The Unabomber and Punky Brewster

Two historic events have been in the news recently.  These feel incongruously tied...

The 20th anniversary of the arrest of Ted Kaczynski (AKA The Unabomber) is coming on April 3.  Yahoo! News has published a number of stories about Ted, mostly about his life and writings in prison.  Much of this reporting has been well worth reading.  Ted Kaczynski's life's work in writing is being preserved at the University of Michigan, where Ted earned his PhD in Mathematics.  As far as serial killers go, Ted has to be one of the more fascinating and enigmatic characters.  It is much harder seeing the writing of Jeffry Dahmer being preserved in perpetuity by an academic institution.
I was in college when The Unabomber's Manifesto was published in 1995.  The internet was in its infancy at the time, but it was available online and I downloaded and read it in entirety.  I've tried more recently to read it and its repetitiveness made it hard to complete.  Or perhaps my attention span is now shorter than it once was.
I had graduated by the time Ted was arrested in 1996, but was still fascinated by the story of the Unabomber.  What I found most compelling about him was that, while his methods were madness, his message was hard to argue against.  I've met a few PhD's who I struggled to understand how they got their degrees, but good schools like UofM don't typically just hand them out and, it was easy to see Ted's intelligence.  Still, one must ignore the bombings to think truly think this.
And that makes his message harder to take seriously.  How a few random bombings, often against bit players in technology, will affect any real change is, frankly, a really dumb idea.  It did get his Manifesto published, but the New York Times likely did that to sell more newspapers over any other reason.
One other fascinating aspect of Ted's life was that not only did he believe and espouse the dangers of modern technological society, but he lived what he believed in a small cabin without electricity or running water in Montana.  It is much easier to write about the destruction of the world, Al Gore style, finger-wagging and living a very comfortable existence.
A few years after his arrest and conviction, OFF! Magazine published Ship of Fools by Ted Kaczynski.  I heard a blurb about this on NPR and wrote the magazine editor for a copy, which I still have.  This led to a short correspondence with the magazine's editor, Tim Lapietra.  I continued to get OFF! for a few years, giving me insight into the fringe left of American society - a scary place indeed.  I wish I could find Tim's final editorial from the magazine as he made some personal observations of the fringe left and what it was really preaching.

And 10 years before Ted was arrested, while the Unabomber was bombing computer store owners, the Challenger Space Shuttle blew up over coastal Florida - the other historic event in the news this week.

I can vividly recall the first space shuttle launch in 1981.  I was riveted to the idea of, not a rocket, but of a spaceship blasting off and returning to earth to be reused.  The space shuttle was infinitely more cool than a rocket.  I even had an Estes model rocket designed to look like the space shuttle - painted flat white (with house paint), just like the real thing.
By 1986, space shuttle launches were become routine, at best, and maybe even boring.  In order to bring public attention back to the space program, NASA held a contest, American Idol style (long before reality TV invaded), to transform a commoner into an astronaut.  A school teacher, truly "one of us" was chosen.
Our school classroom was not one of the many which watched the doomed space shuttle Challenger launch on January 28, 1986, but it was all the talk at recess.  Being of a certain age when things blowing up is cool, the initial reaction of many of us was, "Gosh, it is a spaceship, don't they blow up all the time?"
Being probably too old for  the TV show Punky Brewster, I'm slightly embarrassed to still remember the episode post-Challenger that dealt with the Challenger destruction.  Why this memory is stuck in my mind almost as vividly as the actual destruction of the space shuttle is yet another mystery of the feeble mind.  We are not in complete control of our memories!

Space shuttle launches continued after a hiatus, with new o-rings.  Despite Punky Brewster, the astronauts still must have been reminded of that old joke during prelaunch readiness that, "this thing was built by the lowest bid!"
Manned space missions are even more boring now than they were in 1986.  After the 2003 Columbia destruction on reentry into the Earth's atmosphere (Don't make spaceships out of Nerf!), the majority of time in space was spent making sure the shuttles survived launch with a few minutes to look at an ant farm sent into space by a grade school in Topeka, Kansas.
Unmanned missions continue to provide much more data, and excitement, at a fraction of the cost and risk.  Mars Curiosity and Rover provided real data and vivid images long after they were expected to die a quiet death on the surface of an alien planet - something impossible with a manned mission.
Meanwhile, manned missions are now using Soviet Soyuz technology derived from the 1960's to put humans in the International Space Station.

And maybe that is where the connection between Ted Kaczynski and the Challenger destruction actually do come together.  The Unabomber was railing against the technological destruction of humanity and society, while the Challenger brought this to life with horribly tragic and visible consequences.  And now we're reduced to using cold war (ancient, but still probably unacceptable to the Unabomber) technology to put humans into space, to accomplish things of questionable value relative to what modern automation and robotics can do.
So while Ted's message against nearly all technology is impossible to live - not many of us want to live in shacks in the woods, perhaps a Luddite can help us think about what technology can, and should be used for.  And more importantly, an Atavist can help us think about what it should not.