The Ted K Archive’s Two Year Anniversary
A roundup of all the archiving work that's been done

Introduction

We’re coming up on two years since we went public, so it’s time for another round up on all that’s happened. This is a long document so most people may prefer to skim-read and skip around.

There are now exactly 2650 texts on the archive, 293 of which were authored by Ted Kaczynski. So, there will be a concerted effort to kick the habit of archiving texts as frequently as we did over the last two years.

We definitely sympathize that the archive contains an unwieldly wide range of texts, some of which simply shows what else the political violence researchers and true crime fans who visit the website are reading and find interesting discussing.

In the past, as the tangentially related reading grew and grew, it spun off another website called The Library of Unconventional Lives or ‘the LUL’ for short lol. That website more clearly represents some of the Ted K archivists initial interest in researching Ted K in the first place. All this is to say, it’s not unlikely that another similar splitting off of texts may happen again in the future.

We’ll still upload texts every now and again to make e.g. badly scanned ecology/philosophy books easier to read and printable again. However we think we will slow down a lot now, barring some big event like if any of us make a trip to the Michigan archive. Or if we could convince Danh Vo, Julie Ault or Benning to make public the writings of Ted’s that they bought at auction and shared between each other.[1]

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 archivists 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 associated discord server plays host to discussions 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.

This archive aims to serve a similar role to the existence of other archives dedicated to tragic events like 9/11. Ideally, a 9/11 memorial archive would include documents on (1) the terrible harm to families and firefighters as the long-term victims of that attack, as well as (2) documents explaining the grievance narratives of the perpetrators, such as documents on imperialist wars, intelligence agency tricks, extractive corporations, etc. Plus, (3) documents on actions that could be pursued going forward, to try to reduce the likelihood of similar tragic events happening again.

So, with regards to Ted, we see part of the solution to reducing the emergence of similarly alienated people like Ted as; agitating for rewilding at least 50% of the world, boycotting animal agriculture and living a minimum viable use tech lifestyle to partly provide this incentive, plus forming housing and worker co-ops for kids general well being growing up. For further reading on the general politics of archivists, see Clay’s contributions to these two texts:

• A Collaboratively Edited Discussion on Anti-Tech Politics

• Correspondences With a Contributor to The Ted K Archive

General running

We encourage participation

Which texts go up on the website is decided by a small collective of archivists, but all decisions can be put to a debate that anyone can join, in the live chat discussion spaces.

On the discord and matrix live chat spaces you get:

• Updates on when new texts go live.

• Help with how to request rare documents from university archives.

• The chance to co-ordinate with others on copy typing up handwritten documents onto the website.

• The option to debate what new texts go up on the website.

Ethical steps taken by this 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’.

General upkeep

Back-ups of files & meta-data

All the source PDFs for all the most important texts on the website were archived on Archive.org. Including ‘the ‘Primary Source Documents on Ted K’ & ‘The Collected Works of Ted K’:

• archive.org/details/@thetedkarchive

A spreadsheet was created collecting together lots of the meta-data, like the source URLs, published dates, etc. here:

• thetedkarchive.miraheze.org/wiki/The_Ted_K_Archive_Sources

• archive.org/details/the-ted-k-archive-sources

We still need to create a torrent back up of everything on the website, and ideally all the source PDFs and EPUBs too.

In the mean time however, we made all our files available to download as zip files for offline reading and backup safekeeping:

• EPUBs

• Backup of Text, HTML & Image Files

Copy typing

Lots of scanned documents have been partially or fully typed up onto the website, such as:

• Notebook X

• Ted Kaczynski’s Salt Lake City Journal (1972)

• Ted Kaczynski’s 1974 Journal

• Ted Kaczynski’s 1978 Journal

• Journal #1 of 4 from Series VII (1984–1986)

Some texts that are published on the archive under the topic tag ‘half-finished copy typing’, so that volunteer archivists can easily search through the list of texts in order to choose which text volunteers would prefer to help work on.

One reason for publishing them this way is also because there are lots of long handwritten journals that readers like having a link signpost to, so that it’s easier to be able to find the source PDF e.g. readers can search for a memorable line from the journal without having to remember the journal title, and then be able to find the photo scan of the handwritten journal linked at the top of the text.

Error correcting

Similarly for error correcting, some pages are published under the topic tag ‘half-finished error correcting’ to encourage more collaboration.

Wishlist

We have a wishlist of texts we would like to see someday on the library that’s always changing. Please feel free to add to this list also.

Our top picks for some of the archiving we’ve done

Introductory Texts

The Various Ted K Archives

The source PDFs to many of our texts on the Calif. Uni. website archive of UNABOM documents were mysteriously taken down, but we managed to re-upload most of them to archive.org:

• U-Documents

• T-Documents

• C-Documents

• Miscellaneous Materials

We converted all the PDF’s typed text for the archive. There’s still many long hand-written journals that would need copy typing up in order to say it’s 100% copied over, but all the pages are there and tabulated:

• The UNABOM Taskforce Documents & Their Typed Up Copies

Original Texts

The Ted K Wiki

We’ve helped make more easily accessible information that lots of people search for, such as:

• Where Ted Kaczynski lived in Lincoln, Montana

• Ted Kaczynski’s flirtations with the supernatural

Essays

• Does the Unabomber have any relevance to anarchism?

Debates & Conversations

• Debate in the Earth First! Journal about Ted Kaczynski

• Debate in the Earth First! Journal about ‘The Parable of the Tribes’

Research text dumps

There was a wannabie Unabomber copycat dude who was recently sent to prison for preparing terror attacks who we think actually joined our associated discord server. We could see traces of his discord activity in various servers we researched. So, we think he was likely the same person who posted Ted K video memes in our server. We actively deleted some of the more edgy meme videos he posted and would have tried to talk him out of his terrorist outlook if he ever joined in any of the discussions, but for whatever reason his only engagement with the server was dumping a few movie edits in the shitposting channel:

• A text dump on Jacob Graham

Here’s a bizarre case of some conservative bio-primitivists trying to recruit members of the ‘dissident right’, conspiracy theorists and ‘social autists’ into becoming anti-tech revolutionaries:

• A text dump on Resistance Protocols

Here’s a research text dump on the history of a project that translated some of the last ITS ‘communiques’ and who hoped to “develop a post-Atassa project for Anglophone ee [eco-extremists].”:

• A text dump on The Society Dispatch

Attempts have been made to spreadsheet rare and out-of-print book publisher catalogs, to help with finding worthwhile books to digitize:

• A text dump on Loompanics Unlimited

• A text dump on how many Loompanics Unlimited books are downloadable

Finally, as part of researching the anarchist library’s archiving ethos we created text dumps on a few of their potentially controversially deleted & rejected texts:

• A Text Dump on Mao Zedong s Anarchist Beginnings

• A Text Dump on Murray Rothbard s Left-Anarchist Beginnings

• A text dump on Magical Comrade Molotov Catgirl

Primary Source Documents on Ted K

Ted’s Family’s Writings

• Ted and the CIA

• La Linda

• Existential Literature

Ted’s Neighbors Writings

• Unabomber: The Secret Life of Ted Kaczynski

• Madman in the Woods: Life Next Door to the Unabomber

• I Grew Up Next To The Unabomber. I Felt Such Anger Toward Him — So Why Am I Grieving His Death?

• She Grew Up Next To the FBI’s Most Wanted Man & Had No Clue

The Bombing Victims & Survivors Stories

• Diogenes Angelakos, 77, Scholar Who Was Target of Unabomber

• Charles J. Epstein

Ted’s Correspondences Before His Imprisonment

• Ted Kaczynski’s Letter of Resignation from his Professorship at Berkeley (1969)

• Ted Kaczynski’s Correspondence with the Majority Leader of the US Senate (1972—1973)

• Dearest Debbie (1975)

• Letter to a Show Dog Breeder (1979)

• Ted Kaczynski’s Correspondence with ‘Wild America’ Journal (1979)

• Ted Kaczynski’s Letter to Paul Kurtz on Determinism (1986)

• Ted Kaczynski’s Letters To Therapists (1988)

• Ted Kaczynski’s Letters on an Old Colleague’s Mental Health Issues (1989)

The End of Ted’s Life Story

• Why did you do it?

• A letter on self-restraint from the Unabomber (May 2014)

• Ted Kaczynski’s Unsent Letter to Manhunt Unabomber Assistant (2017)

• Jamie Gehring’s Letters To & From Ted Kaczynski (2018–2021)

• Ted Kaczynski’s Correspondence with Maria DiLorenzo (2020–2021)

• Ted Kaczynski’s Correspondence with Lily Yang (2021)

• Ted Kaczynski’s Various Notes for Prison Staff (2021)

• The Letter That Broke the News on Ted’s Terminal Cancer (2022)

• ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski Hanged Himself in Prison Cell...911 Audio Reveals

• Ted Kaczynski’s Autopsy Report

• Yom Kippur Afternoon Speakers 2023: Violence and Forgiveness

• Our America with Lisa Ling: Families of Killers

Ted’s Interests & Influences

• Documents and Books Kept in Cell

• Dangerous Reading

• Most Complete FBI List of Ted’s Cabin Books

Non-Fiction

• Growing Up Absurd

• The Technological Society

• Rules for Radicals

• Hitler: A Study in Tyranny

• My New Order

• The Last Days of Hitler

• Into the Wild

• Villa and Zapata

• The True Believer

• The Forest People

• The Uncommitted

• Ice Brothers

• Assassination and Political Violence, Vol. 8 (Preview)

• John Adams and the Prophets of Progress

• The Revolt of the Masses

• Nichols’ dream of ‘tribe’ vanishes

• Journal of a Trapper

• The World of the Huns

• The French Revolution

• Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans

• My life with the Eskimos

• Life in the Rocky Mountains

• A New Voyage Round the World

• The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini

Fiction

• The Secret Agent

• The Monkey Wrench Gang

• The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

• The Fast Driver

• The Last of the Mohicans

• The Human Race Has, Maybe, Thirty-five Years Left

• Wanted: Paying Guests To Trace the Lost Cities of Peru

Music

• Wabash Cannonball

• I’ve Got A Woman

• The Four Seasons

• Waves of the Danube

The Collected Works of Ted Kaczynski

We’ve gathered together the largest online collection of Ted’s writings. With the option of viewing his work in book compilation order, chronological order or categorical order:

• The Collected Works of Ted Kaczynski

Letters to the Editor

• The Groovy Revolution (1969)

• Survival of the Smallest & Responses (2005)

Fictional Stories

• A Halloween Story

• Three Worthy Artisans

• The Adventures of H. Bascomb Thurgood

Translations

• Grijalva’s Revenge on the Apaches

• Juan Darien

• Our First Cigarette

Analysis of Ted K’s Ideas & Actions

• Searching for Ecoterrorism (2023)

• The Internet’s Favorite T*rrorist (Nov 2023)

• A Review of ‘Old King’ (May-June 2024)

• The construction of masculinity in far-right attacker manifestos in the west (Jun 2024)

• HSS, the FBI, and the Unabomber (September 2024)

• Out there in that cabin in the middle of nowhere in Montana (October 2024)

Broader Topics

The Great Kalahari Debate

• The Kalahari Debate: A Bibliographical Essay

• Review: Documenting the Great Kalahari Debate

• Man the Hunter

• The Harmless People

• Land Filled with Flies

• What Is Politics podcast

• Socialism (ASA Monographs)

• Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism

• Withered Anarchism

People we’ve tried to help

Anarchist Federation of Cyber Communes (AF2C)

We worked together on securing research grant funding from an anarchist org and we try to co-ordinate outreach to each others mutual benefit.

The plan is to eventually move the website files onto their servers and have members help with building the radical libraries forum.

For anyone curious, here’s a link to the AF2C website: af2c.org

The Anarchist Library

T@L has published around 100 texts we submitted that were first archived here, 17 of which they shared with their twitter followers.

We’ve also been on hand to help with fixing the formatting of texts other people submitted.

A volunteer archivist on this project copied over the 170 or so lib.anarhija.net texts to T@L that were missing from the library, meaning T@L can now be a place where people can find everything or virtually everything that is on lib.anarhija, whilst lib.anarhija can remain a place people can find a more restricted collection of texts with a more insurrectionary anarchist focus.

The archivist also created a private questionnaire of amusewiki texts that T@L librarians could use to mark the texts they’d be happy to publish so that a lot of time wasn’t wasted submitting some of the texts that librarians know they would reject. However, after marking 70 or so texts on the questionnaire half a year ago and them getting submitted and published, librarians didn’t continue to fill it in. So, a public list was posted meaning that other people can just copy over texts that they would most desire to see on the library and think most deserve to be on there.

We also link to T@L in the ‘Related projects’ tab at the top.

We’ve created some guides for how to speedily archive documents with word365, ABBYY fine reader and google sheets. Plus, we plan on making more.

Finally, we helped with creating archiving ethos transparency pages, which involved us fixing the formatting on some deleted texts and giving recommendations to give other texts deemed not anarchist enough second looks. This led to a few texts being republished, meaning the texts could receive a wider audience on the library.

AnarchistLibraries.net

We helped with re-opening up the French anarchist library, teaching people how to submit texts, submitted a text and have more in the works to submit.

We gave the anarchistlibararies folks all the info on fixes T@L made that are relevant to texts on their website like a potential pedo apologea text T@L deleted. Plus, showed them all the texts that were still live on the USA mirror that were deleted on T@L which they were grateful for.

We’ve also had tons of people viewing the utility of amusewiki software. So, people have reached out asking about setting up their own projects which we’ve helped with information and directed people to the anarchistlibraries.net starter guide.

We also link to AnarchistLibraries.net at the top of the ‘Related projects’ tab.

People we’ve happened to annoy

Anti-tech vanguardists

The website owners were threatened again by the lawyer of the person claiming to be the rightful heir to Ted’s copyright.

They wanted both the website taken down, plus a no views, one video youtube channel taken down that that they thought was connected to us.

We did create a youtube channel of AI audio readings of Ted’s essays in order to promote critiques of Ted and because doing it amused us, but YouTube took it down because they thought it was hateful content or something.

Ted’s fans don’t have an issue with the free sharing of information on principle, the same way Ted didn’t have an issue with terrorizing people on principle, however Ted often opportunistically tried to use the law to try and make accessing most of his writings come at a cost that would help fund anti-tech organizations.

We have no interest in helping fund anti-tech organizations.

The Anarchist Library

The archiving ethos transparency pages received 90 upvotes over three posts on reddit:

• Transparency list of all of The Ted K Archive’s controversially published & deleted texts

• My recommendations for two anarchist libraries

• Nerdy research into The Anarchist Library crew’s archiving ethos

However, T@L librarians took issue with a volunteer archivist quoting the publicly linked matrix chat and the ‘#DELETED’ reasons he saw when he researched the history of the anarchist library on web.archive.org.

Here are the arguments the archivist gave in favor of leaving the quotes up:

1. I’m being careful about shit like not publicly revealing lists of texts that authors requested be taken down.

2. The quotes that I do release are useful for anyone wanting to understand what type of texts are likely included at a higher or lower rate. So, what type of texts it is better to go elsewhere to look for.

3. T@L could just offer detailed updated reasons for archiving various texts, then the old reasons would be superfluous, they could be deleted and T@L would be doing a great service.

Come to think of it, T@L never getting around to making the unlisted texts private is a beautiful irony, as it was likely because they didn’t have anyone with the tech know-how who would desire to write the script anytime soon. So, this likely mirrors the situation of the majority of readers who visit T@L in that if they were presented with a choice of what kind of texts they would like to see on the anarchist library it would look slightly different, they would likely desire someone with the tech know-how build this slightly different library, and they would likely just create share links to that newer library more often.

That isn’t to say the majority opinion would definitely be better, it’s just interesting how higher population levels of expertise with tech would likely enable someone to come along and fulfill a desire of many readers for a version of T@L that lived up to principles that T@L don’t desire to. Plus, then T@L wouldn’t have to experience as many people questioning their divinely ordained precedents.

AnarchistLibraries.net

We took up the anarchistlibraries.net offer to help others with creating new radical libraries with amusewiki software. So, within a year we created:

• Steal This Wiki

• The Library of Unconventional Lives

• & The Ted K Archive

We hoped that the anarchistlibraries.net people could potentially enjoy seeing our niche library projects as part of their “other great sources of anarchist texts hosted here” category.

However, after a year and a half they said hosting us on their servers had become too much of a hassle, so they helped us buy new servers and moved everything across. The 3 events, months apart, that had frustrated them were:

1. The Ted K Archive hosting 50 or so anti-fascist texts + 10 or so fascist texts with disclaimers, as part of a section on anti-fascist research material. This included reading on fascism that Ted Kaczynski acknowledged reading when he was a young library loner, which lasted at least 3 years, and involved him having fantasies of being a fascist dictator sending his followers to kill people he hated.

2. The Ted K Archive risking archiving a Kaczynskist zine called Garden with one section redacted. Someone then told the domain company, who then complained to the server owners saying it was illegal. We’re sure this isn’t the case and think it would be great if someone wished to fight a legal case over it, but never mind.

3. Steal This Wiki digitizing the classic yippie text ‘Steal This Book’, which has one small section on (probably shitty) b*mb making instructions, but the text has remained in print since the 60s by established book distributors, and recently had a popular 50^th anniversary reprinting. Then, the text was promoted on multiple platforms like reddit, raddle and r/ObscureMedia, a discussion was started in the comments of the r/ObscureMedia post about potential collaboration on digitizing more books by one of the publishers who used to sell Steal This Book, called Loompanics Unlimited, so a text dump was created of old Loompanics Unlimited book catalogs. Then, someone sent in a complaint to the server linking this text dump of Loompanics catalogs saying “Did you know that your server is hosting straight up HOW TO MAKE A B*MB texts?” However no such guide exists in the Loompanics catalogs they linked.

So yeah, big dignified win I’m sure for the people who made efforts to get us deplatformed from our servers by telling lies and just making it too much of a time sink for the server owner to sort through the claims: “The point is that I don’t have time/will/energy to dig this whole affair and understand if I agree with what you’re doing.”

We recognized from the beginning that The Ted K Archive would be seen as doubly unsatisfactory to many people.

We make more non-anarchist texts accessible than the anarchist library does, which I’m sure the anarchist libraries.net people would especially not like doing themselves. However, we also add long disclaimers to the beginnings of texts which the anarchist library people have argued against doing.

One goal we had was desiring to have an easily searchable website people could use to research socially conservative primitivists and eco-fascists attempts to appeal to anarchists. Plus importantly, a website that was very openly highly critical of these attempts.

So, our middle ground suggestion for libraries, publishing houses, social centres, etc. who want to explore the emergence of some reactionary ideas, is just not to confuse a primary role the project serves in being ‘a place people can find anarchist texts’, but to spin off a separate research project, and advertise it as such.

The Future

Radical Libraries Forum

We hope to get a single classic forum board up and running that would create and unite the web addresses; <forum.thelul.org>, <forum.stealthiswiki.com> & <forum.thetedkarchive.com>. Plus potentially others in the future. Then we’ll buy a unique domain to host the forum also like <radicallibraries.com>.

We created an example of how a forum might look that focuses on only radical libraries, but in hindsight it was way too niche:
<anarchistlibraries.freeforums.net>

And there’s a drawing board document people can find here:
<cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/view/qXvTjB3fbQimD2T6jUPGG4U3bbOXDSC6abk4nI+vqh8>

A coalition of the curious

We hope to bring together a diverse group of people with one or multiple of the interests listed below. Also, we hope to open up new people to the attraction of these interests through media output, friends and online acquaintances:

1. Discussing new uploads to various radical libraries

2. Collaborating on archiving texts

3. E-book hoarding; sharing and requesting out-of-print books

4. Hobby digitizing for travel e-reading, saving books before needing to sell them, etc.

5. Hobby publishing

6. Reading circles

Next Steps

We’ve learnt how to access our server with SSH keys on Ubuntu and FileZilla. Next, we’d like to:

1. Learn how to download everything on the server to turn into various torrents of website PDFs to share.

2. Learn how to do site maintenance e.g. small stuff like when an error happens and a pdf fails to be built.

3. Create a single classic forum board that unites multiple web addresses; <forum.thelul.org>, <forum.stealthiswiki.com> & <forum.thetedkarchive.com>. Plus potentially others in the future.

4. Buy a new domain called something like <radicallibraries.com> and host the forum there also.

5. Create user account login pages so that people can journal their progress with formatting texts and create wish lists of texts they’d like to work on, and so that a trusted second trusted user level can see the library queue.

6. Create a ‘recent changes’ page that people can view for inspiration which ideally logs both anonymous edits, plus hyperlinked usernames of accounts who made small and big recent edits.

7. Figure out more ways to collaborate with other projects such that we can be a useful networking big tent forum.

Get in Contact

Reach out to us via:

• Email: radicallibraries@proton.me

• Discord: discord.gg/SutemgwckJ

• Reddit: reddit.com/r/RadicalLibraries

• Facebook: facebook.com/groups/1098298118151005

• Matrix: matrix.to/#/#radical-libraries:matrix.org

Further Reading

• About this project

• All of The Ted K Archive’s Controversially Published & Deleted Texts

• All of Steal This Wiki’s Controversially Published & Deleted Texts

• Website Visitors Guestbook

• Readers Favorite Texts

• Correspondences With a Contributor to The Ted K Archive

• A Collaboratively Edited Discussion on Anti-Tech Politics

• Frequently Asked Questions about Ted Kaczynski

• Wishlist of Texts

• Does the Unabomber have any relevance to anarchism?

• The rare Unabomber documents being kept hidden by a few zealots and rich people

• Responding to claims I’ve been attempting anarchist and/or anticiv entryism

• A failed attempt to get Ted K to wax autobiographically

[1] The rare Unabomber documents being kept hidden by a few zealots and rich people