"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

The future is scary not just for the unbalanced but for the observant as well. But questioning the road ahead and trying to blow it up so that no one can proceed are two very different things. It’s a thorny situation, then, for those who abhor the Unabomber’s violent acts but see sensible assertions in Ted Kaczynski’s anti-tech manifesto. Michigan philosophy professor David F. Skrbina finds himself in that tight spot, having become a confidante of sorts for the imprisoned domestic terrorist. From “The Unabomber’s Pen Pal,” Jeffrey R. Young’s revealing Chronicle of Higher Education piece about the unusual bond:

“But when David F. Skrbina, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan here, read the manifesto in The Washington Post on the day it was published, he saw value in the message. He was particularly impressed by its clarity of argument and its references to major scholars on the philosophy of technology. He saw a thinker who wrongly turned to violence but had an argument worthy of further consideration. That argument certainly wasn’t perfect in Skrbina’s view, and he had some questions. Why not just reform the current system rather than knock it down? What was Kaczynski’s vision of how people should live?

In November 2003, Skrbina mailed a letter to Kaczynski, then as now in a supermax prison in Colorado, asking those and other questions designed ‘to challenge him on his views, to press him.’

So began a correspondence that has spanned more than 150 letters and has led Skrbina to help compile a book of Kaczynski’s writings, called Technological Slavery, released in 2010. The book is a kind of complete works of this violent tech skeptic, including the original manifesto, letters to Skrbina answering the professor’s questions, and other essays written from the Unabomber’s prison cell.

Today, Skrbina is something like a friend to Kaczynski. And he’s more than that. The philosophy lecturer from Dearborn serves as the Unabomber’s intellectual sparring partner, a distributor of his writings to a private e-mail list of contacts, and at times even an advocate for his anti-tech message.” (Thanks Browser.)