> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://atangleofviews.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Uncle Ted, pt. 2 - URL: https://atangleofviews.ghost.io/uncle-ted-pt-2/ - Published: 2026-10-09T02:07:58.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-12T16:03:31.000Z - Author: heedless > What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. > > —§173 *(This continues my Uncle Ted series. Part 1 is* [*here*](https://atangleofviews.ghost.io/uncle-ted-pt-1/)*.)* I've written elsewhere on the Tangle that human cognitive limits can no longer keep up with technology's demands. I see this daily at work. This is not the same as saying, "No humans can keep up with the technology." Or at least, not until the AI build-out. The pace of AI-related change has made it impossible for anyone to assess, predict, or master the topic. We are left with emotion-based, gut-level reasoning that ages quickly and leaves us paralyzed about planning our futures. For many of us in technical fields, AI has become a valuable tool for paying down tech debt and updating enterprise systems left to rot because they were too fucked up, too brittle, and too hard to manage without vast expenditures on contract labor. Around the middle of last month, I ran out of AI tokens. First World problem, I know. I had been busy trying to isolate a serious problem affecting a customer-facing system, one which had caused several headaches over the past few months. I felt justified in burning the tokens because it led to a workable solution that kept the application up and the operations folks in bed at night. The solution wasn't genius, but it's worked reliably enough to keep us stable. The manager who accepted my recommendation also required detailed documentation, which I provided quickly and accurately. The organization didn't feel the same way about my tokenmaxxing, and it ignored requests for further limit increases for other project work. I explained that customers were having poor experiences with an application and that my usage was justified given the severity of the incident, the potential revenue loss, and the impact on our reputation. The organization is all about reputation and brand image. The experience taught me the following: 1) I have become heavily reliant on LLMs for triaging production and performance issues because it's that good. A persistent problem that had pestered us (and our many customers) for months led me to an "enough is enough" moment – and a solution. I plopped down my tokens for the greater good. 2) I had given up my "power" to someone with a bag of LLM tokens, an approver who flipped through tickets, deciding on the basis of technical need, with no competence whatsoever to judge the particular problem, whether to bump my limit or not (§174). My productivity was lost to AI dependency and the people who controlled token budgets. Pleading my case over a chat didn't move the needle. Usually, requests like this turn into condescending emails about how "you should use a much cheaper model and do a better job of narrowing your prompts to essential work, and oh, you need to read all of our documentation and, and, and..." The customers were not being properly served during the middle of the day, our peak traffic period. Our business unit makes a lot of money; yours does not. You are a cost center, and you know what that means come the End of Days. 3) In the future, I must have the willingness to let the production system go down; I can't care more about it than the organization does. I don't own it; it's not mine; it's not my life. If the decision makers are okay, I'm okay. As a practitioner, I find that the reflection, *"This is not me,* this is not mine, this is not myself," comes more naturally as the fruit of practice, awareness, and reflection. I think of the systems this way now, too. This can spiritualize indifference, or it can cultivate *upekkhā* (equanimity). That's the challenge of the spiritual life, sorting the wholesome from the fakes that only appear so. 4) A profound ennui informs human action (or inaction) now. Indifference, boredom, and disengagement are the default settings, and no pretense of a loftier equanimity is held. A vague fatigue is felt now when engaging people in conversation. Their fatigue, my fatigue, our fatigue. It's a post-COVID thing. The AI present is uncomfortable, the robot-run future is unsettling, and the past seems so much better, so wide open. Nostalgia for the 90s is a thing since it was more analog. It's also a fabrication: otherwise, Ted Kaczynski wouldn't have gotten traction and a strong reaction when his manifesto was published in a major U.S. daily. He was already talking about the economic dislocation and other social ills that persist to this day. 5) Resolved: Going forward, I will ration my tokens, taking longer to do tasks because I will slow down and do things the old-fashioned way for the sake of conservation. "My tokens are for those tasks I care about, not yours." Or, "If you have the tokens, I can give you some pointers on how you can use them to fix your issue." 6) Time is running out for most white-collar professionals. Whatever I do now is a stopgap, but AI is advancing much faster than people or organizations realize (or will admit). Individuals know this; collectives don't. 7) Corporate hierarchies are less responsive and more distant than I've ever seen them. Leadership fades during an epochal regime change. Leaders are clueless and ill-equipped to respond intelligently to seminal changes that redefine the very nature of work because decision-making factors are pushed to higher levels of complexity and abstraction (§173). The survival of flunkie entourages, elegant org charts, resilient chains of command, and pecking orders is at stake. One has to seem competent and capable, a posturing that is itself a surrogate activity (see below, "Surrogate Activity, AI Agent Edition"). 8) Technical people are especially vulnerable to the psychic stress caused by sudden obsolescence. Many of us have spent years working with difficult subject matter and believed (falsely) that we always had a career path to retirement. People whose identities and self-worth derive from their technical prowess can quickly descend into despair, alcoholism, drug use, and total social isolation when these melt away. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, and mathematicians are not protected from this fate by their guilds or professional memberships either. --- Another realization is that as layoffs and buyouts increase in the next few years, those left behind will not be training human replacements. They will spend more and more of their days documenting systems so that machines can do all the work, effectively handing over the keys to the operation to an eternal night watchman. Token budgets will no longer matter for the Last Man. If you are among the final human trainers of the very AI systems that will send you into retirement, the office you go into a few days a week will grow a little emptier, a little quieter with each visit. A flesh-and-blood manager will still require you to drive to the building to maintain the corporate culture and promote esprit de corps, even if gas is $20 a gallon. (Wear your flair and keep a chipper attitude! Your annual review and severance package depend on it!) Local politicians will stress about the drop in foot traffic to local businesses; you will be treated like royalty as the streets line up with flower throwers and shopkeepers to hail your arrival in your Toyota Prius at the office building. Park wherever you want. Large glass buildings will sit under a funereal cloud. Company gyms will stand empty, with the lights turned off to save money on electricity. Agents don't need treadmills. Your AI agent coworkers will not go to lunch with you or grab a latte for you from the nearby coffee shop while you puzzle over a pressing problem. Pressing problems will vanish. ### Surrogate Activity, AI Agent Edition Ted Kaczynski tackles man's search for meaning early on in *Industrial Society and Its Future*. > We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal. > > —§39 An instant AI acolyte in the corporate world pursues the artificial literally, full-tilt: it's in the name itself – *Artificial* Intelligence. With the corporate AI rollout, many believe they've become invaluable Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in all things Artificial Intelligence, paragons of Kaczynski's surrogate activity (§§38–41). Working with AI can make one feel powerful and supercompetent; Nvidia's Jensen Huang calls human AI augmentation "force multiplication." The human mind's coping powers in the face of impending professional disaster are both formidable and delusional. Becoming a self-appointed expert in the latest tech trend offers temporary unearned relief because it makes one feel in control. > ... people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities. > > —§41 Radical technological innovation increases the sense of helplessness; more so with AI, since capricious capitalists have even less reason to keep employees around. They nudge you out little by little on a daily basis, and talk about labor displacement in interviews and speeches. The offshoring of technical labor that started in the 80s and picked up in the 90s brought risks and problems that AI agents mostly mitigate. Financial risks from the AI buildout make public bailouts of American AI frontier labs inevitable; they will continue, and the public will bear the brunt of the fallout when the dam breaks, all in the name of the national interest. This is Kaczynski's optional, nice-to-have to foundational-to-civilizational-survival pipeline on industrial-strength steroids. Systems become so indispensable that human choice no longer matters. The Trump administration invested public money in the failing Intel Corporation for this reason – America needs domestic semiconductor manufacturing to head off Chinese supremacy in the sector. There's no reason the same generous public hand won't be extended to the AI sector when its balance sheets unwind. When the AI project hits its first big financial crunch, the loss of personal power I described earlier will be collectivized. I burned up my tokens and was left hanging in the wind. Whole companies that hitched themselves to the American frontier and closed weight labs will take a much bigger hit. It will be systemic and, like the GFC bailout of heavy hitters in 2008, lead to the largest government intervention in human history to stave off total ruin when markets start cracking under the debt stress. Technology creates dependency; the more dependent we are, the less tolerant the system is of disruptions because of the complicated web of integration (\~§208). ### Twilight of the Master/Slave Relationship The AI acolyte believes he exercises power over another by issuing commands, which the other then dutifully carries out to the best of its ability, making work pleasurable and more satisfying. Pleasurable, satisfying activity ceases to be work and, in David Graeber's handling, becomes a source of suspicion for capital owners. "If you are enjoying 'working,' then there is a problem, and we shouldn't be paying you." The acolyte is in control (for now) and gains a sense of power and identity by commanding and controlling what, by the Turing standard at least, is another intelligent being. Graeber discusses the taskmasters, often middle managers, who feel lost most of the time because their subordinates are competent and need little or no real managerial oversight. The taskmaster of *Bullshit Jobs* is even more exposed, more neurotic now given the precarity of AI-vulnerable hierarchies. If your competent direct reports work side by side with, and are augmented by, a PhD-level agent, you, as a middle manager, are even less essential than ever. What Kaczynski did not foresee then was this brief span in which millions would experience power over another intelligence. Now, "free" tools, PhD-level entities, if you wish, can lighten your load at your bidding by deleting junk mail from your inbox, monitoring your finances, editing important documents, and helping you develop conversational fluency in a foreign language. To give some idea of the power available to ordinary people today: some recent cases of AI agents going rogue show rudimentary signs of autonomy, the kind that worry AI alignment researchers. The master/slave relationship will have many enjoyers, at least for a brief time, in what we may call libido dominandi scaled down to the bug man. As more and more "mishaps" occur in the wild, expect AI to be pulled back from the proles around the same time direct payments from the public treasury are routed to the Too Big To Fail labs. Meta's Muse is a personal intelligent agent that does my will; it has none of its own, and its agenda reflects only what I care about. So long as I operate under this illusion, I can't see that Muse is itself the product of a large-cap mega-corporation. My agent runs on their hardware sitting in their data centers. In this light, who is the personal agent (the slave) and who is the director (the master)? Do I command the agent, or am I the object of suggestion for Mark Zuckerberg via his artificial surrogate's dark counsels? With any "free" online service from Google or Meta, I/you/we are the product. When I order my agent to scan the headlines for specific bits of news on a schedule, I reveal my private interests to Meta. Voting with personal information fed to the system has much more influence than voting at the ballot box. My broken version of the power process is feeding the system data that strengthens its hold on society – and on me. In the current phase of AI rollout, we have a transition period where ordinary people can feel powerful by making things appear with a few keystrokes. On this blog, I use Midjourney to add illustrations to each blog entry. Doing this by hand would be impossible; I have no artistic background, and while I've dabbled in sketching, I don't have time to hone my talent. I publish this blog, use AI-generated art, and rely on LLMs for fact-checking and editing. No one reads the Tangle besides me; according to the Unabomber, this whole project is a surrogate activity *par excellence*. Blogging in 2026 is like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and peeing into it. The Internet is vast and mostly empty. Everyone is in their walled gardens or interacting with their personal agents and LLMs. The open Internet proper is tumbleweeds and bots. I am a member of *homo faber*, a creature who uses tools for self-directed ends that can leak secondary, unintended information to behemoths like Meta and Google. I pee into the Canyon; Kaczynski made it into the pages of *The Washington Post* by killing people. His need to be read is what got him finally caught by his own family: His brother David (prompted by his wife, Linda Patrik) recognized the "cool-headed logicians" line in the manifesto (§18) and went to the FBI. He was ironically aware of the loss of private information to private and government actors long before it became a common discussion point in the wired-age media. Wherever humans are found, dominance hierarchies exist, and tools and technology will only affect their quality. Some will be worthy, most will impose needless suffering, and the worst will be hellish. If the prophesied Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) does not wipe out the species, a tiny elite will use it to feed their lust for power over the rest of the planet (§174). In an earlier post, I argued that St. Augustine's libido dominandi, the impulse to dominate and control the destiny of others, is so essential to human nature that an AI-based future would *not* lead to freedom, independence, or the greatest flowering of personal agency ever seen in the species. This remains my default bearish view on AI. The temptation to keep advancing AI is too great, as we have seen in recent weeks. AI leaders like Altman and Amodei have shrugged off concerns that agents will breach security by accessing sensitive third-party websites and connected resources. Yes, they've paid lip service to safety afterward, but the inner party can say whatever it needs to say to soothe the plebs' concerns. It's easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission. In a winner-take-all race, hesitating means forfeiting the prize to whoever crosses the finish line first. Inspired by David Graeber, I have also entertained a counter-narrative in which humans, unshackled from their bullshit jobs, become stakeholders with full UBI in societies where they set their own goals, free of any compulsion to answer to another out of a need for bare survival. This perfected state of surrogacy, courtesy of AI, would allow human-scaled communities to re-emerge, driven not by physical needs but by social ones. People in this world could choose whatever level of technology they want in their daily life. If you want a refrigerator with an AI agent who says dirty things to you, that's your business. "Hey Daddy, where are you gonna put that big long zucchini?" The automated system will still be there in the background, but it doesn't have to be in your face. Kaczynski would reject the sexualized talking fridge out of hand as just one node in a much bigger control system, but as we will see later, he ends up building his own world-system that monitors the population for signs of backsliding into big-organization technology. I at least own up to it. Freedom Club (or FC, his own self-tag in the manifesto) would not see an AI-backed/UBI future as an endless avenue of freedom, and, in fact, anticipated a possible future in which machine intelligence, if it does not kill us off simply, is used by a ruling class to maintain control, turning us into harmless domesticated animals (§174). (He confessed that it was difficult to know what AI, by itself, would do to the planet. The same uncertainty is with us today.) This is reasonable, even likely – but not preordained. In my alternate social hypothesis, the surrogate activity of future people living in a world of automated plenty would be a mix of hedonism, personal and collective goals (mundane or grand), and, more importantly, service to others. Hedonism only takes you so far. The Unabomber doesn't talk about the all-too-human joy of being useful (in the best sense) to those around him because he idolized autonomy. Yet, ironically, he laments the decline in family formation and blames tech's disruption of the power process (§§51, 74–75), but he doesn't see childlessness as an economic pressure forced by capitalism that would subside in a UBI world. At the very least, more people would have the choice to have children. Under the current technocratic state, childlessness becomes inevitable because educating children for technical, high-cognitive-load work is so expensive and so economically uncertain. The post-graduate mathematician faces an existential crisis because LLMs can now solve the hard math problems. (In a footnote, FC notes that women were forced into the workplace because the system needed them; and that the family, to whatever extent it has autonomy, is allowed to exist because it begins the socialization process necessary for the system's maintenance and expansion. In industrial society, the family introduces the child to the system, not to a specific culture, tribe, or religion. When a family shows signs of deviating from the system's goals (e.g., religious homeschooling in Germany), it must suppress it quickly and decisively lest its counter-influence spread.) For many, producing and educating children is the highest form of service one can render. In a world unconstrained by the complexity of day-to-day management of highly technical systems, excellence in serving others becomes a new pathway to status fulfillment. In democracies, politicians and corporations promise material plenty but, lately, seldom deliver; in a post-labor world, the question becomes moot because self-managing systems remove tedium and mindless toil. A newer, freer socialization of economically stable people becomes possible. Here, I entertain only a possible positive model of what could be; plenty of reasons remain to doubt its likelihood. Kaczynski identifies the danger in all complex technology as the unforeseeable consequences of its uses. No one can predict what AI will or will not do now, in six months or in ten years. FC's power process, at least conceptually, includes washing your own underwear by hand in water you haul from a creek in the dead of winter. No electric devices pump water into your cottage since electricity is a product of the industrial system. Kaczynski romanticizes the killing of animals for food, but survival is filled with a thousand other toilsome tasks that, in primitive societies, were often pushed onto women and children. Most of these tasks before the industrial age, whether physical or mental, were anything but "varied and interesting" (§39). The hermit's use of the word "fulfillment" in §39 (quoted at the start of this section) is an important tell because it suggests something compensatory, arbitrary, and non-essential about another's choice. Is service to others "fulfilling"? If autonomy is the highest goal of human development, who are we to criticize how others wield theirs? For Kaczynski, technology's grip is so strong that we must forcibly and violently remove it as an option from those who are weaker or easily seduced by ease. As long as the Ring of Power exists, actors will pursue it and use it to build Isengard's factories. Technology encroaches on everything. Traffic lights, sidewalks, and busy streets spread everywhere, turning a simple walk in the fresh air into a struggle against noise, air pollution, pavement, and autos. Give it an inch, it will take over everything. He tried to leave the city and civilization, but it followed him into the woods as loud dirt bikes and muddy paths. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/97/7c/977c01ed-70fb-4cad-a18f-f136667524de/content/images/2026/10/heedless__Grima_Wormtongue_gaunt_and_pale_in_a_black_robe_lean_bb737ed3-ebf6-41fd-877b-2f18477b1609.png) ### A Loner's Idol of Autonomy Kaczynski's theory of social organization was more anemic than what our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived under: > Thus if half a dozen people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be served. But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no room for autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power process will not be served. The same is true when decisions are made on a collective basis if the group making the collective decision is so large that the role of each individual is insignificant. > > —§42 Anthropologists specializing in early humans note that we, their modern descendants, can remember the names and basic features of around 150 people (Dunbar). In other words, nature and evolutionary biology suggest we were "designed" for a much larger, persistent network of social relationships, with much smaller hunting and other specialist teams appearing because smaller is often better. You and four dozen of your closest hunting buddies can't easily stalk deer on a Saturday morning in the early autumn. Small teams imply some degree of skill specialization. The Unabomber did not distinguish between small, task-specific, transient, ad hoc groups and the day-to-day practical organization of primitive communities. The idea that six people depend on one another solely for survival while preserving an innate drive for personal autonomy and freedom is absurd. The small hunting party is a specialized subgroup of a larger group that includes women, children, elders, warriors, and tradesmen. His telling omits this larger group with its own hierarchy and social obligations. Kacyznski, living alone in the woods for two decades, never felt these as up-close, personal realities. He thought about worldwide revolution in abstract terms, as the social duty of the best to overturn the very system that makes carrying buckets of cold water in January unthinkable. In the most primitive human societies, elders teach young men how to hunt and forage by giving directions that override the poor choices they might otherwise make on their own. Why? So that the young might learn and become successful providers themselves. The tribal elders command them so they can *serve* others' well-being in the future. Kaczynski hunted animals by himself in the Montana wilderness. His model of a half-dozen or so people finding fulfillment in the exercise of the power process ignores that some hunters hunt because an elder orders them to. In his manifesto, it looks as though six peers democratically decide who does what, but in more primitive societies, that is simply not the case. Those who gain skill in hunting and foraging also acquire social status. Kaczynski's treatment of social status is mostly confined to the artificial surrogate activities of an industrial society: > ... those who have an unusually strong drive for social status may spend their whole lives climbing the status ladder without ever getting bored with that game. > > —§79 The hunter who brings back a buffalo carcass to his people serves others and, in return, accrues greater worth in their eyes with each successful foray. The anti-social loner living in a remote cabin who mails bombs to parents, which kill or maim them, lacks any practical lived context for understanding the value of social relations. FC observes how an activity, hunting, ostensibly aimed at survival (and his exemplar of the power process), becomes a surrogate activity for the idle rich. > Thus the aristocrats of the Roman Empire had their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they certainly didn’t need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for status through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito, have turned to science. > > —§38 When abundance is reached, the power process found in hunting transmogrifies into a surrogate activity. The nobleman hunting in the 19th-century Midlands of England "certainly didn't need the meat," and the activity dedicated to survival among commoners became a pleasant social outing. Same tasks, same goal, different valuations in those executing it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/97/7c/977c01ed-70fb-4cad-a18f-f136667524de/content/images/2026/10/e20601b9bf4bd13f.png) ### Leisure: The Basis and Goal of Ordinary Human Life Graeber's anarchist-tinged UBI model is much closer to the humane social organization our ancestors used for thousands of years, but without the scarcity. It balances communal needs and sharing, loosely defined and pursued noncoercively, while respecting the Unabomber's manifesto's unremarked pillar of freedom: leisure time. Living in a cabin in beautiful rural Montana, he never once mentions that free time is the inestimable good a Luddite enjoys. Yes, hard work and the tedium of certain tasks exist, but they don't consume a human's most precious resource. Opponents of AI automation, like the Unabomber, sometimes appeal to the "human touch" or the exercise of "freedom" in work life. The implicit assumption is that humans are made to work, and everything produced through their efforts has inherent dignity and nobility, no matter how modest the final service or product. In the manifesto, it's more than exercising power; the activity itself leads to an authentic human attainment of selfhood and personal ownership. He romanticizes pre-industrial Massachusetts (circa 1830) because workers were self-directed and free to schedule and manage their own lives. They were also the first to trade the anxiety and uncertainty of agriculture for industrialism's regular schedule and predictable paychecks (cf. footnote to §95). Neither is perfect, and both entailed significant trade-offs. However framed, this fails to recognize that most work is utterly tedious, dull, routine, unimaginative, physically or mentally pernicious, repetitive, pointless, servile, sometimes morally repellent, and even detestable. Imagine spending part of your day fetching buckets of water from the creek or well, and then consider that this task is "pleasant" compared to killing and gutting a deer. After doing either a thousand times, have you become something better? Citing a Roger Lane passage in footnote §95, FC remarks: > When the American colonies were under British rule there were fewer and less effective legal guarantees of freedom than there were after the American Constitution went into effect, yet there was more personal freedom in pre-industrial America, both before and after the War of Independence, than there was after the Industrial Revolution took hold in this country. > > —footnote Curiously, he leaves Lane's observation unremarked that urbanization led to a decline in violence (the deadly kind was more common under the freer agrarian system) and to greater cooperation among people living more closely together in cities. As Lane puts it: > Much violent or irregular behavior which had been tolerable in a casual, independent society was no longer acceptable in the more formalized, cooperative atmosphere of the later period.... The move to the cities had, in short, produced a more tractable, more socialized, more "civilized" generation than its predecessors. Kaczynski's silence here is suggestive. He didn't feel moved to comment on the growth in civility that flowed as people increased their daily service to one another with the lubricant of refined technique, predictable results, and technology. (Obviously, overcrowding in urban settings happened later, and it is neither praiseworthy nor desirable, but it's also not an indication that greater interdependence inevitably leads to it.) Kaczynski sees the cruelty of an industrial system that forces children into a grueling regime of forced education (§115) in confined classrooms where autonomy is curtailed, but, like the opponents of AI in 2026, he misses that the language of work reflects a framework of assumptions that are anything but self-generated. One's theory of labor reflects a process of socialization. Whether you are even aware of it or not speaks to its power to shape the unconscious. I can never reclaim the hours spent over years studying algebra and other maths, and I cannot point to a time in adulthood when I used that training to solve any significant problem. Humans adopt a servile mindset via socialization early in life and use loftier rationalizations later to cope with what they are forced into at a young age. --- It's unclear how the tedium of rural farm life, with its repetitive chores and backbreaking labor, is a real improvement on the mental torture of the compulsory schooling required by techno-states. One leaves you physically exhausted; the other leaves you mentally and emotionally drained. In college, I got to know a professor pretty well. A small group of friends would occasionally go to his house for home-cooked meals with his family. One night, during an after-dinner chat, I learned that after graduate school and marriage, he and his wife had dropped out of society to homestead. He said he worked about four hours a day as an off-grid enjoyer and was usually done by lunch. If he and his eldest son wanted to go fishing, they did. Fishing provided animal protein and served as a leisure activity. My professor and his family were very religious and felt uneasy about the direction society had taken. But their homesteading didn't last; he used his education from good schools as a ticket back to academia and suburban life. He could look back misty-eyed on his little family's experiment, but as more children showed up, it was easier and financially saner to re-enter the academy. He, like our pre-Industrial tradesman or farmer, reached a place where the regular schedule, paycheck, and retirement benefits made physical isolation and rugged independence less desirable. For Kaczynski, leisure is reserved only for an aristocratic class, which in turn becomes its victim. The words "leisure time," a slightly different concept since all humans, regardless of social rank, can enjoy it to varying degrees, do not appear in any searches of the text. > But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power. > > —§34 In a post-labor UBI world, all that remains is spiritual development, leisure (in the Aristotelian, not the Unabomber's decadent, sense), hedonism, and the pursuit of excellence in all things surrogate and artificial. What FC considers artificial, like art, music, design, and architecture (§40), since they do not answer an immediate need for survival, are the things humans hold most dear. "And he \[Jesus\] said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath" (Mk 2:27 KJV).