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There are way more Ted K's running around today - it's just that you don't need to kill people to get heard anymore. Nowadays the spectacle of ruining your own life is enough to get noticed. Anyone with an internet connection today has access to world stage provided they are interesting enough. Back then you'd need to catch the eye of a producer for a mainstream news broadcast to get any coverage. Now you can just fire up a camera and there's a 50% chance you'll end up on a podcast circuit and end up talking to Joe Rogan.

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You seem to suggest that Kaczynski murdered as a kind of marketing strategy for his ideas. I highly doubt that.

Terrorism isn't marketing? Marketing is all about advertising your ideas and changing people's ideas. 9/11 wasn't marketing for Al-Quaeda?

Even if he was purely driven out of self-interest and ego, the result of his actions is that today we are discussing his ideas when we should be working.

I think it comes down to order of operations and intent. If we knew that he first had a manifesto to present, then decided to murder strangers to draw attention to it then I grant you it was terrorism as marketing.

I'm just suspicious whether this was the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber_Manifesto

> Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski engaged in a mail bomb campaign[4] against people involved with modern technology.[5] His initial targets were universities and airlines, which the FBI shortened as UNABOM. In June 1995, Kaczynski offered to end his campaign if one of several publications (the Washington Post, New York Times, or Penthouse) would publish his critique of technology, titled Industrial Society and Its Future, which became widely known as the "Unabomber Manifesto".[6]

In a sense, he used the murders as a marketing strategy, but honestly it was more of a threat to force his manifesto to be published.

From the manifesto itself: "In order to attract attention to our ideas, we've had to kill people."

Quoting from memory - may not be word for word.

So, if you can believe him, then yes, he murdered as a marketing strategy.

That is also marketing. He was hiding his personal grievances behind these ideas.

That's interesting.

I'm skeptical enough though (having read books about the Zodiac Killer, for example) that I see it just as likely to have been an unexpected opportunity that Kaczynski exploited.

I guess I'm not surprised that a murderer, enjoying their new-found public lectern, might engage in rationalization of their murders.

it's 2023 and everyone has an Internet-connected smartphone in their pocket at all times—in 1995 this was not the case.

And yet people in this internet age still go on shooting sprees and leave behind "manifestos".

My take away is that there are and always have been sick people. Citing lack of a megaphone shouldn't even be a sliver of rationale for a murderer's behavior.

the odds are way worse than that. think how many emails his producer gets from people wanting to be on his show

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