I’ve been writing a few research essays for an online archive of texts called The Ted K Archive recently. So, I just wanted to debate the ethics of that project with people, because I think there’s obviously a lot of interesting unethical pitfalls to curating an archive based around interest in a serial killer.

Basically the TLDR to my interest in Ted K is I used to live with a primitivist crust punk who promoted misanthropic terror attacks and who died really young: a text dump on Jay. So, I just also find Ted K’s weird life story and what people take from it an interesting fault line in culture and politics.

Baudrillard asserts that the explosion of the terrorist’s bomb causes an implosion of meaning, a gaping hole in the social fabric that power frantically seeks to cover in order to restore the tyranny of meaning.

A lot of people are bought into the mythology around Ted that he was an ‘academic savant who rejected society to live in the wild, and only struck back at technology because of its continued encroachment on his wilderness life’. But, the timeframe for Ted feeling lost and first planning to kill started long before that.

So, what’s interesting to me about this is I think this archetypal mythologising is a mirror image of Euro-American narratives of the ‘last wild Indian and the noble savage’. The ‘noble savage’ is admired for starting out a Wildman fighting a justified war against his oppressors and who then becomes someone who could teach the white man his wisdom; whereas Ted is perceived by some as having gone in the opposite direction, of being someone who had all the capabilities and drive to become well accomplished academically early on in life in advanced society, but who chose to reject society to go into the wilds and fight a justified war.

But, regardless of the truth or usefulness of these noble savage stories, when we see people who even vaguely resemble them, they are often very emotionally impactful because it’s a striking reminder on such an intuitive level that this fight to preserve wildlife habitat and low-impact ways of living are being lost. How we have failed to organize well-thought-out and sufficient resistance to the powers that bring about this environmental destruction.

Anyway, that’s probably enough about me. Here’s why the name of the website was chosen:

People who are curious about his life and impact are just the main audience we hope to draw in with this website.

Since we think he’s going to be remembered as a true crime curiosity anyways, we might as well capitalize on that and use it as a space to promote critiques of people with similar politics to him and help with similar mental health issues to him.

And here’s how the website is explained on the about page:

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.

Saying all that, this isn’t the main goal of the archive by any means, we’re mainly just happy to have been able to achieve archiving goals, such as creating parallel pages for every PDF on the Calif. Uni. website archive of UNABOM documents, making them easier to search through.

( click here to see a cute diagram )

So, one of my hobbies currently is trying to engage people in productive debates and recommending texts I enjoy discussing which argue people over to being pro-tech, but I’m open to arguments that I should be anti-tech.

And obviously just discouraging people from going down the anti-tech road for any length of time would also be a win for me, even if that means just staying with their old politics. As becoming an anti-tech extremist can have disastrous consequences for people whilst they’re involved with it, such as copy-cat terrorist networks:

Kaczynski’s influence on ITS is difficult to miss. Many parts of the group’s communiqués are merely paraphrases of the Manifesto: ‘The essence of the power process has four parts: setting out of the goal, effort, attainment of the goal, and Autonomy’. But the depth of Kaczynski’s influence on ITS is difficult to appreciate without knowing the origins of his ideas. ITS cites Morris’s The Human Zoo in support of its claim that ‘the Wild Nature of the human being in general was perverted when it started to become civilized’. The same communiqué later echoes Morris without citing him: ‘it is totally abnormal to live together with hundreds of strangers around you’.

—The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism

Finally, here’s a list of ethical steps taken by the 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’.

Finally, finally, here’s a few other archival projects for comparison:

The Ted Kaczynski Papers – A University special collections archive which Ted K sent copies of all his letters to, the library is mostly offline, but people can ask for scans of two folders per month.

UNABOM Collection – Another university one that is made up of donated scans of an FBI guy who worked on the UNABOM taskforce. Lots of the scans are online in downloadable pdfs.

I don’t think either of the archives above did much to publicize their archives, which was potentially a conscious ethical choice, to not make it easier to find for zealots, so to attempt to mainly cater to academic researchers.

The Anarchist Library – Huge archive that includes some non- and ex-anarchist texts, to document the reasons why people left anarchism or came to the philosophy late. But, it means archiving some really insipid stuff, such as primitivist terrorists ‘communiques’. I think they’re wrong to not include disclaimers at the top of texts and to not format some of the texts as text dumps, but their argument is that’s simply not their job as archivists.