"Las ideas del Unabomber: un eco inquietante que atraviesa el espectro político, desde Musk hasta Mangione"

Carlos, un joven de 27 años de España, como muchos de su generación, a menudo recurre a deslizarse por diversas redes sociales cuando siente aburrimiento. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X... Pronto aparece una publicación que ya ha visto antes. Es una captura de pantalla de una aplicación con el mensaje: “Responde a más seguidores con tu propia IA. Crea una IA para contestar preguntas, compartir enlaces y conectar con tus fans sin necesidad de aceptar solicitudes de mensajes.” De fondo, se puede ver la imagen de un hombre barbudo, desaliñado y de aspecto severo. Carlos comparte la publicación con varios conocidos ideológicamente opuestos, quienes se ríen o comentan que tiene razón. Ese hombre es Theodore “Ted” J. Kaczynski, el terrorista estadounidense ampliamente conocido como el “Unabomber.”

Of all the corners of social media and its various fads, few are more extravagant than the posts about Kaczynski. Photos and videos with catchy, pounding music show his ramshackle shelter, his homemade bombs, passages from his manifesto, his police record, and his identikit. There are profiles that encourage people to take the “Ted-pill,” a reference to The Matrix, in which the protagonist Neo escapes from his mental-dream prison after ingesting a red pill. In this case, the pill symbolizes rejecting the industrial world and its consequences. As Baudelaire wrote, man advances through forest-groves of symbols, strange and solemn, who follow him with their familiar glances.

A Harvard graduate at a young age, Kaczynski completed his PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan. His thesis was so complex that only 10 or 12 people in the United States are said to understand it. Later, he became an adjunct professor at Berkeley but resigned after just two years to isolate himself in a cabin with no running water, gas, or electricity — just 13 square meters in the woods of Montana, in the style of Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson.