Desde un bosque lejano : Tecnología, colapso y revolución

Theodore Kaczynski was a brilliant philosopher and mathematician who, after graduating with honors from Harvard, obtained his position as a professor at the University of Berkeley when he was barely twenty-five years old. However, he only taught a couple of courses before secluding himself in a cabin without water or electricity in the woods of Montana. From there, and over almost two decades, he kept the FBI and the CIA in check with the shipments of various package bombs that caused the death of three people and injured twenty. With his attacks he intended to light the spark of a global revolution against the techno-industrial complex (and its latest exponent: artificial intelligence), causing climate change and the ultimate and catastrophic alienation of humanity. Kaczynski was therefore a terrorist, but also, as uncomfortable as it may be, one of the most lucid thinkers of our time, as the essays collected in this volume demonstrate. As we explain in detail in its prologue, as editors we believe that it is possible (and necessary) to value his writings without endorsing his actions, just as we admire the catalog of the Feltrinelli publishing house, even if its editor and founder died planting, he too, a bomb; or how we read the writer William S. Burroughs with passion even though he murdered his wife; or we continue learning from Plato without defending, like him, slavery. In this sense, the theoretical analysis that Kaczynski proposes stabs its dart at the fundamental problem of our time: the progressive extinction of individual freedom and the growing ecological catastrophe caused by our absolute dependence on contemporary technology, which has become an autonomous system that does not serve human beings, but rather uses them. And his reasoning, impeccable from a theoretical point of view and difficult to refute, led him to conclude, on the one hand, that the ultimate problem is not capitalism, but the technological system that governs it; and on the other hand, that this system is not susceptible to reform, and that, therefore, it must be destroyed to avoid the final devastation of the planet and the vast majority of its inhabitants.