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A much better piece of writing on this topic is “Industrial Society and its Future,” also known as the Unabomber’s Manifesto. You have to forget who wrote it and also ignore the worst 20% of it to get the most out of it though.

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I can't forget who wrote it. I can't forget taking my computer in to get it repaired, and how much pain the repairman was in. A month or two earlier he had picked up a package left by the Unabomber. I can't forget what the Unabomber's ideas led him to do. I've seen the results of his ideas, written in pain on a man's face. I can't forget.

The way I recommend reading it is, there is something in those ideas that you can act on, in a constructive way, in your own life, without hurting anyone.

But where do you draw the line? I'm not going to read Mein Kampf looking for constructive ideas. Why? Because Hitler's position is so destructive that trying to untangle constructive ideas from the destructive seems like a fool's errand. (Also dangerous - I don't want to miss some of the destructiveness and incorporate it into my thinking.)

So the question is, did the Unabomber have good ideas, but follow them to bad conclusions? Or is the destructiveness more pervasive in his writing?

For me, the destructiveness was too vivid and too personal.

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