Dear Viktor Recel:

My Verizon bill is online. @dril is posting again. Ted Kaczynski does not deserve a second chance. None of these things are wrong, but none of these things are right.

I started a book club this winter. I wanted to reconnect with old friends, written and living. The idea was good, the results were not. That’s the problem with ideas. Their failures can never be faulted, so they live second, third, and sometimes immortal lives.

You want to feed the children. I want to feed the children. Our best ideas for feeding children are to destroy the earth and take from each other. This is the story of humanity in three sentences.

The word culture has its etymology in feeding children. It means to cultivate, to grow. All our ideas, all our beauty, everything we point to as culture has its roots in making more copies of food in order to make more copies of ourselves. Mary Shelly created modern horror during a summer where nothing grew. She gave birth to Frankenstein because the fields would not make copies of food. She lost her second child before the novel was published. Mary Shelly’s horror was that she could not make copies of Mary Shelly. 

Horror is the disruption of copies.

The year without a summer gave birth to science fiction because it gave birth to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Soon it will be summer all the time and that will be a new type of horror. Endless Summer. Global Warming. Some people do not want to acknowledge global warming. They want to bury it, hide it. They use their power to remove it from our science. They treat it as fiction. Science Fiction. Mary Shelly created science fiction to express her horror with nature.

Why are they doing this? Because they are in denial. Our culture is burying the fact that we will not be able to cultivate soon. Instead of confronting our sins, our inability to get past the basic idea of agriculture, we make copies of monsters instead. We take good ideas and twist them. We turn old symbols on their heads once again.

The cross represents a man nailed to a tree. It is a symbol of God’s unconditional love for his creation. Set a cross on fire and it is a manifestation of horror.

Ted Kaczynski was right. Freedom cannot compete with technology. Nothing can compete with technology. Technology promises us the ability to free copying from the Earth. Copies without the body. Copies without the risk of failure. Endless unlimited copying. We will never turn our back on technology because our drive to copy is stronger than anything else. Even Uncle Teddy could not get past this. He killed people to force the newspapers to make copies of his message.

Newspapers are technology for making copies of ideas. Bombs are technology for taking from someone else. Kaczynski destroyed lives in order to make copies of his ideas. If he hadn’t become a monster, we would have never listened to him.

Horror is the medium of ideas these days. He understood that before so many others, but he was wrong. Still, his ideas lived on. That’s the problem with ideas. People blame the result, never the idea. This is why we will never abandon agriculture. It is the original technology. It is the first bad idea, only we’ll never see it that way.

White men burned crosses because their ability to make free agricultural products was taken away. They burnt crosses when confronted with a notion of equality. Equality meant less for them, less for their copies. Burning crosses are back because people are worried about fewer future copies. In the endless summer, there is less pie to go around.

That’s scarcity mindset and it is horror.

We are leaving an age of abundance and entering an age of scarcity horror.

Everything about Kaczynski is wrong except that he is right. He is the John the Baptist of scarcity horror and he predicted the coming of the Scarcity Christ who walks among us today. This Scarcity Christ is not a man, it is not a woman, it is not non-binary. It is a god. It is a system. It is a god system called technology. People were outraged when corporations became citizens, yet few have quite realized that Facebook achieved nationhood. You have which is why I am writing to you. What, Mr Recel, is beyond nationhood? God mode. The system is already God, will Facebook elevate itself like Caesar did? No, it is smarter than that. It has copied itself onto billions of devices and walks among us. It is the god of small things, the god of the people. Technology is destroying us because it needs to make more copies of itself, just like we destroyed the planet in order to make more copies of ourselves.

Scarcity Christ is here to take away our freedoms and Ted Kaczynski saw this coming. For that we locked him in a supermax cell in ADX Florence, the retirement home for monsters. World Trade Center Bomber, Underwear Bomber, Shoe Bomber, Oklahoma City Bomber, Boston Bomber. These are the monsters of ADX Florence. These are men who decided to blow up the world instead of making copies of themselves. Prometheus volcels. Prometheus incels. Frankenbombers.

Everything about Kaczynski is wrong, except that he is right.

I don’t know what to do about that, but I am intrigued by the horror of it. I am filled with fascination by the errors that emerge when our ability to copy is threatened.

Earlier, I mentioned that I started a book club. The first book we read was White Noise by Don DeLillo. If you are familiar with this work, then you know that the protagonist is a professor at a small liberal arts college who invents the field of Hitler studies. Hitler studies turned out to be a lucrative field. It was untapped and ripe for exploitation. I feel the same potential exists for Kaczynski.I would like to create a Kaczynski podcast called Freedom Club and air it on your network. I am giving you the exclusive first option to distribute unlimited copies of my ideas on the Unabomber.

While he appears at first to be an unlikely subject of examination, I ask you to look closer at the man, at what he portended, and at all the interesting offshoots we can go in. This letter alone shows what fertile ground lay at his feet. Furthermore, all of his work exists in the public domain. There are no rights issue. Beyond that, he remains a rich figure in the public imagination, but is less known among younger consumers. As the recent Netflix series Narcos has shown, there is a great demand for the resuscitation of popular monsters from the 80’s. If Escobar can pull those ratings, then I am confident that a Kaczynski podcast can be successful.

If I am too forward for making this proposal directly to you, then I apologize. I bypassed the submission process on the advice of a mutual friend, Sean Eckhard, who was a part of my book club. He found my fascination with Kaczynski intriguing and suggested that you would as well. With his encouragement, I have drafted this letter on the hope that we can further discuss the Freedom Club Podcast proposal.

Sincerely,

Coyote Hill

Reproduced with permission of Mr. Coyote Hill

“Scream and Manifesto”by Xurxo Martínez is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0