which is the site of a power struggle between an open-pit gold-mining operation and local activists. Kaczynski knew and admired the head of Lincoln’s activist group, and surely noticed the moribund state of the local economy, a casualty of the megatrend toward a postindustrial economy of knowledge workers and minimum-wage drones. “There aren’t many good blue-collar jobs here anymore,” notes the writer William Kittredge, writing in Newsweek. “There are just tourist jobs (which can also be thought of as the servant trade).”[2] Lincoln, like many of the state’s former logging and mining towns, is broke.

Predictably, newsmagazine coverage of the Unabomber has neglected a socioeconomic analysis that would make sense of his individual pathologies in a larger cultural context. Instead, it has employed a psycho-biographical approach more agreeable to our age of inner children and recovered memories. Time and Newsweek crossed Freud Lite with Old Testament allegory in pop psych parables that compared Kaczynski and his brother David, who turned him in to the FBI, to Cain and Abel.

The Newsweek article, “Blood Brothers,” played up the story’s Oedipal aspects, noting that Kaczynski excoriated his mother, Wanda, in “anti-Mom diatribes”—letters blaming her for his utter failure at forming romantic relationships with women.[3] Ever ready to seize the moral low ground, the National Enquirer reshot the Oedipal drama from a lurid angle halfway between Hitchcock and Hard Copy, casting Wanda Kaczynski (an atheist!) as the smotheringly protective Mrs. Bates who turned Ted into an unmanly little Norman by dandling him on her lap and reading Scientific American to him. “While other boys were playing rough-and-tumble games such as baseball,” noted the Enquirer, with a delicious shudder, “Ted and his mother visited science museums, planetariums, and nature centers—and the little mama’s boy loved every minute of it.”[4] (For the record, Kaczynski’s mother did, in fact, take her infant son to art museums in a behaviorist attempt to stimulate his intellect. As well, she reportedly demanded academic excellence of her boys. If only he’d played more “rough-and-tumble games,” and stayed away from those nature centers …)

Oddly, the Unabomber echoes the Enquirer’s cold showers-and-saltpeter bluster about the sissifying effects of high culture and book learning. In his 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” he writes, “It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. … Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits—just the sort of thing that boys like. But in our society children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.”[5]

The moral of the Enquirer’s version of the Unabomber fable, memorably titled “From Mama’s Boy to Murdering Madman,” is straight out of Diane Eyer’s Mother guilt: How Our Culture Blames Mothers for What’s Wrong with Society. The Unabomber, we are given to understand, is a Skinnerian experiment gone horribly wrong, an object lesson in the dangers of too much “heir conditioning,” to use Skinner’s unforgettable phrase. With her hypodermic injections of cultural literacy and her “meticulous journal of [Ted’s] development,” Wanda Kaczynski created a nutty professor who would turn against the scientific America that made him.[6]

The Log Lady’s dysfunctional cousin; Cain to brother David’s Abel; Norman Batesian Mama’s Boy turned Murdering Madman: These and other readings yield a composite portrait of the Unabomber as semiotic shape shifter. In fact, the shape-shifter trope is an illuminating one, spotlighting an unconsidered aspect of the eco-terrorist: the buried lines of connection between the Unabomber and the geek elite who style themselves the “digerati”—between wild nature (Kaczynski’s Utopian alternative to technological modernity) and wired nature.

The five head shots of Kaczynski in the Time cover story “Odyssey of a Mad Genius,” spanning the fifties through the nineties, invite us to read that odyssey as the transformation scene fromyln American Werewolf in London, protracted over a lifetime. Kaczynski morphs from the high school and Harvard math nerd of the fifties and early sixties, neatly attired in regulation suit and tie, into the shaggy-haired, sallow-faced hermit of his 1996 mug shot. The story told, as in all werewolf tales, is of wild nature revenged upon culture—the nightmare, equal parts Darwin and Freud, of the return of what a Cheers episode hilariously called the “inner hairy man”: the bestial self brought to heel by evolution and civilization. Here, however, the folktale’s other elements are overshadowed by the image of a vengeful nature overmastering culture in the person of a skinny-tied math professor transformed into a furry, foul-smelling wild man, red in tooth and claw.

If the Unabomber-wolfman analogy seems strained, consider the print media’s tendency to collapse misanthrope and lycanthrope in their characterizations of Kaczynski. Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News &SL World Report had a field day (full moon?) with creep-show descriptions of the feral recluse: All three employed the phrase “lone wolf” in their sketches of the unwashed, unshaven mountain man, with Time reporting that FBI agents had gazed at long last on the “shaggy face” of the serial killer they had “tracked like a grizzly” for the past 18 years.[7]

But, as in American Werewolf, where the transformation of human into animal is made possible, ironically, by technology (latex skin, inflatable bladders, and so forth), Wild Nature conceals wired nature: The Unabomber may be a wolfman, but he’s a prosthetic one, a self-declared “techno-nerd” beneath his hairy neo-Luddite hide.

Consider the Net’s seemingly incongruous elevation of the poster boy for neo-Luddite resistance to the status of a Mansonesque anti-icon, a living symbol of chaos culture. Kaczynski’s manifesto seems to be everywhere on the Net, and he is extolled in Usenet newsgroups like alt. fan.unabomber or the “Unabomber for President” Web site hosted by the Unabomber Political Action Committee, UNAPACK.

Superficially, the Net’s embrace of the neo-Luddite mad bomber has much to do with the black humor of the terminally ironic, but just beneath its brittle surface lies a gnawing anxiety over the superhuman speed of technological change and the deadening, disorienting white noise of the info-deluge. “The Unabomber is the only candidate really addressing the issues, which are the destruction of wild nature and the increasing poverty and destruction of our daily lives because of the onslaught of technology,” says UNAPACK spokesman Chris Korda. “This is no joke.”[8]

The Unabomber gives vent to a simmering resentment toward the digerati who blithely advise the rest of us to sit back and enjoy the ride as they joystick our wired society into the coming millennium. Psycho-killer though he is, the Unabomber speaks at times for more reasonable minds, from lefties to liberals to the DOS-for-Dummies crowd that resented AT&T’s imperious “You Will” ads, whose peremptory tone foreclosed any alternatives to a corporate-brand future (“Have you ever tucked your baby in from a phone booth? You will”). The Unabomber is the wild-eyed, lunatic-fringe tip of a demographic iceberg; while hardly neo-Luddite, the nondigerati who make up that iceberg resent the messianic self-righteousness and übernerd arrogance of cyberboosters like John Perry Barlow, MIT Media Lab director and Being Digital author Nicholas Negroponte, and, quintessentially, Wired magazine in its heady early days, when the founder Louis Rossetto’s televangelistic exhortations resounded through its pages.

Debuting in 1993, Wired soon established itself as a bully pulpit for corporate futurists, laissez-faire evangelists, and prophets of privatization. In 1. S, the futurist Alvin Toffler bemoaned the fact that the shortsighted United States was air-dropping food rather than fax machines and camcorders in the former Yugoslavia, and that Washington was concerned with ho-hum Second Wave issues such as the decaying urban infrastructure when it should have been paving the information superhighway. In 1.4, George Gilder, an apostle of info-capitalism, rewove the threadbare myth that in the near future, when each of us commands the googlebytes of a supercomputer, economic and political power will be magically redistributed. (This cherished article of cyber cratic faith buttressed Newt Gingrich’s speculation that the government should provide “the poorest Americans” with laptops—after it has unburdened them of frivolous entitlements such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, presumably.) And in issue 1.3, Peter Drucker, the Moses of management theory, reprised the corporate-friendly refrain that since our postindustrial culture runs on information, the blue-collar worker is obsolete—joyful noise to managerial ears in an age of outsourcing and downsizing, but bitter music to former laborers, now consigned to the subsistence-wage purgatory of the service industry. No matter, consoles the Drucker disciple and corporate futurologist Peter Schwartz: “Massive unemployment… became the fertile ground in which Silicon Valley bloomed.”[9]

In the silicon social Darwinism ostensibly popular with the 33-year-old, 81k-earning male who is Wired’s typical reader, the evolutionary race goes to the wunderkind “small player” enshrined in computer industry myth (Bill Gates, the two Steves who founded Macintosh), while the unskilled and the deskilled masses are stampeded in the mad rush to the millennium. “Tofflerism-Gingrichism,” Hendrik Hertzberg asserts in a New Yorker essay, is not unlike Marxism-Leninism in its “worship of technology,” its “know-it-all certainty,” its “scientism,” its “ ‘revolutionary’ rapture.”[10] There is, he notes, a “similar exhilaration that comes from being among the select few to whom the mysteries and the meaning of history are vouchsafed … a similar patronizing contempt for those who don’t ‘get it’ and are therefore fated to be swept into the dustbin of history.”[11]

Wired’s vision of a radically deregulated, privatized future is dangerously myopic, blind to environmental concerns, race relations, gender politics, and labor issues. It’s a future so bright you’ve gotta wear shades, as the hit song put it; the digerati don’t want to know about the downside of postindustrialization and global capitalism: the social dislocation and economic anxieties of the middle class, the hemorrhaging of domestic manufacturing jobs, the exploitation of nonunion, sometimes underage Third World labor.

As the critic Margie Wylie put it in her blisteringly funny essay “Wired Doesn’t Speak for Me,”

Everyone in Wired’s warped view of the world has either already become an instant millionaire through the infinite grace of the benevolent Free Market, or they yearn to be the ones standing on the backs of people just like themselves to get there. … It’s a scramble to the increasingly small top of the heap: The last one up is a rotten egg—or worse, if you’re on the bottom, an immigrant farm hand. For every million people on e-mail, another million have been killed by the ‘obsolete’ notions of war, poverty, and hunger. Of course, war, poverty, and hunger seem obsolete when your most pressing concern is the length of the line at Starbucks.[12]

The Unabornber’s refusal to fall into lockstep with the digital revolution has struck a sympathetic chord with all who are weary of the ceaseless drumbeat of cyberhype. “I can’t shake the ‘Ultimate Truth’ of those normal working stiffs in my straw poll,” wrote Wired correspondent Brock Meeks in his electronic newsletter, Cyber Wire Dispatch. Sickened by people’s seeming unconcern over the lives shattered by Unabombs, Meeks nonetheless concedes that there is something in the Unabornber’s message that has “touched a nerve. And it may be a nerve that, beneath the warp and woof of all the current self-congratulatory cyber-masturbation, is very sensitive to the hundred-plus million people that aren’t online.”[13]

But at the same time that some among the off-line millions have come to see the Unabomber as the pathological embodiment of anxieties provoked by an ever more wired, increasingly denatured world, there are those in cyberculture who recognize him as one of their own—Yahoo Serious with an animus. (Clerks at a Sacramento bookstore where he used to browse the science books nicknamed the wild-haired Kaczynski Einstein.) He is a hardware hacker who began, in the best hacker tradition, as a teenage basement tinkerer and homemade-bomb freak. After reading “Industrial Society,” Wired’s executive editor, Kevin Kelly, was lavish in his praise, pronouncing the Unabomber “pretty sophisticated” and “very broad,” a “far more interesting critic than [Kirkpatrick] Sale or Jerry Mander or Langdon Winner” (well-known neo-Luddite, liberal, and left-wing critics of technoculture, respectively). Then Kelly dropped a bomb of his own: “Most important,” he noted, “this guy is a nerd. He is a geek. He is one of us. The [manifesto] is structured like a doctoral thesis, or those computer science papers with numbered graphs. Very tidy. Like the bombs.”[14]

Indeed, to fellow “techno-nerds,” the Unabombs are unmistakably cyberpunk. Admittedly, Kaczynski invites interpretation as the psycho-killer reincarnation of William Morris, the late-nineteenth-century designer who called for a rejection of mass production and a return to medieval arts and crafts. Sprinkled with breathless references to “exquisite craft” and “painstaking care,” journalistic descriptions of the Unabomb read like Pottery Barn blurbs for pricey reproductions of Shaker handicrafts. A New York Times feature lapsed into swooning prose worthy of Martha Stewart Living, calling the box that housed the first Unabomb “almost a work of art, carefully fashioned from four kinds of wood, meticulously sanded, polished and stained, like a piece of fine furniture from an old-world artisan.”[15]

At the same time, Kaczynski can just as easily be read as a techno-bricoleur from the pages of William Gibson’s science fiction, a close cousin to Rubin, the avant-garde tinkerer in “The Winter Market” who reanimates industrial rubbish in the form of cyberpunk robots, or as an alter-ego for Gibson himself, a “master of junk” trolling “the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on.”[16] Before the FBI dubbed him the Unabomber, investigators called Kaczynski the “junkyard bomber” in reference to the fact that his engines of destruction were concocted from lamp cords, sink traps, furniture parts, old screws, match heads, and pieces of pipe. Considered as Outsider terror-art or exploding Joseph Cornell boxes, the Unabombs evince a decidedly hackerish love of the ad hoc and the DIY, of retrofitting and refunctioning; they cast an ominous light on Gibson’s cyberpunk shibboleth “The street finds its own uses for things.” They even suggest a mordant appropriation of the cyberhype that promises a future of exponentially bigger bytes in endlessly smaller boxes: “We expect we will be able to pack deadly bombs into ever smaller, lighter, and more harmless looking packages,” the Unabomber bragged, in a letter to The New York Times, sounding for all the world like a nightmare parody of a trade-show salesman flakking the latest in palmtops.[17]

Even wild nature, the antitechnological ecotopia at the heart of the Unabomber’s ideology, is consonant with the cyberpunk mythos. The manifesto offers a curiously Hobbesian vision of paradise regained, where humans rejoice in the fulfillment of what Kaczynski calls “a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the ‘power process,’” by which he seems to mean the pursuit of the basic requirements of survival rather than the consumption of commodified images that characterizes consumer culture in the Digital Age. Untouched by Fordism, Taylorism, or any of the other command-and-control instrumentalities of industrial society, wild nature is the sole province of freedom, defined by the Unabomber as “being in control (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) of the life-and-death issues of one’s existence: food, clothing, shelter, and defense against whatever threats there may be in one’s environment.”

Reducing beings to bodies (i.e., their immediate physical needs) and redefining freedom as the struggle for survival, the social Darwinian ecopolitics of the Unafesto bear more than a passing resemblance to the postapocalyptic primitivism romanticized in cyberpunk movies like Escape from New York and The Road Warrior. A heady brew of masculinist power fantasies, frontier mythology, and the American cult of the anomic loner, SF films and fiction in this vein betray a nostalgia for a more embodied world, before the TV screen, the computer terminal, and the rest of the technological membrane grew between us and reality. “In such films as Mad Max: Beyond Thunder dome,” notes the cultural critic Scott Bukatman, “the bread-and-circuses barbarism of the future-archaic society masks a deeper uto-pianism: the ‘perverse hope that someday conditions will indeed warrant a similar return to the body’ as technology collapses into ruins.”[18]

Survivalist and antistatist to the core, the Unabomber and cyberpunk make common cause in their libertarian leanings as well: The Unabomber’s statement, in a letter to the New York Times, that he “would like, ideally, to break down all society into very small, completely autonomous units” parallels cyberpunk’s vision of society decentralized into self-sufficient autonomous zones like the Lo-Tek Nighttown in Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic.”[19] Libertarianism is the default politics of real-life cyberpunks like Japan’s otaku, the hacker subculture that bends technology to its obsessive ends even as it embodies what Wired calls “the apotheosis of consumerism and an ideal work force for contemporary capitalism.”[20] The libertarian philosophy of minimal government and maximal individual freedom appeals, as well, to the globe-trotting computer professionals who consider themselves less citizens than “netizens,” wired by cellphone, fax, and modem into the world space of ceaselessly circulating information and liquid capital but increasingly disengaged from public space, civic life, and social responsibility.

Despite the Unabomber’s obvious resonances with libertarian thought, however, neocon ideologues have typecast the self-declared “anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-leftist” terrorist as a whipping boy for the creeping culture rot of the sixties, the lunatic excesses of the environmental movement, and the academic left’s sullen refusal to ride capitalism’s Carousel of Progress. Lance Morrow (Time’s answer to Ed Anger of The Weekly World News) laid the blame for the “fatal effects” of Wanda Kaczynski’s “manic idealization” of little Ted on the “breezy California child-worship” of the sixties; Newsweek’s Joe Klein argued that the Unabomber is joined at the hip with “any number of left-pessimist academics” by the notion that “technological ‘progress’ will bring despair, unemployment and ecological ruin.”[21]

There’s no denying the cultural genes the Unabomber seems to have inherited, albeit in mutant form, from the sixties: his antitechnology bias, his back-to-nature philosophy, his romanticization of “primitive man” (specifically, Native Americans), and his revolutionary faith in the power of a well-placed bomb to “strike at the heart of the state,” as the Red Brigades put it.

In fact, though, Kaczynski was by all accounts a blurred face in the crowd scenes of the sixties, untouched by the emergence of S.D.S. during his time at Harvard and the University of Michigan or by the uprising at nearby San Francisco State College when he taught at Berkeley. The dogmas of the New Left, as well as the communitarian ethos and Dionysian eros at the heart of the counterculture, are wholly absent from his worldview. In a journal entry dated somewhere between 1977 and ′78, when he was just beginning his campaign of terror, Kaczynski wrote, “My ambition is to kill a scientist, big businessman, government official or the like. I would also like to kill a Communist.”[22] The Unabornber’s closest kin can be found, not among sixties radicals, but in the far-right militia movement of the nineties, whose anti-government refrain harmonizes with the Unabornber’s battle hymn of decentralization by any means necessary. The militias’ tactic of “leaderless resistance” and their dream of the cellular society destined to follow the overthrow of the federal government parallels the manifesto’s vision of atomized self-governance in “small, autonomous communities.”

The Unabornber’s radical libertarian vision of a “postnational” body politic, decomposed into scattered cells, is the missing link between wild nature and wired nature, the toggle switch that connects the Unabomber to cyberpunk on one hand and cybercapitalism on the other. In a crowning irony, the Unabornber’s call for the atomization of the nation-state resonates sympathetically with the Tofflerist-Gingrichist rhetoric of decentralization dear to the hearts of Wired editors and the laissez-faire futurists they lionize (George Gilder, Peter Drucker, Peter Schwartz, and their ilk).

Although they prefer deregulation to demolition and obviously reject the antitechnology and anticorporate planks in his platform, the digerati share the Unabornber’s libertarian contempt for politics with a capital ?, by definition statist. “This is not to be a POLITICAL REVOLUTION,” writes Kaczynski, in the Unafesto’s opening section. “Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.” He realizes, astutely, that political power’s center of gravity is rapidly shifting from the nation-state to the multinational corporation, specifically to technology-dependent, postindustrial entities such as media conglomerates and financial-services firms.

Wired’s editors were singing from the same page as Kaczynski when they wrote,

We have basically ignored Clinton, Washington, and politics in general. The Revolution is definitely not happening in the halls of the Capitol, and politics are becoming not only increasing obsolete, but irrelevant. … Everyone on the planet believes in the free market now, like they believe in gravity. … There are other, better ways to affect [sic] change in society today than pulling a lever in a voting booth. Politics isn’t the solution, it’s become the problem—and the Digital Generation may be consciously rejecting politics … because they have rationally decided that politics and government are fundamentally discredited. … [Wired] reports on a Revolution without violence that embraces a new, non-political way to improve the future based on economics beyond macro control.[23]

(Clearly, the digerati for whom Wired’s editors speak also share the Unabomber’s revolutionary fervor, the unshakable hubris of the true believer confident that history has a telos, and it’s going his way.)

Of course, as with their deregulatory soulmate, the “conservative futurist” Newt Gingrich (to whose Progress and Freedom Foundation Wired has contributed), the digerati’s Tofflerist rhetoric of decentralization is a blind for a massively parallel Reaganomics whose immediate business is the dismantling of the rickety regulatory framework that (just barely) constrains multinational corporate power. The digerati’s ultimate goal is the elimination of the nation-state (and thus even an unreliable governor of utterly unfettered corporate power, answerable to no one).

In keeping with the social Darwinist undertones of their vision of a cybercapitalist “revolution” masterminded by a technocratic elite, with the Second Wave masses along for the ride (or part of the road, if they won’t hop aboard), the digerati lend their laissez-faire economics the force of natural law by couching it in the language of chaos theory and artificial life (a branch of computer science in which researchers create digital creatures that feed, breed, struggle for survival, and pass on evolutionarily successful traits in imitation of their real world counterparts). The executive-friendly jacket copy of Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization, promises “‘out-of-control’ business strategies for an emerging global economy built on networks.” Inside, Kelly invokes both chaos and AL to validate the notion that capitalism, unconstrained by Second Wave assumptions (the necessity of governmental regulation presumably among them), would evolve into something rich and strange—a “network economy” of decentralized, outsourced “economic super organisms,” able to adapt to the nonlinear dynamics of the global economic ecosystem.

Visions of out-of-control cybercapitalism also dance in the heads of managerial gurus like Tom Peters (author of the business book Thriving on Chaos), whose corporate gospel of “crazy” nonlinear decision-making and perpetual reinvention echoes the chaos-theory thesis that turbulent natural systems, when sufficiently far from equilibrium, often give rise to startling new phenomena. Similarly, Peters’s concept of the postindustrial “Atomized Corporation, with spirited, often pint-sized subunits with their own personalities and headed by disrespectful chiefs” recalls the chaos-theory notion of self-organizing natural phenomena such as hurricanes or amoeba colonies, in which previously disconnected elements suddenly reach a critical point where they begin to “cooperate” to form a more complex phenomenon.[24] “This is the age of biological models of organization, not mechanical models,” says Peters. “I’m keen on companies such as CNN, which are creating something organic, something that recreates itself, invents itself each day.”[25]

Management theorists like Peters are already living in William Gibson’s cyberpunk future, where multinational corporations, highly evolved “life forms” whose DNA is “coded in silicon,” are “the planet’s dominant form of intelligence.”[26] The notion of the corporate entity as a complex colonial organism is implicit in recent attempts to obtain a ruling conferring on corporations the legal status of individuals, thereby protecting corporate image advertising as free speech.

The global marketplace is increasingly conceived of in Darwinian terms, with the social and environmental depredations of multinationals rationalized as corporate life forms’ struggle for survival in an economic ecosystem. “‘Ecology’ and ‘economy’ share more than linguistic roots,” maintains the nanotechnologist K. Eric Drexler; corporations, he argues, are “evolved artificial systems” born of the marketplace’s “Darwinian” competition.[27] In Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism, the business consultant Michael Rothschild straightfacedly argues that “what we call capitalism (or free-market economics) is not an ism at all but a naturally occurring phenomenon” (and therefore presumably beyond reproach). In Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage, Charles H. Fine offers sociobiological parables about “industrial fruit-flies” for anxious managers, whom he promises to turn into “‘corporate geneticists’ who do not react to the forces of change but master them to engineer their company’s destiny.”[28]

A 1996 issue of the business magazine Fast Company featured a profile of one such “geneticist”: Eric Schmidt, Sun Microsystems’s chief technology officer. Fraught with unintentionally hilarious examples of corporate biobabble, the article extols Schmidt’s expertise at corporate crossbreeding—”organizational genetics,” to those in the know, which means “combining organizational DNA in unique and inventive ways.” What’s organizational DNA, you ask? Why, “it’s the stuff, mostly intangible, that determines the basic character of a business. It’s bred from the founders, saturates the early employees, and often shapes behavior long after the pioneers have moved on.”[29] Gene-splicing the latest in Darwinian metaphors with a sexual politics straight out of The Flintstones, the article’s author analogizes venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to “the male urge to sow seed widely and without responsibilities and the female desire for a mate who’ll settle down and help with the kids.”[30]

We’ve heard this song before, and when the hundredth trend-hopping management consultant informs us, as James Martin does in Cybercorp: The New Business Revolution, that high-tech corporations are “creature[s] designed to prosper in the corporate jungle” and that “capitalist society is based on competition and survival of the fittest, as in Darwin’s world,” we realize where we’ve heard it. It’s the theme song of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, as popular in its day with monopoly builders like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie as Kelly’s neobiological capitalism is with Tom Peters and his corporate flock.” ‘Social Darwinism,’” Stephen Jay Gould usefully reminds us, “has often been used as a general term for any evolutionary argument about the biological basis of human differences, but the initial 19^th-century meaning referred to a specific theory of class stratification within industrial societies, and particularly to the idea that there was a permanently poor underclass consisting of genetically inferior people who had precipitated down into their inevitable fate.”[31]

The genealogical links between the public musings of the self-anointed “digital elite” and the Spencerian rhetoric of the robber barons is apparent at a glance, though they’re separated by a century or so. Nicholas Negroponte, a sharp-dressing pitchman who hawks visions of a brighter, broader-bandwidth tomorrow to Fortune 500 executives (and to the unwashed AOL millions in his book Being Digital), breezily redefines the “needy” and the “have-nots” as the technologically illiterate—the “digitally homeless,” a phrase that wins the Newt Gingrich Let Them Eat Laptops Award for cloud-dwelling detachment from the lives of the little people.[32] Stewart Brand, a charter member of the digerati, blithely informs the Los Angeles Times that “elites basically drive civilization.”[33] Rossetto rails against the technology critic Gary Chapman as someone who “attacks technologically advanced people,” as if Web site design were an inherited trait, a marker of evolutionary superiority.[34]

If the analogy to social Darwinism seems overheated, consider Wired founder Rossetto’s belief, earnestly confided to a New York Times writer, that Homo cyber is plugging himself into “exo-nervous systems, things that connect us up beyond—literally, physically—beyond our bodies. … We will discover that when enough of us get together this way, we will have created a new life form. It’s evolutionary; it’s what the human mind was destined to do.”[35] As Rossetto readily acknowledges, his techno-Darwinian epiphany is borrowed from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit philosopher and Lamarckian evolutionist who predicted the coming of an “ultra-humanity” destined to converge in a transcendental “Omega Point” that would be “the consummation of the evolutionary process.”[36]

De Chardin*s ideas are well known in theological and New Age circles and, increasingly, among the digerati. Less known is his passionate advocacy of eugenics as a means of preparing the way for ultra-humanity. “What fundamental attitude … should the advancing wing of humanity take to fixed or definitely unprogressive ethnical groups?” he wrote in Human Energy. “The earth is a closed and limited surface. To what extent should it tolerate, racially or nationally, areas of lesser activity? More generally still, how should we judge the efforts we lavish in all kinds of hospitals on saving what is so often no more than one of life’s rejects? … Should not the strong (to the extent that we can define this quality) take precedence over the preservation of the weak?”[37] Happily, the answer is readily at hand: “In the course of the coming centuries it is indispensable that a nobly human form of eugenics, on a standard worthy of our personalities, should be discovered and developed,” he writes in The Phenomenon of Man.[38]

Since there is an implied guilt by association here, it’s important to note that Rossetto and the other digital de Chardinians may well be unfamiliar with the philosopher’s thoughts on eugenics. But given our increasingly “genocentric” mind-set and the creepy popularity of books like Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, as well as the potential misuses of vanguard technologies like gene therapy and genetic screening, the digerati would do well to consider the ugly underside of their techno-Darwinian vision of the ultra-human apotheosis of the “technologically advanced”—”de Chardin’s advancing wing of humanity,” by any other name.

Obviously, the Wired ideology is far less pervasive, and not quite as nasty and brutish, as social Darwinism in its heyday; none of the digerati has embraced eugenics, at least publicly. But nineteenth-century capitalists like Carnegie and Rockefeller, who in the words of Andrew Ross “seized for themselves the mantle of the fittest survivors as if it were indeed biologically ordained,” would undoubtedly note a family resemblance in the digerati, way cool white guys secure in the knowledge that they are Stewart Brand’s fabled “elite,” guiding civilization from their rightful place atop the Great Chain of Being (Digital).

The digerati, with their Darwinian marketplace ruled by corporate life-forms and their societal ecology presided over by a “technologically advanced” elite, and the Unabomber, with his inviolate wilderness peopled by neo-Luddites gone native, have built contrary worldviews on a common cornerstone: the notion of nature as a legitimator of theories about culture.

On the surface, the back-to-nature rhetoric of the digerati and the Unabomber is only the most recent example of a technodeterministic tendency in Western history to map the mechanical metaphor of the moment onto human affairs and the natural world. The world of the mechanical clock gave us Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s theory of the clockwork human, in Man a Machine (1748); the nineteenth century, dubbed the Railway Age by C. S. Peirce, begat the concept of the living organism as a steam engine; and the Information Age has seen Norbert Wiener’s redefinition of humans and animals as cybernetic systems gain currency, with the metaphor undergoing periodic upgrades as computers themselves have evolved. The current proliferation of biological and evolutionary metaphors signals the emergence of biotechnology and genetic engineering as the flagship technologies of the next millennium.

But metaphors don’t come cheap: The costs of turning culture into nature, transforming it from social construction into elemental force, are merely hidden, buried in Western history. A little spadework reveals that the indisputable authority of natural “law” has been invoked, throughout European history, to legitimate the subjugation of women and the enslavement or extermination of non whites, as well the exploitation of nature itself.[39] Andrew Ross notes, “Nature is the ultimate people-pleaser, whose name can even be lent to and honored by causes associated with its destruction.”[40]

A single example speaks volumes: In Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, Londa Schiebinger describes how eighteenth-century anatomists, anthropologists, and natural historians, “working under the banner of scientific neutrality,” cited the supposedly simian anatomy of Africans to account for the lowly status Europeans assigned them on the evolutionary and, consequently, social ladder. Similarly, the childlike “compressed crania” of women of all races were adduced as evidence of impulsive, emotional, and generally inferior intellectual qualities.[41]

The Unabornber’s feral ecotopia and the digerati’s free-market ecology are only the latest examples of nature used as a ventriloquist’s dummy in the service of social agendas, few (if any) of which are pretty to look at. In the last hundred years or so we’ve seen the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age; the eugenics movement of the twenties, which resulted in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, designed to limit immigration to “superior” Northern European stock, and the forced sterilization in more than two dozen states of the “socially defective”; and, most recently, the voodoo sociology of The Bell Curve.[42]

The Unabomber and the digerati aren’t alone in ventriloquizing nature. Ross contends that we are witnessing “a wholesale revival of appeals to the authority of nature and biology. … Nature’s laws are invoked once again as the ground of judgement and the basis of policy. … Biologism and social Darwinism have returned with a vengeance, and are a driving force behind the sweeping new world view engineered by biotechnology and genetic medicine.”[43] He worries that “the authority of nature, and hence of the status quo,” will ultimately become “a despotic vehicle for curtailing rights and liberties.”[44]

Already, The Bell Curve’s Herrnstein and Murray have argued that immigration should be restricted and birth control aggressively promoted among the lower classes to prevent “dysgenesis,” or the dissipation of intelligence through the muddying of the gene pool. The psychologist Jean Phillippe Rushton believes that blacks have evolved to develop smaller brains and display more sexual and aggressive characteristics than, say, “Orientals,” who have larger brains, tamer sex drives, and are more easily socialized. Christopher Brand, a psychologist and self-declared “scientific racist” who stresses the supposed genetic link between race and intelligence, has suggested that women should be encouraged to mate with high-I.Q. males to improve their descendants’ inherited traits.[45] Can a kinder, gentler eugenics be far away?

Nearly 40 years ago, Roland Barthes argued, in Mythologies, that one of ideology’s most insidious aspects was that it converts constructed social reality, and the power relations embedded in it, into innocent, immutable “nature.” Ideology, he noted, “has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.”[46] Wild nature and wired nature are pernicious because they do just that, foreclosing debate by camouflaging the manmade as the god-given.

In the Unabomber’s case, the deceit is writ small in the life he led in his crude, one-room cabin at the edge of the Scapegoat Wilderness. Beneath his shaggy exterior, Kaczynski was a prosthetic wolfman, more scientific American than American Werewolf. The public image of obdurate techno-phobia remained at heart a techno-nerd, striking at the heart of the state in the name of wild nature while living in what Newsweek described as a “do-it-yourself bomb lab.” At night, surrounded by books on electrical circuitry and chemistry, he read Scientific American and Omni by candlelight, a live bomb under his bed. Though he lived in God’s country, his life was far from being a Waldenesque idyll: “It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the Sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb,” he lamented, in a letter to The New York Times.[47]

Like the rest of us, the Unabomber was entangled in the web of cultural complicity, hopelessly implicated in technological modernity. The question is: Where does technology begin? Clearly, bombs are infernal machines, although he may have symbolically inoculated himself against the technological virus by nestling his contraptions in wooden boxes and fashioning many of their working parts out of wood. Did he make a distinction between the postindustrial, cybernetic technologies favored by the technonerds he reviled and Machine Age artifacts such as his bicycle or the antique typewriter on which he wrote the Unafesto? Did he reflect on the irony of communicating his opposition to technology and his dream of wild nature via language, the ur-technology whose invention cast us out of nature, into culture?

Perhaps he suspected, all along, the futility of his project. The Unabornber’s symbolic return to culture was acted out in a National Public Radio segment on his haircut.[48] Unwittingly conjuring the image of a werewolf the morning after, Ν PR’s Howard Berkes reported that Kaczynski’s “wild and matted hair” was gone, that his hair was “close-cropped” and his beard “neatly trimmed.” According to Berkes, the local woman who works as the jailhouse barber described him as a “courteous man” who “did not have the demeanor of a monster.”

While having his mustache trimmed, the woman recalled, Kaczynski told her a story about “an ancient tribe in Japan that used to grow their hair as long as possible. He said that he had heard that they even had a special tool designed to lift the hairs of their mustaches off their lips so they could eat. And he said, ‘I’d love to see that tool.’” In this droll fable, we hear the first, shy overture toward a détente with technology.

Of course, the machine was always there, lurking in the garden, be it a broken-down typewriter, a bicycle cobbled together from spare parts, or the bombs themselves. Ironically, even the Unafesto’s imagined return to wild nature would inevitably have given rise to Road Warrior— esque techno-bricolage, setting in motion the historical dynamic that begins with Robinson Crusoe and ends with Robinson Crusoe on Mars. The Unabomber realized this: In the manifesto, he warns that the “greatest danger is that industrial society may begin to reconstitute itself within the first few years after the breakdown. … If and when industrial society breaks down, its remnants [must] be smashed beyond repair, so that the system cannot be reconstituted. The factories should be destroyed, technical books burned, etc.”

For humans after the Fall, symbol-manipulating animals that we are, nature—in the sense of an absolute authority, the Transcendental Signified that anchors all of culture’s free-floating signifiers—has always been an epistemic mirage, seen through the haze of language. Now, in a historical moment when technologies such as genetic engineering and theoretical ones such as nanotechnology hold forth the promise of hacking the operating systems of the physical world and organic life, nature and culture—the wild and the wired—are more maddeningly (and literally) intertangled than ever. “I’m always a little amazed when I run into people who feel that technology is something that’s outside of the individual, that one can either accept or reject,” says William Gibson. “At this stage of the game, we are technology.”[49] Even the Unabomber’s most ardent fans seem to have embraced this paradox: A poster displayed on the UNAPACK Web site asks, “If the Unabomber prevails and we return to wild nature, can I still have my car phone?”

Postscript

On May 5, 1998, Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years in prison for 13 of his 16 acknowledged Unabombings, three of which were fatal. Kaczynski’s bombs killed Thomas J. Mosser, a public relations executive; Hugh Scrutton, the owner of a computer rental store; and Gilbert P. Murray, an official of the California Forestry Association, a trade group.

Throughout this essay, I have set aside the obvious fact that the Unabomber was a serial-bombing murderer, focusing instead on his tangled relationship to the digerati and the philosophical debt these unlikely bedfellows owe nature. Obviously, there’s more than a little irony in airbrushing the bloodstains out of an essay that takes the digerati to task for their Laputan disengagement from the human realities of everyday life.

In truth, there’s blood all over the Unabomber’s story. When one of his bombs blew away the 38-year-old Scrutton, whose apparent crime against humanity was renting computers, Kaczynski wrote in his journal, “Excellent. Humane way to eliminate somebody. He probably never felt a thing.”[50] The bomb that killed Murray mutilated him so horribly, according to Kaczynski’s prosecutors, “that his family was allowed only to see and touch his feet and legs, below the knees, as a final farewell.” Kaczynski, who had actually intended the deadly package for another official, wrote that he had “no regret” that the wrong man—46, married, and a father of two—was his accidental victim.[51] When Mosser opened his bomb, he was torn apart by a blast of nails and razor blades. In court, his wife told of rushing into the room where her husband lay, “his stomach slashed open,” his “heart perforated.” One of the couple’s three children approached. Ms. Mosser recalled the “unbearable pain” she felt when she told her daughter, “Daddy’s dead. It was a bomb.”[52] In his diary, Kaczynski wrote, “A totally satisfactory result.”[53]

Without wanting to exploit the unimaginable agony wrought by what Kelly called Kaczynski’s “tidy” little bombs, I feel compelled to remind my readers—and myself—that the Unabomber is more than a repressed “technonerd” and/or a sociopathic symbol of the resentment many feel at being stampeded into a future they’ve had little hand in building, by a hubristic elite that routinely dismisses them as “clueless.” He is also a conscienceless sociopath who killed and maimed in the name of an imaginary army, the one-man Freedom Club, whose lost cause hasn’t even merited a Movie of the Week.

[1] Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994), p. 200.

[2] William Kittredge:, “The War for Montana’s Soul,” Newsweek, April 15, 1996, p. 43.

[3] Evan Thomas, “Blood Brothers,” Newsweek, April 22, 1996, p. 28.

[4] Jim Nelson and Denny Johnson, “Unabomber: From Mama’s Boy to Murdering Madman,” National Enquirer, April 23, 1996, p. 29.

[5] All quotes from the Unabornber’s manifesto are taken from “Topic 230: The Unabornber’s Screed” in the “Weird” conference on the WELL, a Sausalito-based on-line service. Posted on August 10, 1995, before the entire text began cropping up all over the Internet, the version in question was conflated from excerpts that appeared in The New York Times on August 2 of that year and an article that was posted anonymously to the alt fan. unabomber Usenet newsgroup on August 4. “Careful examination of the latter leads us to conclude that it is authentic, and that the combination of the two is more readable and effective than either text by itself,” notes Jerod Pore, who posted the document. “Though we have made every effort to weave the two texts together seamlessly, the 4,870 word result is obviously no substitute for the original 35,000 words.” It is, however, an infinitely breezier read that preserves the manifesto’s essential points.

[6] Thomas, “Blood Brothers,” p. 30.

[7] Nancy Gibbs, “Tracking Down the Unabomber,” Time (Australian edition), April 15, 1996, pp. 24—25.

[8] Joshua Quittner, “The Web’s Unlikely Hero,” Time, April 22, 1996, p. 47.

[9] Peter Schwartz, “Post-Capitalist,” Wired, July-August 1993, p. 82.

[10] Hendrik Hertzberg, “Marxism: The Sequel,” The New Yorker, February 13, 1995, p. 7.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Margie Wylie, “Wired Doesn’t Speak for Me,” C| Net, December 17, 1997, www.news.com/Perspectives/perspectives.html?ntb.pers.

[13] Brock Meeks, “Unabomber as Folk Hero,” CyherWire Dispatch, September 19, 1995, HTTP://Cyberworks.com:70/0/Cyberwire/CWD/CWD.95.09.19.

[14] “Topic 283: The UNABOM Manuscript in Cyberspace” in the WELL’s Fringeware conference, September 21, 1995, Kevin Kelly (kk).

[15] Robert D. McFadden, “From a Child of Promise to the Unabom Suspect,” The New York Times, May 26, 1966, p. 24.

[16] William Gibson, “The Winter Market” in Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1987), p. 118.

[17] Michael D. Lemonick, “The Bomb Is in the Mail,” Time, May 8, 1995, p. 72.

[18] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 302.

[19] Quoted in Tom Morganthau, “Who Is He?” Newsweek, May 8, p. 40.

[20] Karl Taro Greenfeld, “The Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures Who Rule the Universe of Alienated Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds,” Wired, 1993 premiere issue (no month given), p. 69.

[21] “strictly anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-leftist”: Ted Kaczynski, in a letter to the San Francisco Examiner, quoted in Evan Thomas, “The End of the Road,” Newsweek, April 15, 1996, p. 39; “fatal effects”: Lance Morrow, “Parental Guidance Suggested,” Time, April 22, 1996, p. 41; “any number of left-pessimist academics”: Joe Klein, “The Unabomber and the Left,” Newsweek, April 22, 1996, p. 39.

[22] David Johnston, “In Unabomber’s Own Words, a Chilling Account of Murder,” The New York Times, April 29, 1998, “National” section, p. A18.

[23] From an on-line statement “crafted, at its core, by [founder and publisher] Louis Rossetto” and posted by then managing editor John Battelle (jbat) in “Topic 129: New Republic Slams Wired!” in the WELL’s Wired conference, January 14, 1995.

[24] Vintage Books, “The Nine ‘Beyonds,’” press release for Tom Peters’s Crazy Times Call for Crazy Organizations, 1994.

[25] Thomas Kiely, “Unconventional Wisdom,” CIO, December 15, 1993-January 1, 1994, p. 26.

[26] William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), p. 203; William Gibson, “New Rose Hotel,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1987), p. 107.

[27] K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (New York: Anchor Books, 1986), pp. 32, 182.

[28] Both quotes from Perseus Books 1998 catalogue, p. 5.

[29] James F. Moore, “How Companies Have Sex,” Fast Company, October—November, 1996, p. 66.

[30] Ibid., p. 68.

[31] Stephen Jay Gould, “Curveball” in Steven Fraser, ed., The Bell Curve Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 12.

[32] Nicholas Negroponte, “Homeless@info.hwy.net,” The New York Times, February 11, 1995, “Op-Ed” section, p. 19.

[33] Paul Keegan, “The Digerati,” The New York Times Magazine, May 21, 1995, p. 42.

[34] Paul Keegan, “Reality Distortion Field,” Upside.com, February 1, 1997, www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id—34712c1778.

[35] Keegan, “The Digerati,” p. 88.

[36] See Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (New York: Grove Press, 1996), pp. 45–48.

[37] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Human Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962), pp. 132—33.

[38] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 282.

[39] This is not to say that the Second Law of Thermodynamics and other natural laws have been wished out of existence, by an act of postmodern will; only that “nature,” for naked apes, is first and foremost an object of knowledge, mediated by language. Given the historical abuses perpetrated in nature’s name, it behooves us to be wary of those who presume to speak on its behalf.

[40] Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society (New York: Verso, 1994), p. 4.

[41] Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), pp. 5, 7.

[42] For more on the Immigration Restriction Act and the American eugenics movement, see Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, pp. 246—50, 260.

[43] Ibid., pp. 5, 15.

[44] Ibid.

[45] For more on Rushton and Brand, see Evette Porter, “The Race Myth: Dividing the Melting Pot,” Village Voice, February 11, 1997, pp. 40–41.

[46] Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), p. 142.

[47] Quoted in Morganthau, “Who Is He?” p. 40.

[48] This story in Howard Berkes, “Grand Jury Could Get Unabomber Evidence Next Week,” Weekend Edition, NPR, April 20, 1996.

[49] Quoted in the video documentary Cyberpunk, by Peter von Brandenburg and Marianne Schaefer-Trench.

[50] Johnston, “In Unabomber’s Own Words,” p. A18.

[51] Ibid.

[52] David Johnston, “Judge Sentences Confessed Bomber to Four Life Terms,” The New York Times, May 5, 1998, p. 1.

[53] William Finnegan, “Defending the Unabomber,” The New Yorker, March 16, 1998, p. 62.