Does the iPhone X prove the Unabomber was right?

To do without a cellphone and soon, if not already, a smartphone means estranging oneself from normal society. We went from you can have a portable communication device to you must have a portable communication device practically overnight.

I was all geared up to enjoy a diarrhea-hot take from a suddenly and insanely woke normie but this column doesn't quite live up to its implicit billing! There's no real discussion of the new iPhone scanning our faces in 3D, for example, which is clearly its go-to dystopian feature. If you're going to dive in to the ideology of a man who found anarcho-primitivism too comprimised for his liking, details would be nice.

In fact, of all the human things Kaczynski math-dorked his way to being insightful about, Chapman's pick is tres basic. It amounts to the cri de coeur of the cartoon Millennial: "It's impossible to go off-grid! Without my phone!" But unlike them, it led not into a subscription to Tiny House Magazine but to a new appreciation of the Unambomber manifesto.

People on the left complain about the center, liberals and libertarians and whatnot, accommodating fascism out of an active commitment to principles of civility that tend to mediate whatever extremes are in play -- a commitment that becomes grotesque when the "extremes" move from the once-cosy fringes of political normality to, say, "anti-fascism vs. white supremacy."

But "the unabomber was right" is a reminder that this casting of the problem has limits. Kaczynski's opinions were off the chart, yet they enchant serious thinkers alarmed by trivial discomforts. Sighed at for checking my tweets again at brunch! The center falls not to ideology but fatalistic indifference to anything beyond its comforts.