The Ted K Archive’s One-Year Anniversary

We’ve finished filling out all the sections of the archive to a good extent now, so now that we’re coming up on a year since we went public, it feels like a good time for a round up on all that’s happened. This became a lot longer document than originally planned, so most people may prefer to skim-read and skip around.

Most of the librarians feel that we can finally say there’s nothing more we’re itching to research to archive on Ted. We’ll still upload stuff every now and again to make e.g. badly scanned ecology/philosophy books easier to read and printable again. But otherwise we think we’ll slow down a lot now, barring some big event like if any of us make a trip to the Michigan archive. Or if we could convince Danh Vo, Julie Ault or Benning to make public the writings of Ted’s that they bought at auction and shared between each other.[1]

We, everyone who has contributed, have archived:

A ton of primary source documents on Ted’s life and ideas.
Documents analyzing the effect he had on the public’s understanding of radical environmentalists, anarchists, terrorists, criminals, the mentally ill & simple mental neurodivergence.
Lots of great suggested reading on anarchism & other issues.

We, the librarians who bought the website domain, are pro-tech anarchists, but we just find his life story and impact really interesting.

So, we’re hoping the website will continue to draw people in with similar politics to him and similar mental health issues frankly. Then for the cold hard reality of the primary source reading material, the epic-ness of the suggested reading material and the inviting discussion spaces connected to the website, to all have a deprogramming effect and be a mental health support.

For example, a popular text on the website for a while was simply a book on how to Unfuck Your Friendships and the discord has already played host to a discussion between people encouraging each other to think rationally about their depression diagnosis.

Also, there are fans of Ted K who literally glorify the Khmer Rouge’s genocide and burning down of cities, so having books about that genocide on the archive to hopefully, yes deprogramme, simple dogmatic reasoning, holding people back from compassionately relating to how fucked up a policy that was is we think a good thing.

The reason we’re saying all this is simply to promote transparency. We think due to the undesirability of anti-tech philosophy, opening all its rarer arguments up to scrutiny is likely going to have a positive outcome in drawing in more critical analysis and leading more people to reject the ideas.

In summary

The project grew into eight main categories:

Introductory Texts has tips on how to use and improve the website, plus more.
Original Texts are texts that were first published on this website. Feel free to contribute your own essays.
Primary Source Documents on Ted K can help researchers understand events as they happened, rather than relying on reflections from years later.
The Collected Works of Ted K includes the largest online collection of Ted K’s books, essays, stories, translations, drawings, musical compositions and mathematical work.
Analysis of Ted’s Ideas & Actions includes political and literary analysis, podcast transcripts and more.
Suggested Reading contains some potentially valuable lessons that can be drawn from the story of Ted K’s life. Plus, the history of political violence related to Ted K and leftist political groups in contrast.
Broader Topics is a wide range of texts that simply shows what else the political violence researchers and true crime fans who frequent this website are reading and find interesting discussing.
The Criminal Justice System covers everything from; reading on the legislators who advance prison reforms, to the terrorists and freedom fighters who get prosecuted as criminals, to stories of poor people getting arrested for dumpster diving food to feed their family.

As the tangentially related reading grew and grew, it also spun off another website called The Library of Unconventional Lives or TheLUL for short. That website more clearly represents some of the librarians on this project’s initial interest in researching Ted K in the first place.

General running

We encourage participation

Which texts go up on the website is decided by a small collective of librarians, but all decisions can be put to a debate that anyone can join, in the live chat discussion spaces.

On the discord and matrix live chat spaces you get:

Updates on when new texts go live.
Help with how to request rare documents from university archives.
The chance to co-ordinate with others on copy typing up handwritten documents onto the website.
The option to debate what new texts go up on the website.

Ethical steps taken by this project

We have a list of essays critiquing Ted’s politics & philosophy on the introduction page of the website.

There are long critiques and disclaimers added to some texts and we aim to add more.

When collecting together research on misanthropic groups and projects, we simply title the text ‘a text dump on ______’. That way for example we don’t dignify fictional stories terror groups weave when they write their own press releases and title them as communiqués.

Anyone can join the debate over which texts should go up on the website, obviously if you join just to troll or spam though, you will be removed.

A record will be kept of all texts that were rejected, whether for minor formatting reasons or deeply held political reasons.

A record will also be kept of controversial texts that were approved, where for example there was a sizable disagreement.

Ideally, in the future we will have popular sorting mechanisms directly under the main search box, such as a check box for ‘only anarchist texts’ that would exclude texts labelled ‘not anarchist’.

General upkeep

Back-ups of files & meta-data

All the source PDFs for all the most important texts on the website have been archived on Archive.org. Including ‘the ‘Primary Source Documents on Ted K’ & ‘The Collected Works of Ted K’:

https://archive.org/details/@thetedkarchive

A spreadsheet has been created collecting together lots of the meta-data, like the source URLs, published dates, etc. here:

We still need to create a torrent back up of everything on the website, and ideally all the source PDFs and EPUBs too.

Copy typing

Lots of scanned documents have been partially or fully typed up onto the website, such as:

Some texts that are published on the archive under the topic tag Half-finished copy typing, so that people can easily search through them to choose which they would prefer to help work on.

One reason for publishing them this way is also because there are lots of long handwritten journals that people like having a link signpost to, to the source PDF.

Error correcting

Similarly for error correcting, some pages are published under the topic tag ‘half-finished error correcting’ to encourage more collaboration.

Wishlist

We have a wishlist of texts we would like to see someday on the library that’s always changing. Please feel free to add to this list also.

Our top picks for some of the archiving we’ve done

Introductory Texts

The Various Ted K Archives

We’ve created parallel pages for every page on the Calif. Uni. website archive of UNABOM documents. We converted all the PDF’s typed text for the archive. There’s still many long hand-written journals that would need copy typing up in order to say it’s 100% copied over, but all the pages are there and tabulated:

The UNABOM Taskforce Documents & Their Typed Up Copies

A Few Guides to Ted K & His Philosophy

Original Texts

The Ted K Wiki

We’ve helped make more easily accessible information that lots of people search for, such as:

Ted Kaczynski’s Seized Possessions

Essays

We discovered who the owners of Ted Kaczynski’s journals are, and so we put a tiny amount of public pressure on those with access to release them to public viewing:

The rare Unabomber documents being kept hidden by a few zealots and rich people

Research text dumps

On the news of Ted K’s death, many people produced well informed posts using research they had been able to do on the ted k archive:

A text dump of responses to Ted Kaczynski’s death > Forums

We made a research document on 325’s brief promotion of eco-extremism and were able to use it to bring some clarity to a disagreement between some publishers of eco-extremist texts and some anarchist bookfair organisers.

A text dump on the 325 Collective

Primary Source Documents on Ted K

Truth versus Lies

The original draft of Ted’s unpublished book Truth versus Lies was finally finished and formatted for the website, so all the footnotes are hyperlinked. Also, a volunteers updated version was created in order to include updates Ted wanted which you can find in his letters to his book publisher. Real names of old acquaintances were also included so they can be cross referenced with old news stories. And there’s an extra appendix no.12 that Ted asked to be added. There are still some letters to his book publisher missing that we would need to see in order to say this is the final update, but this text is the best version yet we think:

Ted’s Autobiographies

Ted’s first and second autobiographies were found in full. And fragments of his later two were found and archived also:

The Bombings Survivors Stories

The Harvard Psych Experiments

Interviews with Ted

We’ve archived all Ted’s interviews and created two custom interview pages that merge together article quotes and audio recordings in order to restore the longest amount of interview fragments on the two custom pages:

Ted’s Prison Correspondence

We have a large collection of Ted’s prison correspondence sorted by date and have created pages for each yahoo letter compilation, making them easier to search through:

Ted’s Prison Correspondence

News Stories

This archive got a brief mention in inews, which interviewed a fairly diverse number of people:

Ted’s Reading Interests & Influences

We’ve archived a bunch of Ted’s reading interests, for example, we’ve archived many of his favorite nature books:

... As for Thoreau, he’s okay, but I’ve never had any particular admiration for him. You’ll find much better nature writing (in my opinion) in Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year (top-notch!). I can also recommend highly a book by Tom Neale, Alone on My Island (the title is not a figure of speech). Of great interest is Alexander Selkirk, who was the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. An account of Selkirk’s adventures was published back in the 18^th century, and it exists in a modern (like, mid-twentieth century) reprint. You’ll also find some eloquent passages about wilderness and solitude in Calvin Rutstrum, Paradise Below Zero and in Horace Kephart’s Book of Camping and Woodcraft. Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders is of considerable interest too ...

The Collected Works of Ted Kaczynski

We’ve gathered together the largest online collection of Ted’s writings. With the option of viewing his work in book compilation order, chronological order or categorical order:

The Collected Works of Ted Kaczynski

Analysis of Ted K’s Ideas & Actions

Green Anarchist Journal

We began the process of archiving old Green Anarchist issues which have been useful to authors such as Sean Fleming in writing his book ‘Revenge of the Luddites’:

Why do People Love this Serial Killer?

A video essayist made what we think is the best short biography on Ted to date, with over 370,000 views. The video uses tons of information and pictures from the archive in order to build a timeline and mentions us in the credits at the end of the video and in the description:

Why do People Love this Serial Killer?

The Criminal Justice System

Revolutionary Subversive Faction-Commando Unabomber

People we’ve tried to help

The Anarchist Library

T@L has published lots of texts we submitted that were first archived here, such as books by Ellul, James C. Scott, Novatore, Tolstoy, various green anarchist texts, etc. And there’s lots more we just haven’t got around to submitting. We’ve also been on hand to help with fixing the formatting of texts other people submitted.

We also link to T@L in the ‘Related projects’ tab at the top.

We’ve created some guides for how to speedily archive documents with word365, ABBYY fine reader and google sheets. And we plan on making more.

AnarchistLibraries.net

On the about section for the website, it’s explained how people from anarchistlibraries.net helped out with things like setting up the amusewiki software after the domain name was bought, in our hopes of encouraging more people to use their software, to set up more unique archival projects such as stealthiswiki.com and thelul.org.

We just bought the domain then asked the good folks at Anarchist Libraries.net to set up the Amuse Wiki software. They did it all for us for free, had it running virtually right away and have helped answer any questions.

If you’re curious to live chat to them, there’s a channel on the Hexchat program under Libera.Chat channels #amusewiki and #anarchistlibrary.

If you’d like to set up your own website with AmuseWiki software you can attempt to follow the steps described here and/or email anarchistlibraries-request@inventati.org.

We’ve also had potentially tons of people viewing the utility of amusewiki software. So, people have reached out asking about setting up their own projects which we’ve helped with information and directed people to the anarchistlibraries.net website.

We also link to AnarchistLibraries.net at the top of the ‘Related projects’ tab.

People we’ve happened to annoy

Law enforcement

The domain provider complained about a ‘kaczynskist’ zine that was archived on the website called ‘Garden’ that we had up in a partially redacted form:

The hosting of an abusive content (Illegal) on your dedicated server

We genuinely thought there wouldn’t be a problem if one part was redacted, the author said that police visited them over why they had gathered the redacted info, but that it wasn’t illegal and they weren’t arrested, so we just thought it was a situation of police overreach like potentially also with The FBI Investigation of Forest Anon.

The zine was up on amazon at one point, is still up on web.archive.org and other issues still up on the anarchist library and archive.org.

In hindsight maybe it was reckless and we should have just had the other issues up which weren’t as risky.

The Anarchist Library

One Ted K archivist in the anarchist library chat got this direct message probably after being experienced as annoying for a number of personally valid reasons:

You mentioned previously about wondering why the library deleted the source to your website on a text, but I’m looking at your website now for some texts and there is no source given as t@l. the double standard is perplexing and I think a large part of why sourcing to Ted K. archive for a few texts got changed. don’t mean to attack, because it’s tough and mistakes are made, but just saying — standing up for librarian who doesn’t participate in the chats, but also I agree
you have a website that focuses a lot on the drama and controversy

And this was the response:

Yello, yeah I do think there’s a lot of value in collecting together lots of one’s research notes and reading interests and seeing what conversations and hopefully collaborations it encourages.

The website definitely forks off from a good chunk of T@L with the aim of publishing many of the texts in a more responsible way and then archiving tangentially related side reading to show the context various books and essays are written in.

For example, there used to be an essay on T@L called ‘The Anarchist Response to Crime’, but then when Bob Black wrote a response to it, it was taken down. My guess is because then it could also be found as an appendix to Bob’s essay and that maybe some librarians preferred solely that item on the shelf as a way of finding the original essay.

And then in other situations, it feels like it’s worth it to some librarians to see non-anarchist texts on the library like ‘Against the Worldbuilders’ archived twice, as a compilation of essays and also as a stand alone essay.

But yeah, TKA is definitely a novel project, I wouldn’t want people directed to it through just looking through various anarchist texts that I submit to T@L. But I do personally think the Ellul connection is interesting, because I think a fair few people find Ellul today through Ted, and may not know about TKA, so it’s potentially an interesting signpost if you see the value in that. But definitely don’t feel the need to do it just to thank me or anything.

TKA does link to T@L in the ‘Related projects’ tab at the top. If you have any other suggestions I’d be curious to read and would take the arguments seriously. It’d be interesting to know how more people imagine making both minor and major overhauls to the site, beyond just that it should be more pro- or anti-Ted, or more anti-civ, etc.

Some insurrectionairy anarchists

Every now and again we get comments consisting of ‘how dare you critique anarchists of action’. One person tried to get the site deplatformed by emailing the server owner with some of these critiques, summarized below, with our response:

Disrupting The Purist Anarchist Pipeline

Argument for deleting: The piece argues that insurrectionary thought is a ‘pipeline’ to eco-extremism, which isn’t true.

Counter argument: The text doesn’t say anything like that:

I really value debate between various specialized political philosophies and strategies, and I have nothing against for example, green anarchism as the promotion of a style of critique not often seen, like black-anarchism and anarcha-feminism. These can help identify you as someone who has had the time to research the ways in which expertise in building democratic institutions, green architecture and rewilding will help get us to a better world.

In using the term pipeline I’m not making an absolutist factual claim, that if a person reads x thing, they are on their way to becoming y thing, always and definitively. I am saying there is a clearly observable psychological crossover among some people from these niche ideologies who move down them in a pursuit of viewing the world in more fundamentalist ways, and who also attempt to move others along in the same direction as them, and finally that it’s more common the further down you go.

Obviously, someone can travel all the way down to the level of a Satanist death cultist and only have been able to encourage one of their former friends to move down one level, thus spitting them out at only one level lower, but it’s still a concerning phenomenon, both for the few who end up at the very low levels, as well as the many who just take on a more purist gatekeeping form of anarchism.

Criminal Justice Reading List

Argument for deleting: The piece celebrates what they call ‘good prisons’ like in Norway (their words).

Counter argument: No, not black and white good, good-ish character virtues on the part of liberal reformist legislators who push for these policies in authoritarian countries as one short-term tactic among many:

‘The Good, the bad and the gray’ are rough approximations of the character virtue intentions of the individuals & groups listed, and/or the net positive outcomes we think they may have achieved in giving people the courage to break free from their social conditioning. That isn’t to say we think every action taken by every group or individual listed in the good or gray categories were ethical.

The Ultimate Ted Kaczynski Research Document

Argument for deleting: All texts should be free, not hidden behind a patreon account, otherwise you don’t really care about achieving an anarchist world.

Counter argument: One paywalled text on the website does not a not an anarchist make. The author says the book took over a year to produce and simply isn’t comfortable with the text receiving a wider audience until it’s fully finished. But, they’d like to find collaborators and are offering help:

At some point I would like to condense this book down into one normal length book, cutting chapters and putting quoted sources into my own words. If you’d like to help as a co-author or would like my help with your own ideas for what to do with the material, just let me know.

I’ve also quoted a ton of people in this book, so the offer is open to anyone I’ve quoted to let me know if you might like your quote updated with a new statement.

My email is ishkah@protonmail.com.

About this project

Argument for deleting: ‘Deprogramming’ people sounds manipulative.

Counter argument: The word deprogramming was used simply to refer to the emotional growth Ted K’s fascist fans could chose to go through for example by reading texts that critique their past literal glorification of the Khmer Rouge’s genocide.

A text dump on eco-extremism

Argument for deleting: The text includes the end stage ITS messages which are so vile and misanthropic that even the anarchist library would never upload them.

Counter argument: The text includes a massively long introductory critique and the latter stuff shows them consistently failing and withering into irrelevancy. Again, the likely net good is being able to understand the history of a group who started out slavishly walking in Ted’s ideological footsteps and how they became way, way more misanthropic and hopeless than him, plus their supporters and promoters.

Another person wrote these two arguments:

Texts by Daniel McGowen

Argument for deleting: Daniel is an ex anarchist POW, so he might deserve special treatment in being asked whether he wants his texts published.

Counter argument: There are countless witness testimonies of the time and place Daniel was radicalized also being a hotbed of interest in the Unabomber manifesto. So when using the website to learn about these events, it’s useful to have writing by the ELF members themselves to look through in the same topic. He acknowledges himself he made some dumb decisions like burning down a tree farm due to thinking they were genetically modified trees when they weren’t, and so hopes others can learn not to make the kind of mistakes he made, this website can attempt to in part serve that purpose.

AnarchistLibraries.net

Our current server owner who also owns anarchistlibraries.net was we think pretty dismissive of this attempted deplatforming:

I’d like to hear what the site owner has to say (which is, I think, on this list and it seems to me that the policy is explained here: https://www.thetedkarchive.com/special/rejected-texts), but please note that the ted K archive is not listed here: https://www.anarchistlibraries.net/libraries so it’s not something officially supported. The thetedkarchive.com domain is their own and no subdomains of anarchistlibraries.net (or equivalent) are in use. It’s, instead, part of a hosting project. Please note that on the same server there are also other random sites and being an anarchist site is not a prerequisite for being hosted.

There was one critique they agreed with though, which was that they disagreed with archiving a few fascist texts as primary source reading to understand the threat, so the texts were swiftly taken down by us.

The texts had included short disclaimers and were listed in the table of contents under a large section on anti-fascism. The thinking was that they would help with understanding why:

Some anarchists had become Ted K fans and then fascists.
Ted has acquired a fairly large fascist following.

In tandem with the above, one aim was also to attempt to archive lots of Ted’s reading interests and influences. Ted had a 1008 page book of Hitler’s speeches in his cabin. We couldn’t find the exact one he had, but we found and archived an even longer volume set, with more critical analysis included:[3]

Series I, #3, pp. 253–254. The name “Nicomus Bagley” is fictitious. The quotation actually is from a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches titled “My New Order.” I was a little embarrassed to put a quotation of Hitler in my notebook.

Anti-tech vanguardists

The archive was threatened with being taken down by Alex of Fitch & Madison, as two DMCA’s were sent to the domain owner and provider, with a lawyer specializing in copyright law CC’d in.:

... the copyright is vigorously enforced by his copyright heir and foreign rights agent (CC’d here) ...
... Ms. Susan Gale, Wild Freedom Publishing, LLC
Ms. Flavia Campbell, Esq., Dickinson Wright PLLC

Amusingly, two people who were close to Kacyznski, Julie Herrada and David Skrbina, both think who owns Ted’s intellectual property is still up in the air. And this legal essay seems to confirm that ambiguity: The Unabomber Strikes Again

We also somewhat accidentally managed to kick the e-luddite hornets nest by sending out a friendly email to various people related to Kaczynski who we knew were unlikely to be friendly to the project, but we thought nothing ventured, nothing gained:

Clay

Hello,

I’m a small contributor to ‘The Ted K Archive’ website and just wanted to let you know about where the project is up to in case it’s any use to you. Also, I know it’s a long shot, but if we can be of help to each other, or you know anyone who you think might like to reach out to collaborate, then that would be great too:

http://thetedkarchive.com

All the source PDFs for all the most important texts on the website have been archived on Archive.org. Including ‘the ‘Primary Source Documents on Ted K’ & ‘The Collected Works of Ted K’:

https://archive.org/details/@thetedkarchive

A spreadsheet has been created collecting together lots of the meta-data, like the source URLs, published dates, etc. here:

Finally, lots of scanned documents have been partially or fully typed up onto the website, such as:

Best,

Clay

Naturaleza Indómita

Hello,

Thank you for the information.

Greetings,

Naturaleza Indómita

Jim Fitzgerald

Thanks, I’ll check them out.

Jim F.

Anti-Tech Collective

This project is being undertaken without Dr. Kaczynski’s or the University of Michigan’s permission and in violation of copyright law. The owner of the site (a pro-tech leftist) only intends to nullify and counteract the anti-tech movement through this site, and the “critiques” of Dr. Kaczynski’s ideas are silly, feeble, and insipid. It would be best for the movement if the site were taken down entirely, but we will leave that work to the author’s, Fitch & Madison Publishers’, and the University of Michigan’s respective legal counsels. Since we are fostering the emergence of the anti-tech movement we have no interest in assisting you in any way.

Clay

This project is being undertaken without Dr. Kaczynski’s or the University of Michigan’s permission and in violation of copyright law.

It’s amusing that only 1 out of 3 of those claims are likely even that important to you in principle.

With regards to copyright law, three of the books in your online library are broken links to a pirate site called Z Library (old URL: 1lib.us, new URL: singlelogin.me):

The Biocentric Worldview
Cosmogonic Reflections
Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life

So, similarly with regards to universities permissions, I can easily imagine you being grateful to ‘a comrade’ sharing around a survival manual that they got from a university without the permission to share it.

The owner of the site (a pro-tech leftist) only intends to nullify and counteract the anti-tech movement through this site

Why use the word ‘only’, why is it necessary for you to view the world in such black and white terms. There could be other very meaningful and relatable, emotional and intellectual motivations driving some of the archivists on the site, which you could simply view as having incidentally been misplaced in the associated service of net bad outcomes.

and the “critiques” of Dr. Kaczynski’s ideas are silly, feeble, and insipid.

The site looks to have included every pro and anti Kaczynski critique that are easily findable and then some, over a 100.

I know for sure that your project doesn’t view at least some of those critiques under such negative terms because you have them featured in your library and on your YouTube channel.

Also, the skim reading of bad critiques is still valuable to many archivists and political science researchers, in order to get a better understand of the various cultures in critical support or opposition to an idea.

It would be best for the movement if the site were taken down entirely

I hope this is true, simply due to the undesirability of anti-tech philosophy and the effect shining a light on it has. But, I’m surprised you don’t see the free accessibility to these anti-tech works as being able to have a net positive effect, in drawing a bigger audience to the ideas. But, perhaps you don’t have enough confidence in the ideas ability to shine out the critiques.

Take for example the Nihilist vs Primitivist feud that spilled out of the remains of Green Anarchy magazine. Two magazines, Black Seed and Black and Green Review launched around the same time. And it was Black Seed’s free distribution that helped the nihilist anticiv position win over more influence than the other could muster.

Finally, it’s not difficult for a website to keep popping up again and again, even if the current domain provider takes it down, especially if it’s maintained by committed anarchists without bank accounts or fixed abodes to care about. So, I suggest learning to live with that reality and find interesting ways to engage with the project, even if that’s in opposition.

Enjoy the hand written and badly scanned up documents that were typed up and formatted, for ease of reading, quoting, linking and saving. If you have any suggestions for texts you think it would be worthwhile to include, feel free to let me know.

Fitch & Madison + Co-signers

A Warning about The Ted K Archive

It has recently come to our attention that a pro-tech leftist that goes by the name Theo Slade has created a website titled “The Ted K Archive” in order to upload all of Kaczynski’s writings online against Kaczynski’s wishes and in violation of the author’s copyrights. Slade also intends for this site to serve as a platform to critique Kaczynski’s ideas and turn individuals away from the cause against the techno-industrial system for the sake of wild Nature. While Slade and his collaborators have gone around to various online communities and individuals that have some affinity with Kaczynski’s ideas in an attempt to solicit help under the guise of creating a project that could be beneficial to the incipient movement, make no mistake, their actions are duplicitous and the overall group behind the website only attempts to nullify the nascent movement against the techno-industrial system for the sake of wild Nature.

In the “About This Project” section of their website (https://www.thetedkarchive.com/special/about-this-project) it is made clear that this site is nothing more than a sad attempt to harm the cause against the techno-industrial system for the sake of wild Nature:

“... we’re hoping the website can work to draw people in with similar politics to [Kaczynski] and similar mental health issues frankly. Then for the cold hard reality of the primary source reading material, the epic-ness of the suggested reading material and the inviting discussion spaces connected to the website, to all have a deprogramming effect and be a mental health support.”

And as for Slade’s collaborators, it seems that the majority are pro-tech as well: “We, the librarians who bought the website domain, are pro-tech anarchists, but we just find his life story and impact really interesting.”

While their critiques of Kaczynski’s writings are so silly that they are not even worth countering (as any reasonably rational and intelligent person would not be swayed by the “arguments” put forth in them), the attempt by these leftists to have control over Kaczynski’s writings (again, expressly against his wishes) is concerning. Those that want to foster the healthy growth of the movement against the techno-industrial system for the sake of wild Nature should denounce and disavow the project, and take steps to avoid any collaboration with it.

Signed,

Clay

I fully understand wanting to discourage anti-tech people from providing free labor to a project that’s against your ideological interests, but I think there were a few falsehoods that you could likely benefit from correcting for your own sake.

Theo Slade has created a website titled “The Ted K Archive” in order to upload all of Kaczynski’s writings online against Kaczynski’s wishes and in violation of the author’s copyrights. … the attempt by these leftists to have control over Kaczynski’s writings (again, expressly against his wishes) is concerning.

Can you expand on what Ted received, what was told to him, and what his thoughts were? I know Theo sent a letter and two books to him, but he said he didn’t get any response.

My understanding, and that of others like David Skrbina and Julie Herrada is that who owns Ted’s writings is not settled:

It depends on who owns the copyrights to all the stuff and it’s not really clear to me who does at this point.
--David Skrbina[4]

The intellectual rights are not yet settled as far as I know.
--Julie Herrada[5]

Also, there were many court rulings that pretty brazenly disregarded his desire to have any say in who could do what with his writings during his lifetime.

Slade and his collaborators have gone around to various online communities and individuals that have some affinity with Kaczynski’s ideas in an attempt to solicit help under the guise of creating a project that could be beneficial to the incipient movement, make no mistake, their actions are duplicitous and the overall group behind the website only attempts to nullify the nascent movement against the techno-industrial system for the sake of wild Nature.

Could you provide evidence of any examples in which you think archivists have behaved duplicitously? I know Theo was part of an email group retyping up Ted’s book Truth versus Lies and that the group originally desired to put it up on the anarchist library for free, but I don’t think there was a good reason that that was reacted to with such venom by Alex. I know Ted would suggest people write to Julie Herrada who would give the book out for free to anyone who asked, so I don’t understand the harm in people simply having free access to the text in an easier-to-read format without having to waste Julie’s time.

Also, explanations of the admins pro-tech beliefs are pinned to the top of twitter, tagged as labels to the accounts of admins on discord and never downplayed.

Many of the admins simply enjoy reading and writing about niche political philosophy, so value archiving hard-to-find texts, plus creating space for and promoting discussion of this reading material.

While their critiques of Kaczynski’s writings are so silly that they are not even worth countering ...

The site looks to have included every pro- and anti-Kaczynski critique that are easily findable and then some, over 100.

I know for sure The Anti-Tech Collective, of which Alex from F&M is a member, doesn’t view at least some of those critiques under such negative terms because you have them featured on the ATC website.

Also, the skim reading of bad critiques is still valuable to many archivists and political science researchers, to get a better understanding of the various cultures in critical support or opposition to an idea.

Those that want to foster the healthy growth of the movement against the techno-industrial system for the sake of wild Nature should denounce and disavow the project, and take steps to avoid any collaboration with it.

I don’t think this is bad general advice in principle, but enemies can still mutually benefit from some forms of dialogue, like debates and small innocuous information sharing.

For example, one of the reasons for the first email was simply the long-shot hope that there could potentially be collaboration on small stuff like working together on a complete list of titles of essays that Ted had written i.e. that we could name rare essays sent to newspapers that not many people know about and other people might know the titles of some we don’t know about.

That’s all anyway, best of luck in finding opportunities for character virtue flourishing,

Clay

Eco-extremists

It is comical how calling the website ‘the’ ted k archive and including social anarchist texts has made it possible for some teddites to relate to how pissed off the social anarchists were when ITS texts got added to ‘the’ anarchist library.

Here are some of their critiques below:

Censored doxes of the eco-extremist writer/translator/publisher Abe Cabrera and his vivisectionist wife

Argument for deleting: No good is being achieved. And even if the husband did commit an unethical act, the wife can’t be guilty of the crimes her husband committed.

Counter argument: Identifying names and locations are blacked out or replaced with the word ‘[censored]’. The likely net good is being able to understand the history of a group who started out slavishly walking in Ted’s ideological footsteps and how they became way, way more misanthropic and hopeless than him, plus their supporters and promoters.

Also of interest is how everyone that was part of the Atassa project reacted to the doxing and the character description of Abe in Children of Ted:

A text dump on bronze age pervert

Argument for deleting: Fascist shit has nothing to do with Ted K.

Counter argument: We think Ted K is a reactionairy, who cycled through a bunch of reactionary dispositions, starting with fascism and ending on a kind of anti-tech vanguardism. He advocated an organizational strategy similar to Maoism and suggested seeing if alliances could be made with jihadists like Bin Laden.

So, we value text dumps on similar people to understand the connections, like why the bronze age pervert dude called up Anarchy Radio recently. Eco-extremists don’t like those connections being made because many of them like Ted and would like to see way more eco-extremist texts on websites like The Ted K Archive and The Anarchist Library.

Rather than moaning about why The Ted K Archive hasn’t been deplatformed, they could easily simply create rival projects for what they would like to see in the world. They could even buy thetedkarchive.org domain and mirror every anti-civ text on this website and delete the rest. All the software is open source and pages open to mirroring and downloading, so they could do it within a few hours work if they have anyone who ever sat through computer programming lesson in school. None of us had to suffer through that thank Zeus, but we’re grateful to the people who did, who decided to host thetedkarchive, and who don’t feel they need to agree 1000% on every editorial decision.

[1] The rare Unabomber documents being kept hidden by a few zealots and rich people

[2] Ted Kaczynski’s Updated Notes on His Manifesto

[3] Ted’s Notes on his Journals (Feb. 1996)

[4] A text dump on David Skrbina

[5] An email exchange with Theo.