This is a two year old project which hosts a huge archive of texts related to Ted Kaczynski.

The website works just like Wikipedia, where anyone can submit new texts to the website and new edits of texts currently on the website.

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

Discussion Spaces

On the discord and matrix live chat spaces you’ll 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 we don’t, for example, dignify fictional stories terror groups weave when they write their own press releases and title them ‘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’.

Frequently asked questions

Why idolize Ted by naming the website after him?

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 thought we might as well capitalize on that interest and create a space to promote critiques of people with similar politics to him and advice that can help people with similar mental health issues to him.

Also, there are other anarchist archives with similar names such as The Ted Kaczynski Papers.

Finally, here are the words of one of Ted’s intended bombing victims, on the positive value of making lots of Ted’s rarer writings available to the public:

“I respectfully urge the court ... to open all the Kaczynski materials, including the decoded journals, to public scrutiny in the expectation that valuable public safety information may be obtained and used to save many lives. Academician analysts will certainly be able to draw a more accurate picture of the mind of a killer and the connections to eco-terrorism if the original materials are in their hands.”

—‘William Dennison of the California Forestry Association, the individual to whom the bomb was addressed that killed Gil Murray in April of 1995.’

Was Ted K ever an anarchist?

He definitely identified as an anarchist in the 1990s at least. His first letter to the media, in June 1993, began with the words: “We are an anarchist group calling ourselves FC.” A later communiqué from April 1995 repeated: “We call ourselves anarchists.” The Manifesto discusses “our particular brand of anarchism”.

Also, for many years after his arrest his message remained fairly consistent: “the social ideal I would put forward is that of the nomadic hunting-and-gathering society.” Plus, that: “after the techno-industrial system has been eliminated, people can and should fight injustice wherever they find it.”

Does Ted K have any relevance to anarchism?

I think Wayne Price said it best when he answered this question in the following way:

First, I answer “No.” His views have nothing in common with my views on anarchism. And even the most misguided anarchist bomb-throwers and assassins of the past would not have killed professors and students.

But I also say “Maybe.” His views are similar to those of many anarchists: the lack of interest in developing a strategy for popular revolution; the belief that the enemy is industrial technology; not building an organization; not participating in popular struggles, but acting as an elite above the people; the worship of violence, abstracted from popular struggle; a willingness to impose their views on the people, even while denouncing as vanguardist those who try to persuade people. Perhaps I could add: an ambiguity about democracy, seeing anarchism as for freedom versus democracy, rather than as the most extreme form of democracy. All these concepts are reflected in the Unabomber’s letters and actions and are also held by various trends within the anti-authoritarian movements. No doubt the Unabomber will be used as an excuse for denouncing anarchism. The movement would be wise to prepare by having open discussion about him and his methods.

For further reading on this subject click here.

How easy was the website to set up?

We just bought the domain then asked the good folks at Anarchist Libraries.net to set up the Amuse Wiki software. They did it all for us for free, had it running virtually right away and have helped answer any questions.

If you’re curious to live chat to them, there’s a channel on the Hexchat program under Libera.Chat channels #amusewiki and #anarchistlibrary.

If you’d like to set up your own website with AmuseWiki software you can attempt to follow the steps described here and/or email anarchistlibraries-request@inventati.org.

How would you like it if The Anarchist Library was run by anti-Anarchists?

Obviously that wouldn’t be ideal, as anarchy isn’t as cringe as Ted K is. But, if the first person to have the energy to create an archive of anarchist texts happened to desire to load the site with long table of contents sections of suggested reading anarchists wouldn’t like, then we would still appreciate the work that went into archiving a lot of anarchist writing. Since if it was anything comparable to The Ted K Archive, the texts written by anarchists would be clearly findable in their own table of contents section linked on the main page.

Also, we know this would be a lot of effort, but we’re not hiding away Ted Kaczynski texts like some private collectors are, so if anyone wanted to create a rival project for what you would like to see in the world you could even buy thetedkarchive.org domain and mirror every anti-civ text on this website and delete the rest. All the software is open source and pages open to mirroring and downloading, so you could do it within a few hours work if you ever sat through computer programming lessons.

It is comical to us how calling the website ‘the’ ted k archive and including social anarchist texts has made it possible for teddites to relate to how pissed off the social anarchists were when ITS texts got added to ‘the’ anarchist library.

It’s obviously a funny dig at Ted K fans to claim to have ‘the’ best collection of reading on Ted K, when the collection includes tons of critiques of the dude. Anarchy doesn’t deserve that kind of dig, Ted K does.

If the most objectionable aspect to Ted K was his terrorism why not just promote texts critiquing Ted’s justification for using terrorism?

1. Because we like the arguments against a lot of his ideas, so why would we aim only for such a small change? By winning someone over to a bunch of arguments, you can sometimes get them to see the value of a very different life and future. We think more people being invested in high-tech culturally-complex society means getting to experience more people expressing what motivates them in complex ways. And...

2. Because being able to have the debate at the motivating foundation of people’s philosophy is important because even if we were able to argue someone out of the justification that it’s ok to use terroristic means in x circumstance, because of y secondary practical reason, the next day they could just double down on their foundational philosophy, that that sacrifice needs to be made for the philosophy to flourish.

So, we hope to offer the best counter-ideal that we think it’s possible to argue for. And any runner-up prize from achieving that ideal would be great too, like just encouraging a few extremists to drop their justifications for terrorism, just encouraging a few people to be a bit more anti-authoritarian, just a bit more leftist/egalitarian and/or just a bit more pro-tech.

Open ended questions

Considering The Ted K Archive is a place people can archive both rare Ted K texts & texts critical of Ted what do you think the long-term impact of the archive will be?

Through helping clarify the distinction between Ted’s ideas and anarchism will it help encourage more people to positively re-evaluate anarchist philosophy?

Will it harm anti-tech groups growth through dissuading some people from falling for the ideology? Or, will it incentivize anti-tech groups to strengthen their arguments such that they recruit more people?