THE WEB'S UNLIKELY HERO

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

What? An online campaign to elect the Unabomber to the presidency? The Unabomber Political Action Committee runs a Website that gets 500 visits a day and urges people to write in the name of suspect Theodore Kaczynski on the November ballot. "The Unabomber is the only candidate really addressing the issues, which are the destruction of wild nature and the increasing poverty and destruction of our daily lives because of the onslaught of technology," explains UNAPACK's chief organizer, Chris Korda. "This is no joke."

In some circles the techno-bashing Unabomber has become a cultural hero. Nowhere is that irony more apparent than on the technological frontier of the Internet. There, copies of the manifesto are as abundant as flame wars. One site offers a Unabomber theme song, another invites people to attend an upcoming online birthday party for Kaczynski, and a third gives away free "Official Unabomber" screen savers that include "fashion tips" and other surprises. "It's dynamite," promises Corey Deitz, the Cleveland FM-radio jock who helped create the computer program.

Judging from the thousands of messages that have been plastered across Usenet, the vast bulletin-board system of the Internet, something more than silliness is going on here. "He wasn't your average murderer," writes a typical fan on alt.fan.unabomber. (For Unabomber info on the Web, go to: http://pathfinder.com/ pathfinder/features/unabomber/index.html). In fact, spiritual strands link antigovernment cyberpunks and the outlaw.

To understand how techies can become fans of a Luddite, one needs to look at the generational difference in attitudes toward technology. The Unabomber suspect went into isolation around the time computers still represented Big Brother. He never saw the comeuppance of IBM and the liberation of the Arpanet, the computer network built for the military-industrial complex. Arpanet mutated into the people's network, the Internet, something so decentralized and anarchic it appears to be torn from the very pages of the manifesto. "It's too bad that Ted Kaczynski, assuming he's the One, was not into the Net," laments one alt.fan. "He could have spent many hours flaming away at Netheads and other techies rather than trying to blow them up."

--By Joshua Quittner. With reporting by Noah Robischon and Chris Stamper/New York

With reporting by NOAH ROBISCHON AND CHRIS STAMPER/NEW YORK