I realized that the age of many of the people here on Hubski might mean you have no idea who the Unabomber is, or about the Unabomber Manifesto, "Industrial Society and its Future."

When I was seven, our house got access to the Internet. I was a nerdy kid, so I spent more time on there than most of my peers - one of my childhood memories is teaching the rest of my elementary school class about Google. So I can honestly say I was one of the first to "grow up" with the Internet.

One of the weird things about that is that it has exposed me to collective memories that I otherwise would never get to know. In high school, for example, I read a ton of Cracked.com articles (back when they were good), and it exposed me to a metric ton of references in the collective memory of Americans that I slowly picked up on over the years. A simple example is that I only watched Star Wars two years ago, but I cobbled together most of the story and knew pretty much all of the cast solely because it was referenced so many times by others. Same goes for Pulp Fiction, which I still haven't seen but has been mentioned and giffed and meme'd on Reddit so much I almost don't need to see it anymore. If you ever want to know just how deep Reddit's American-centrism is, consider the fact that I, a Dutch guy in his twenties, know what this is:

It's part of your collective memory, yet I know that people are nostalgic about being in that tent during gym class. I do not need knowledge like that and in any other generation it would be completely lost on me, but through the magic of the Internet and enough exposure, I kinda know what the collective memory is about.

D.A.R.E. is another example like that. Or O.J. Simpson. Or, and this is why I wrote this whole tangent, the Unabomber. So I already knew the gist, knew his name is Ted Kazinsky, that he was from Harvard and I recalled this Radiolab episode about Henry Murray.

I hadn't read it before though. It vaguely reminds me of a right-wing guy I've had some political discussions with, if his ideology got turned to 11. It's pure, concentrated pessimism throughout - which, sadly, is not something unique in this day and age.

I once heard someone say that the left think in structures, and the right in individuals. Ted does not fuck around: the individual is pure and righteous and needs to be left alone because the world is totally a meritocracy, you guys.

16. Words like "self-confidence," "self-reliance," "initiative,"

"enterprise," "optimism," etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist

vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist.

I don't think it has a lot of merit in the modern age. What I do worry about is that a bunch of his points are agreeable. I mean, didn't South Park do a whole story arc on the culture around political correctness?

12. Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from middle- to upper-middle-class families.

The danger is that it might make the whole piece appear defensible enough to be adopted today. I can totally see some alt-right loser looking past his fifteen years of terrorism and adapt it as his new Bible. I doubt he'll ever get as far as Ted got, though.