“I was surprised how much of Kaczynski’s manifesto I agreed with,” Ray Kurzweil, the computer scientist and futurist, wrote in his 1999 book, “The Age of Spiritual Machines.” When Kurzweil showed Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a passage from the manifesto on the future of artificial intelligence, Joy found himself troubled. He later wrote, “As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage.”

The techno-optimists shared Kaczynski’s view that technology was not a series of innovations but, as the futurist Kevin Kelly wrote in a chapter dedicated to the manifesto in his 2010 book, “What Technology Wants,” a “holistic, self-perpetuating machine.” They also agreed that the near future would be one in which human existence was ruled by a system that humans did not control. Where Kelly and Kurzweil differed from Kaczynski was in viewing this future as navigable, even profoundly exciting — and inevitable, no matter how many bombs you built.

It’s not surprising that broader interest in Kaczynski began to tick upward in the early 2010s, as the average person’s daily experience of technology shifted from discrete tools and entertainment devices to near-constant participation in powerful and inescapable networks — when the system that both Kaczynski and the futurists described went from abstract to concrete. Lamenting Facebook and Twitter and “the ease with which technology taps the ego and drains the soul,” the Fox News contributor Keith Ablow argued in 2013 that Kazcynski was “precisely correct in many of his ideas.”

Since then, fights over misinformation and hate speech have made those networks a polarized battleground, while evidence of their psychological and social harm becomes stark. And over the past several years of increasingly rapid A.I. advance, technologists have come to sound as much like Kaczynski as Kurzweil. Moguls like Sam Altman of OpenAI have brazenly redefined Silicon Valley’s higher purpose, from expanding human opportunity to forestalling an apocalypse that they insist only they, conveniently enough, are capable of avoiding.

Kaczynski’s vision of a species-wide rebellion against our own creations was far-fetched in 1995, but in 2025, even his personal retreat from technological society seems practically impossible. The robots will be everywhere soon enough, and only the people who build them can afford to buy land in Montana these days.