'His concerns seem prescient' How Unabomber's dangerous anti-tech manifesto lives on

The bomb was disguised as a tangle of wooden planks and protruding nails, and when he found it in the car park behind his computer repair store, Gary Wright thought nothing of pushing it from his path.

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The explosion that followed left his body studded with more than 200 pieces of shrapnel . That morning in February 1987, Wright became the latest victim of the “Unabomber”, the terrorist who would be unmasked nine years later as Ted Kaczynski , the mathematics prodigy whose 17-year bombing spree – targeting universities, airlines and others that he linked, however vaguely, to technological progress – killed three people and injured nearly two dozen others.

Kaczynski, 81, died by suicide in a North Carolina prison cell on Saturday 10 June.

Wright had pondered the bomber’s motivation. In 1995, he received an answer in the form of a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski successfully press ed the New York Times and Washington Post into publishing .

 Entitled Industrial Society and Its Future , the essay set out Kaczynski’s nightmarish vision of humanity in an ever-tightening embrace with technology that promised comfort and convenience, but left us enfeebled and alienated. Among those who read it was the bomber’s brother, David, who recognised the style and contacted the FBI, which finally led to Kaczynski’s arrest.