Sometimes the most memorable or noteworthy thing you can do is to fucking die.

Such may well be the case for one Theodore John “the Unabomber” Kaczynski, a man best known today as both the subject of innumerable edgy shitposts, the namesake of the Arthur piece which (appropriately) blew up in our face, and as your friend’s weird boyfriend’s favourite “philosopher.” To people who don’t have holes drilled in their head by the internet, Kaczynski is instead remembered for his (largely unsuccessful) domestic mail bombing campaign, which from 1978–1995 targeted universities and airlines (hence the FBI designation “UNABOM”) in a bid to draw sufficient public attention to publish his (bad) anarcho-primitivist manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future. 

Now, Kaczynski is dead, and a whole bunch of the most annoying people on the internet are being weird about it.

I admit, in writing this I do little to stake myself as an outlier.

Having done my requisite posting about it, I’m now obligated to contribute my own musings to the potluck of lukewarm takes. 

Kaczynski has, in the wake of meme culture, become a folk hero of sorts among the chronically online who profess an interest in politics. He’s especially a fixture of a certain denomination of nominally left-wing shit posting which labels him as a “based” anti-establishment type, ignoring completely that Industrial Society and Its Future denounces leftism at length, and reserves considerable contempt for the rights of women, queer people, and the disabled.

I’ve no interest in defending Kaczynski—while in some cases I can forgive a dubious moral theory which produces meaningful change, ol’ Teddy achieved little more than disfiguring a few grad students and becoming fodder for a million shitty memes. If you’ve read his manifesto, you will know that, in spite of how funny it can be to invoke his image every now and again, his writing is bad and his politics run the gamut from nonsense to absolutely reprehensible. The man is no hero, and despite his worst efforts, industrial society has marched ever onward unimpeded.

Still, to some the legacy of this most outwardly and irreverently celebrated of American domestic terrorists is further marked by an event which occurred in 1966, when Kaczynski visited a psychologist out of a desire to seek counsel on his motivation to pursue gender transition. Upon going to the appointment, Kaczynski changed his mind, and would not disclose his desire to transition. His subsequent views would become markedly transphobic, and he described feeling bodily repulsion at having felt such desire at all.

Unlike some people, I’m not want to say that this might have stayed Kaczynski’s course in life. Whether or not “transition would have saved her,” as it were, there’s little use in speculating a scenario predicated entirely upon a hypothetical more than five decades in retrospect. If anything, Kaczynski’s beliefs are emblematic of those of a contemporary subset of (largely white) trans women whose profound self-loathing is misdirected in the form of extreme, vitriolic, and reactionary disdain for progressive institutions. 

Maybe we should just let him be dead.

Amid all this, the Unabomber is of secondary interest to me.

Instead, my primary interest is in death.

I watched Spike Lee’s (excellent) 2020 film Da 5 Bloods in the immediate wake of its release as part of a concerted effort—which had started with mine watching BlacKkKlansman the November prior—to rewatch all the director’s joints which I had seen, and experience for the first time those I hadn’t.

Just over two months later, Chadwick Boseman died of complications relating to colon cancer.

At the time of his death, Boseman was involved in pre-production on a movie about Yasuke, a Black samurai and the only non-asian ever awarded the title. I’d have really liked to see that movie, if I’m being honest.

To be a member of my generation is to be acutely aware, at all times, that everyone around you is dying. Further, by necessity of the incessant practices of cultural documentation afforded and demanded by the internet and other contemporary, “fast” media, to be a member of my generation is to be subjected to the perpetual documentation of cultural decay. 

Death has become a phenomenon of spectacle, simultaneously unshakeable in its seeming momentousness whilst being stripped all the while of any trappings of its supposed finality.

One can attribute this to any number of sources. The internet is an obvious one. The internet is blamed for any number of problems endemic to modernity. This obviously ignores the fact that as the single greatest defining medium of the last several decades, the internet is not merely responsible for the bad, but a bit of everything, as it were. It’s probably more prudent to attribute it to a general quickening of cultural production, what Paul Virilio calls “the politics of speed.”

We are, each and every one of us, witnessing the never-ending death of popular culture in real time before our very eyes.

Upon introspection, I’ve come to realize that this is a feeling with which I’ve been sitting for many years of my life. At the risk of being melodramatic about it, for as long as I’ve been possessive of any critical faculties of which to speak I’ve felt an inarticulable malaise about my position (both temporal and spatial in its relativity) in popular culture. 

When you’re young, your parents impress upon you the value of certain cultural artefacts. This is intuitively the first step in developing taste, hence why your own taste likely either reflects or else diverges wildly from that of your parents—either way, your tastes are always in relation to theirs as a point of ontology. 

It can be distressing then, the moment we realize that the culture which we consider to be canonical to us is neither immutable, nor indefinite, nor absolute. For me the point this realization would sink in to the point that I could name it would prove to be December 25th, 2016. On that day, Wham! Singer and gay icon (?) George Michael, best known to me then for such hits as “Club Tropicana” (which I enjoyed) and “Last Christmas” (which I didn’t), died.

At the beginning of that same year, David Bowie had died on January 10th. These two deaths of respective (though not necessarilly equal) pop-cultural significance bookended the year in a fashion which I would call “fortuitous.” A more spiritual person than myself might well have called it “fated.” I need not point out that Michael’s dying on Christmas proved bitterly ironic considering his legacy consists by and-in-large of one Christmas song which I detest.

As many members of my family possessing a sort of tactless Welsh humour have remarked, “I guess that really was his Last Christmas.”

Despite my relative inability to experience empathy and my additional status as a profound and incontrovertible cynic (though a genuine one, if nothing else), there are a few celebrity deaths which have formed a genuine impression upon me.

Still, I feel a degree of disbelief that Chadwick Boseman is dead. Lance Reddick’s passing just this year equally surprised me. I suspect I’ll find a similar feeling if and when Keanu Reeves fails to live up to the claims of his immortality.

The Unabomber, it must be said, elicits no such melancholy.

Still there’s a sort of permanence to death that, when documented, profoundly changes your way of interacting with the world. They say you first grow cognizant of its permanence around age seven. You only start to internalize your own mortality at age twelve.

In all candor, I’ve lived with suicidal ideations since at least that age. You’ll note I don’t say “struggle” here; this is, pragmatically speaking, merely a fact of my life. I bring it up because I think that, in full transparency, I fear my own death exponentially less than I fear the deaths of others, over which I myself have no control.

To that end, celebrity death, and the slow erosion of pop-culture is a profoundly destabilizing, downright terrifying prospect for me in many, many ways. While I don’t mourn these people (I don’t know them, after all, and their generally absurd wealth elicits from me a level of resentment I hold for the deeply iniquitous economic system under which we live), it represents, to me, the loss of an ontological stability which pop-cultural knowledge affords—providing instead only the indisputable assurance that we are all dust, and that to dust we shall return. 

Culture changes all the time. That much is in its nature. It is an organic thing, born of popular consensus and social chaos, and necessarily in perpetual flux. I’m sure many, many people before have bemoaned their inability to experience the cultural staples of generations prior, to have been “born in the wrong [decade/generation/century],” so to speak. Still, I don’t think any previous generation has experienced, to the same degree as mine, the feeling that such a vast body of cultural knowledge is simultaneously preserved, but inaccessible.

It's not that the production of culture itself has slowed down—if anything the blistering feedback loops of TikTok and the like have conspired to make it at once all the more quicker and ephemeral—rather, as cultural production speeds up around us, it creates the impression of stagnation as the codified points of reference become the only foundation in a social sphere characterized by brevity and illusion.

You’ve probably, at some point in your life, met someone who is obsessed with artefacts of their parent’s generation.

I’m always a little confused when I stumble across the type. Take for instance, a dyed-in-the-wool “classic rock” fan my age. I’m sure you know the type—if not a friend of yours then a co-worker, or someone from your seminar group—always talking about Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd or (Goddess forbid) The Beatles. 

For all intents and purposes their perception of music stops in 1976. 

Sure, a lot of old stuff is extremely good, the mere fact of its continued relevance and popularity being testament to the fact that people find merit in it. Comparably, by the law of averages more things new are merely passable than they are transcendentally good, but even still I can’t wrap my head just how stuck in the recorded past so many of my generation (myself at times included) have become.

What we’re left with instead is a sort of “nested nostalgia,” wherein the nostalgic feelings of generations prior are being repackaged for sale to their successors. A better name for this might well be “The Stranger Things Phenomenon”—wherein contemporary cultural properties are being marketed and sold on the basis of nostalgia for events, consumer products, and cultural phenomena which their audience (by-and-in-large) did not experience for themselves firsthand. Guardians of the Galaxy (among other properties) do the same thing, demanding familiarity with an established body of cultural canon as a barrier for entry. If there’s one thing for which I can praise Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (that itself being an onerous task), it’s that it almost satirizes this practice.

I, for one, feel like I’ve been living out 80s nostalgia for most of my childhood.

Cline’s novel, Guardians of the Galaxy, Stranger Things, any number of television series, feature films, and video games reward participation in nostalgia for spans of cultural time that predate the birth of a considerable portion of the present population of planet Earth. Increasingly we see movies like Avengers: Endgame or Space Jam 2: The Next Chapter which amount to two or more hours of mindlessly soypointing at a screen because you recognize something it displays. As previously implied, Ready Player One relies so heavily on this practice that it borders on parody, such is the absurdity off placing the crux of a narrative exclusively on the premise of its protagonist being so familiar with the culture of the 1980s that he is somehow more deserving than any other person in the world of becoming heir to the fortune of a late billionaire.

This is the same exceptionalist psychological trick the entertainment industry has pulled on every single instance of you smugly congratulating yourself on having gotten a reference dating back to the 2001 release of Shrek—many, many stories are less interested in telling their own narratives these days than they are in pandering to the memory of nostalgic fetishes of the past. The thing is, most of us weren’t even around to experience that past. It cannot, by definition, be legitimate nostalgia. If anything, it's only a manufactured memory.

In my mind, this phenomenon extends beyond the scopes of film, music, television, and celebrity. They are symptoms of the disease, the metastasized lumps, if you will. The root of the problem is endemic to culture itself. It permeates politics, history, and oral tradition. 

The problem, ultimately, with making claims such as these is that only time can be your vindicator. Time, generally speaking, however, is a fickle mistress when it comes to such things. I suppose that this process has been occurring as long as any recording medium has existed, though it is tempting to suggest that we’re rapidly approaching a point of singularity.

I find it harder to categorize the contemporary culture in which I grew up than I do to recognize something as culturally symbolic of the 1970s, 80s, or 90s.

Nostalgia is no longer a mere fact of popular culture, it is popular culture.

By way of demonstration, let me provide a practical example. 

In the twilight days of the second semester past, when still there was snow on the ground and it got dark in the middle of the afternoon, a close friend and I went on a drive. Somehow we ended up atop Armour Hill. Sitting there, sandwiched between parked cars in which young lovers were probably having frantic, contorted, and window-fogging awkward sex, I reclined in the passenger seat of my friend’s car to smoke a joint and pop Sour Skittles® in my mouth by the double.

“You know what this reminds me of?” I said. “You ever heard ‘Come Dancing’ by the Kinks?”

“Of course I’ve heard ‘Come Dancing’ by the Kinks..”

“This reminds me of ‘Come Dancing’ by the Kinks.”

We listened to “Come Dancing” by the Kinks on the tinny speakers of his several generations-old iPhone. In the song, the narrator relays his nostalgia for when his sister used to go Swing Dancing to Big Bands in (presumably) the 1940s. The song itself was released in 1983. I first listened to it on my second-hand, 6^th generation iPod Classic in 2009. In 2023 I listened to “Come Dancing” by the Kinks in a car atop Armour Hill, feeling nostalgia for mine having listened in 2009 to Ray Davies singing in 1983 about nostalgia he felt for the 1940s.

I have never, in my life, been swing dancing, nor have I experienced the sort of helicopterial mothering which Davies describes his sister as having been subjected to in the song. When I was the same age as the narrator’s sister I was going to hardcore shows frequented by men in their thirties who didn’t wash. Our respective childhoods several decades and a continent apart could not possibly have been more different.

Still, on Armour Hill I remembered that song which reminisced of simpler times, and transposed the nostalgia of the narrator onto my own experiences of carefree teenagehood. It made me think of a drive-in movie theatre in Ottawa. Maybe someday I’ll write about it, but now is not that time. 

This is what I mean when I say “nested nostalgia,”—that, as they say, is how they getcha’. In the great chain of signification, cultural artefacts increasingly become a sort of emotional shorthand for lived experiences. The more we chart these in media (and admittedly in essays such as these), the more we comprehensively map the scope of human experience. As we give ourselves a point of reference for everything, it certainly feels as if there remain fewer novel experiences to actually be had.

There’s a lot of music today which is far more worthy of my consumption in 2023 than “Come Dancing” by the Kinks, if for no reason other than the fact that I might one day see its creator play it in the same room as me. While itself not intrinsically better than recorded music, live music does possess the novelty of its own meagre half-life. Sure, live albums are common practice these days but not every band makes them, and not every recording is going to sound that same way live ever again. If you’re following independent acts in your local scene, chances are live recordings are the only ones they’re making (if they’re recording at all) and you’re never, never going to experience that same show twice.

Hard to believe we somehow got here from talking about the Unabomber, huh?

Theodore Kaczynski, as cranked-up and misguided as he was, envisioned a world subject to radical political change. A world where the mass unification of people disenfranchised by the universality of technology was possible and could result in definite and tangible change. For all of the incongruency borne of his dissonant and short-sighted ideology, I’m tempted to say that on some level, Kaczynski did probably believe he had the best interests of society at heart. 

I wonder if part of the reason the Unabomber has been canonized by so many young, perpetually-online people of my generation is that they legitimately cannot remember meaningful collective action having happened in their lifetime. 

Most of the people who have politically shaped the last several decades—Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, any number of politicians, businessmen, and defense secretaries—are dead and fucking buried. We live in a world wrought by the actions of these people, who have themselves faced no accountability by virtue of their own mortality. If nothing else this imparts to me an understanding of the appeal of believing in hell—I’d much rather imagine someone like Pat Robertson or Donald Rumsfeld there than returned to constituent stardust. Believing that maybe there is no divinely-appointed mechanism of retribution is certainly less comforting than imagining people who bombed literal children getting their just desserts.

However, there certainly have been mass mobilizations within the past ten, or twenty years, even if we have been conditioned not to remember them. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street proved that, at least for a time, people could collectively organize to take meaningful action against banks and mega corporations directly responsible for manufacturing, actively worsening, and subsequently profiting from a financial crisis of unprecedented scale. Extinction Rebellion was, for several years, one of the most significant collective movements the world over, spurred on by many of the same concerns as Kasczynski himself espoused. The response from Black Lives Matter (itself less well-defined a group than a collective identitarian label) in the Summer of 2020 was incomparable to almost anything that came before in terms of sheer turnout and the magnitude of collective outrage. Things are still happening, but we seem to have lost the short-term cultural memory to recollect them. 

Nostalgia is a dangerous game. It restructures cognition and memory. It spins grand narratives about the way things used to be—about times when things were better than they are now. Nostalgia, as much as it profits from a belief in “the good old days,” is the very thing inventing that mythologized past in the first place. 

In subscribing to the intravenous media drip of manufactured nostalgia, what we’re tacitly doing is saying that our present is less valuable than someone else’s past. It’s easy to feel like everything is dying when you’re trying to take a pulse from a dead arm. 

Being able to find the future necessitates first and foremost your belief that there’s one out there to find. That we’re not just doing the same things over and over ad nauseum. That actions mean something for the sake of their having been done.

I’m at a loss for a profound, or even a witty note to end this on. I think the best I can muster is that, while it’s no crime to enjoy things, it’s equally of little use to idolize dead people. When it comes down to a matter of action, they are notoriously flaky in their support.

A week or so back a friend told me that her criteria for movies are as follows:

“No sequels;

No universes;

and no capes.” 

I’ll admit, I have several movies I enjoy quite a bit which are themselves sequels, though as a stringent practice goes, I think hers is fairly commendable. I’ve moaned at length before that every “new” video game seems just an HD Special Edition Remaster Definitive Remake of a previous version of that same game. I say this as I’ve been playing the Final Fantasy VII Remake and enjoying it immensely, though I still generally prefer when the games industry does something new—even if it winds up being bad. The solution I’ve proposed before is to create these new cultural artefacts for ourselves, and I think that’s certainly part of a solution. 

Much though my anti-theist ass hates to say it, I think the other half is faith.

In order to create something new you have to first believe there is something new to be created. There’s little use in trying to improve society if you already think it beyond salvation. When someone significant dies, when a movement collapses, when an artefact vanishes from cultural memory, there are two responses:

One; you can give into the nihilism and tell yourself everything is going to hell

Two; you can refuse to mythologize it or, better yet, do something to take its place.

Who gives a shit about Ted Kaczynski? None of us have to live in his shadow just because some fourteen-year-old on Reddit is crying that his based idol is no more. Twilight comes for us all, and idols prove no exception. Maybe we owe it to ourselves to let them have some fucking rest.