TECHTONICS

UNABOMBER: THE MAN WE CANNOT SWITCH OFF

JÓZEF KONRAD

October 8, 2026

A man who rejected technological society has become dependable streaming content. Ted Kaczynski returns to our screens through platforms designed to keep us watching, an arrangement he would presumably have found instructive. Beyond the cabin and the manhunt lies an argument that has become harder to dismiss: Useful inventions can gradually turn into obligations, while convenience quietly narrows our room to refuse. His renewed screen life offers an occasion to reconsider his unsettling instincts about dependence, autonomy, and the kind of world we have learned to call progress.

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There is something almost indecently convenient about watching the Unabomber on Netflix. The man who wanted to bring industrial civilization to an end arrives through a broadband connection, travels across a network of servers, and settles into the evening between dinner and whatever the platform recommends next. We can pause him to answer a message. Somewhere in this arrangement, a system devoted to keeping us watching has found another use for its most uncompromising opponent. Ted Kaczynski has become content.

Janus Metz’s Unabomber, released on Netflix in late September 2026, joins an already substantial screen life: Manhunt: Unabomber (2017), Unabomber: In His Own Words (2020), Tony Stone’s Ted K (2021). The attractions are obvious. A brilliant mathematician abandons an academic career, retreats to a small cabin in Montana, and becomes the subject of an extraordinary investigation. The story has a location, a recognizable face, a family drama, and an ending. It scarcely requires a development meeting. Yet the frequency of these returns suggests another possibility: Perhaps the investigation has ended while the argument has become more difficult to put away.

Kaczynski’s bombing campaign killed three people and injured twenty-three. That history remains part of any honest account of him. It also leaves a separate question: What did he understand about the society he attacked? His crimes have often made his writings something to explain through his personality rather than examine as an argument. The film and television versions provide occasions to reverse that emphasis. We have spent considerable time asking how this man became estranged from the world. We might also ask what he found estranging about it, and why some of his objections now sound uncomfortably familiar.

His 1995 manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” describes a civilization in which human beings are increasingly required to accommodate the needs of technological systems. Its central concern is autonomy: the capacity to pursue consequential goals through one’s own effort and exercise control over essential conditions of life. He calls the pursuit and attainment of such goals the “power process.” Modern society, he argues, frustrates this need while providing substitute pursuits. He also maintains that the industrial system could not be reformed sufficiently to preserve freedom and advocates for its revolutionary destruction.

He put his objections in writing. The system acquired the adaptation rights.

My ambition here is more modest: to reconsider the perceptiveness of his diagnosis.

What distinguishes his strongest observations is an instinct for the way dependence develops. An invention arrives promising to make something easier. We adopt it because it does. Then businesses, institutions, and social expectations reorganize around its availability. Eventually the person who declines discovers that an ordinary preference has become an administrative difficulty. An employer assumes access. A school changes its procedures. A bank discontinues an alternative. None of these decisions need be sinister. Their combined effect can nevertheless narrow the practical terms of participation. The invention remains useful. Its usefulness has helped make it compulsory.

Kaczynski sensed that a society could undergo this transformation without ever deciding, in any meaningful collective sense, that it wanted to. Each innovation would bring its own attractive justification. The accumulated dependencies would become apparent later, when returning to the previous arrangement was no longer straightforward. That is a considerable insight. We are good at comparing devices, less good at discussing the kind of life that develops around them. We can debate whether the new version has a better camera while scarcely noticing that a functioning camera is now the least important reason we must carry it.

Consider the familiar assurance that we can always switch it off. Switch off what? The phone through which work arrives? The application through which the school communicates? The system that provides access to an account? The ability to decline a technology depends on the continued existence of arrangements that do not require it. When those arrangements disappear, the switch retains its physical function while losing much of its political meaning. Kaczynski’s instincts were unusually sharp on this distinction. A person can possess an abundance of choices within a system and very little authority over the system’s place in their life.

This helps explain why his arguments can feel contemporary. He was attentive to a direction of travel: increasing complexity, widening dependence, and a shrinking space in which people could determine their own conditions. Particular technologies were instances of a larger process. Seen from that perspective, social media and artificial intelligence do not require an entirely new vocabulary. They give us new occasions to ask the question he placed at the center of his critique: Who is adapting to whom?

Social media brings the question directly into all our lives. We may have excellent reasons to use it. But those opportunities also create obligations. We must maintain a presence. We must keep appearing.

The argument concerned technological systems. The injuries belonged to people.

The most effective platforms offer things we actually value. Friendship, recognition, income, and the discovery of work are substantial benefits. That is why their authority can become so difficult to challenge. Leaving involves a calculation of what might be lost. For a small magazine, withdrawal could mean readers; for an artist, invitations; for someone working independently, a network of people who make continued work possible. The recommendation to spend less time online can sound oddly serene when delivered to a person whose rent depends partly on being visible there.

The pursuit of attention then acquires a peculiar character. A person works toward a goal while the mechanism determining success remains largely outside their control. Recognition arrives, disappears, or changes its terms. Effort becomes increasingly attentive to what appears to travel. The thought is evaluated for its likely reception before it has fully formed. Will this attract notice? Will it keep the audience? Is it sufficiently immediate? Slowly, an imagined measurement takes a seat beside the writer. The sentence now has company, and the company is impatient.

Kaczynski’s concern with autonomous effort offers a useful way to examine this situation. The relevant question is what our activity enables us to direct. A great deal of work may produce visibility while leaving the worker with little durable control over its conditions. A following can be substantial and a livelihood precarious. An apparent increase in influence can coexist with dependence on rules made elsewhere. Kaczynski’s suspicion that busy, ambitious lives might still contain a profound deficit of autonomy is one of the more illuminating elements of his thought. Activity alone provides no reliable measure of freedom.

His language of substitute pursuits can be too severe when applied indiscriminately. Art, scholarship, sport, and friendship have purposes that cannot be reduced to biological necessity. But the underlying distinction becomes valuable when it helps us identify goals that have been supplied to us and competitions whose rules we never chose. A meaningful project can gradually be reorganized around maintaining a position. The person still works hard and may still enjoy the work. Increasingly, however, the effort sustains participation in a contest that has become difficult to leave.

Wanted by the FBI. Later, by the content department.

Artificial intelligence intensifies the issue by making assistance itself a source of new expectations. A task that once took an afternoon can be completed quickly. That can be a welcome gain. But what happens to the afternoon? A worker may recover it, or an employer may fill it with further tasks. A new capacity may increase independence or become the basis for a higher minimum of output. The useful demonstration tells us what the tool can do. The less spectacular question concerns who will decide how the saved time is used.

An office adopts a system because its competitors might. A worker adopts it because the office has. A student adopts it because speed appears to confer an advantage. Each choice can be rational on its immediate terms, even when the resulting arrangement leaves everyone under greater pressure. Kaczynski’s sensitivity to this process deserves attention. He understood that large changes in the conditions of life could emerge through decisions whose individual benefits concealed their collective costs. We need not imagine a secret command center. Competition can provide the coordination.

There is another cost that the vocabulary of assistance makes it easy to overlook. Composing a letter, reading a difficult passage, learning how to draw, and developing an argument are activities through which people acquire capacities. Their value includes what happens to the person performing them. Sometimes a shortcut is sensible; sometimes the process is the point. If we describe every difficult undertaking as an inefficiency awaiting correction, we begin losing the ability to distinguish burdens from experiences worth having. Kaczynski’s emphasis on effort restores something that the language of frictionless living tends to remove: the possibility that a satisfying life requires certain difficulties.

His instincts also matter when we consider the environment. Digital services arrive with a remarkably weightless vocabulary. We speak of clouds, connections, and intelligence, while the systems require electricity, equipment, buildings, and material supply chains. The screen makes these requirements easy to forget. A prompt appears, an answer arrives, and the transaction seems to have occurred in a place without weather, geography, or consequence. Technological society has become especially accomplished at putting distance between an experience and the infrastructure that makes it possible.

Behind the recurring television event, the deaths were final.

The standard reassurance is that greater efficiency will reduce the costs. Sometimes it does. But using less energy for each operation does not establish how many operations we should perform, just as producing a more streamlined object has nothing necessarily to do with how many objects a society needs. There remains a question of scale. What are we expanding, for what purpose, and with what limits? These questions are awkward because they cannot be resolved simply by making the next device better. They require judgments about the direction of life, including the uncomfortable possibility that some forms of expansion should stop.

Kaczynski’s insistence on examining the whole arrangement cuts through the habit of treating every consequence as a separate technical problem. We buy a solution, discover another dependency, then seek a further solution to manage it. The sequence can continue indefinitely while the original question disappears: Is this producing a world in which people can live more freely, with less damage to the conditions that sustain them? His impatience was directed toward a civilization that seemed able to improve its means without reconsidering its ends.

An open floor plan. No outlets for professional networking.

Whatever the excesses of his conclusion, that impatience has intellectual value. It makes room for a neglected form of judgment: deciding that a capability should remain unused or used within firm boundaries. A landscape, a practice, a form of work, or a degree of independence may be worth preserving even when a proposed replacement offers measurable advantages. Restraint can involve understanding an innovation perfectly well. We have become accustomed to praising the person who identifies a new possibility. The person who considers it carefully and declines is more likely to be described as resistant to change. Kaczynski forces us to consider whether that resistance might contain intelligence.

The cabin gives this refusal an enduring image. One person, a small shelter, a comprehensible inventory of needs—it suggests a scale of existence in which the relationship between effort and outcome can be seen. Its appeal becomes sharper in a world where ordinary life depends on arrangements too vast for any individual to grasp. We need not want his isolation to recognize the desire expressed by the image. It is the desire to understand what sustains us, to possess useful capacities, and to have some say over the obligations that organize the day.

This is why digital detox feels so small beside the argument. A weekend away may be pleasant. It does little to alter what will be expected on Monday. The language converts a question about the organization of society into advice about managing fatigue. Return refreshed, ready to resume the same demands. What would matter more is the capacity to establish boundaries that institutions must respect. A person should not have to negotiate every interval of undisturbed life as a special accommodation.

Before the case became a viewing recommendation, it arrived as news like this.

The films repeatedly return us to the exceptional individual. His estrangement has a face and a setting. Our accommodations are less cinematic. They accumulate in ordinary changes: a service moves online, a workplace extends its hours of availability, a professional practice becomes dependent on maintaining a feed. There is no single scene in which we consent to the resulting arrangement. Perhaps this is one reason Kaczynski remains compelling. His refusal gives visible form to pressures that we usually encounter separately and accept as the cost of getting on with things.

The streaming platform can accommodate that refusal with impressive ease. It offers the critic of technological dependence another reason to remain connected. Kaczynski’s ideas may circulate, provoke conversation, even make viewers uncomfortable, while the conditions of viewing continue undisturbed. The system need not suppress the objection. It can even recommend it. A challenge to the organization of attention becomes an item within that organization. After the final scene, there will be something else.

This essay will also depend on some of the mechanisms it questions. It will need readers and probably a reminder that it exists. Recognizing that dependence provides a useful starting point. Most of us will have to recover greater authority over our lives from within the arrangements already sustaining them. Participation is a circumstance. It need not be a permanent endorsement. Criticism matters when it helps us identify what we have accepted, what we value, and what we would like to change.

A pane of glass then. A screen now. Distance has always helped us look.

Kaczynski’s relevance lies in the acuity of his unease. He sensed that comfort could coexist with a loss of control, that expanding capabilities could narrow practical freedom, and that a society absorbed in solving its next problem might lose sight of the life its solutions were building. These are substantial instincts about the modern world. They deserve examination without the reassuring assumption that someone so estranged could have nothing to tell those of us who stayed.

When the film ends, switching off the screen remains easy enough. Carrying that decision into the arrangements governing work, communication, and public life is harder. The man returns because the case makes a compelling story. The argument returns because the freedom to refuse has become a question we can no longer comfortably leave to a man in a cabin.

Józef Konrad was born in Łódź, Poland, in 1978 and holds a degree in anthropology. His subsequent research in comparative civilization studies examines forest settlements, intentional communities, and off-grid living experiments, with particular attention to the obligations people carry into places designed to escape them. He lives in rural Poland, where his interest in technological independence still depends on a reliable internet connection.

Cover image: The future once looked like a promising career.