Unabomber Gets Internet Backing

April 06, 1996 | By Cornelia Grumman, Tribune Staff Writer.

It's unclear what one of the most famous technophobes of the moment, the Unabomber, would think about his popularity on the Internet, perhaps the ultimate symbol of modern technology.

Nearly a dozen Unabomber sites can be found on the Internet, from news groups like "alt.fan.unabomber" to the FBI's Unabomber site to the World Wide Web site that promotes the Unabomber as a write-in presidential candidate.

The Unabomber's manifesto and commentaries on the manifesto can be found at dozens of sites with the click of a mouse.

That the Unabomber's treatises on the evils of the Industrial Age are receiving a wide audience on the global network is an irony not entirely lost on Lydia Eccles of Boston, who on Wednesday posted her "Unapack" site promoting the Unabomber as a write-in presidential candidate.

"The basic idea is for people to write in the Unabomber as a way of rejecting the boundaried political menu that they're given," she said in an interview using long-distance phone technology. "People are extremely oppressed and dominated by the technological system. I don't condone it but I want to take advantage of it, and I think that's very different."

Eccles is among a handful of radicals who are riding the wave of publicity generated by the Unabomber case to promote their own anti-technology causes.

The Church of Euthanasia's "Freedom Club" web site draws sympathetic connections between the Unabomber and anarchist writers such as John Zerzan and Jacques Ellul.

Christine Korda, who posted the web site, dismisses any suggestion that such a site might be considered insensitive.

"What the Unabomber is saying is vastly more important than the methods he has used to bring them to the public eye," said Korda, whose group is attempting to persuade people to vow not to procreate.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published April 10, 1996:
Corrections and clarifications.
A story Saturday about the Unabomber's popularity on the Internet inappropriately characterized Jacques Ellul, the French theologian and sociologist, as an anarchist. The Tribune regrets the error.