Four Manifestos and the Future of Humanity
Three independent traditions agree on what artificial intelligence is doing to human beings. The one that disagrees is writing policy.
A terrorist who saw what was coming. A democratic activist who died trying to prevent it. A venture capitalist who is making it worse. A Pope who is asking us to choose. Together, they define the entire moral architecture of the AI debate.
From a Physician and Citizen
There is a particular quality of intellectual surprise that comes when you discover that four very different minds, working in complete isolation from one another, across three decades, have been circling the same question. That surprise arrived for me in the process of building the civic curriculum that underlies this series.
I came to this material as a psychiatrist, which means I came to it through Aaron Antonovsky — through the salutogenic question of what creates the conditions for human flourishing rather than what causes disease. What struck me, as the research on AI displacement accumulated and the governance frameworks failed to materialize, was that the psychological dimension of what was happening to American workers was not incidental. The loss of comprehensibility, manageability, and meaning that Antonovsky described as the root of human suffering was precisely what the AI transition, ungoverned, was producing at scale. I had spent a career treating the symptoms. I was watching a civilization manufacture the cause.
Then I encountered these four documents together. And what I found was that a mathematician in a Montana cabin, a twenty-one-year-old who loved Wikipedia, the Pope, and a billionaire venture capitalist had, between them, already mapped the entire moral terrain of the question I had been trying to answer. Three of them were describing the same crisis I had been seeing through a clinical lens for decades. The fourth was denying it — and writing policy.
I am, by temperament, what David Brooks would call an irrational optimist. I believe that citizens, equipped with the right frameworks and organized around the right questions, retain the capacity to shape the conditions of their own lives. I believe this not naively but because the history of democratic reform demands that I do. Each of those moments of transformation — the labor movement, the New Deal, the civil rights movement — was impossible right up until it happened.
What this article gave me — and what I hope it gives you — is the clearest possible picture of what the choice before us actually is. Not between technology and no technology. Not between progress and stagnation. Between a future written for us and a future we write together.
The Five Babies — Liam, Amare, Emma, Eva, and Mateo — will enter the workforce in 2043. Every governance decision being made now is a decision about the world they will inherit. That is the stake. That is why these four documents matter.
Read this as an invitation to deliberation. The window is open.
— Shimon Waldfogel, MD Founder, Moonshot Press | President Institute for Salutogenic Philadelphia, June 2026
The tradition of the manifesto is an act of radical clarity. Not a policy brief. Not a white paper. Not a hedged and footnoted academic argument. A manifesto says: here is what I see, here is what I believe it means, and here is what must be done. It is addressed to anyone willing to read it. Its claim is not expertise. Its claim is truth.
In the thirty-one years between 1995 and 2026, four documents were written in this tradition that together constitute the most complete map available of the moral and political landscape of artificial intelligence. They were written by four very different people, from four very different traditions, with four very different prescriptions for what should be done. On the single most important question — whether industrial and digital technology systematically erodes human autonomy and produces mass psychological suffering — three of the four documents agree. Only one denies the problem exists.
The one that denies the problem is the one currently governing AI policy in the United States.
That asymmetry — three independent traditions arriving at the same diagnosis, the fourth position being held by the people with the money and the political access — is the central fact of the AI governance debate. Understanding it requires taking all four documents seriously: what they say, who wrote them, what tradition they draw from, and where each goes right or wrong.
One of the four documents was produced by a man who murdered people. Naming his ideas without obscuring his crimes — and without pretending, as most comfortable technology commentary does, that his diagnosis was simply wrong — is what intellectual honesty requires. It is also, as will become clear, the strongest possible argument for the constructive responses that the other traditions offer.
Let us read all four.
I. The Documents
“Industrial Society and Its Future” — Theodore J. Kaczynski, 1995. Thirty-five thousand words, printed as a special supplement to The Washington Post in September 1995 at the request of the FBI. Its author had been mailing bombs since 1978. He offered to stop if his document was published. Three people had already died: Hugh Scrutton, a Sacramento computer store owner, killed by a package bomb in his parking lot. Thomas Mosser, an advertising executive, killed by a bomb mailed to his home. Gilbert Murray, a timber industry lobbyist, killed in his office. Twenty-three others were injured. David Gelernter, a Yale computer science professor, lost vision in his right eye and partial use of his right hand. Gary Wright, a computer store employee, was left with permanent nerve damage.
These were not symbols. They were people. Their suffering is the price of the document’s publication, and it must be named before a single idea within it is examined.
With that said: the manifesto itself is not what most people imagine. It is the work of a Harvard-educated mathematician who had spent decades reading Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and the serious intellectual tradition of technology criticism. In its analytical sections, it reads like a rigorous if tendentious social science paper. Kevin Kelly, the technophilic writer, devoted several pages to the Unabomber Manifesto in his book What Technology Wants, calling it, with apologies, one of the most astute analyses of technology he had ever read. This was not a rogue judgment. It is widely shared among serious readers who are honest about what they found.
“Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto” — Aaron Swartz, 2008. Four hundred and eighty-one words, published in a corner of the internet almost nobody read. Its author was twenty-one years old. He had co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification at fourteen, helped build Creative Commons, and would later play a central role in defeating SOPA, the internet censorship bill. He would subsequently be charged with thirteen federal felony counts for downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR, facing up to thirty-five years in prison. He died by suicide on January 11, 2013. He was twenty-six.
“The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” — Marc Andreessen, October 2023. Five thousand two hundred words, published on the website of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm managing approximately $42 billion in assets weighted toward AI and technology companies. Its author is one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley, a donor to the Trump campaign, and an informal architect of the deregulatory AI governance framework currently in place in the United States.
“Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” — Pope Leo XIV, signed May 15, published May 25, 2026. Forty-two thousand three hundred words. The first encyclical of his pontificate, addressing human dignity and the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Released on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum — Leo XIII’s foundational 1891 encyclical on labor and capital — a date chosen with evident deliberateness. Its author leads the largest religious institution on earth and was named to the 2025 Time 100 AI list as a key thinker shaping how humanity confronts AI.
Four documents. Four traditions. One crisis.
II. The Genealogies
Every intellectual argument rests on a tradition. The tradition tells you nearly as much as the argument itself — whose thinking you are inheriting, what assumptions you are carrying, and what moral vocabulary you are using. The four documents draw on four distinct traditions, and the genealogies reveal the fault lines before the arguments even begin.
Kaczynski’s tradition runs through Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and what might be called the technology pessimist school of the twentieth century. Kaczynski’s brother called Ellul’s The Technological Society his “bible.” In a fan letter to Ellul, Kaczynski wrote that he had read it six times. His manifesto is shot through with Ellul’s ideas. Ellul argued that modern technology — he preferred the word “technique” — had become autonomous, self-reproducing, and hostile to human freedom, that it obeyed its own internal logic rather than human purposes, and that its total reach into every domain of life constituted a new form of totalitarianism. These ideas, absorbed and radicalized in a Montana cabin over seventeen years, became the intellectual foundation of Kaczynski’s campaign. What Kaczynski inherited from Ellul was the diagnosis. What he invented himself was the prescription.
Swartz’s tradition runs through Jefferson and Paine and the abolitionists, through the labor movement and the civil rights movement, through the open-source programmers who built the internet as a commons before it was enclosed by corporate interest. His intellectual heroes are unnamed but unmistakable: the anonymous Wikipedia editor, the researcher who publishes without a paywall, the programmer who releases code freely because knowledge belongs to everyone. His tradition is democratic solidarity — the conviction that the concentration of information and knowledge in private hands is a form of political oppression, and that the response is not destruction but liberation.
Andreessen’s tradition is explicit in a way that invites close reading. He invokes Hayek’s Knowledge Problem to argue against democratic governance. He cites Milton Friedman on the infinitude of human wants. He describes the “techno-capital machine” using terminology borrowed from Nick Land — often considered the “father of accelerationism,” whose anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian ideas were deeply influential to the neo-reactionary and Dark Enlightenment movements. At the end of his manifesto, he lists patron saints by name. They include philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the fictional character of John Galt, the neo-reactionary philosopher Nick Land, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti — who would go on to co-author the Fascist Manifesto. Among his declared enemies: sustainability, tech ethics, risk management, and “the ivory tower.”
Leo XIV’s tradition is the oldest continuous social teaching in Western civilization. He traces it explicitly from Rerum Novarum (1891) through every subsequent papal social encyclical, through the Second Vatican Council, through Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum. He invokes Augustine of Hippo, St. Francis, and the prophetic tradition of Scripture. He quotes Augustine’s De Civitate Dei: “’Two loves have built two cities: the earthly city, the love of self even to the contempt of God; the heavenly city, the love of God even to the contempt of self.’” His fundamental claim — that the human person is made in the image of God and bears an inalienable dignity that no market outcome, no algorithmic decision, and no productivity metric can negate — is 2,000 years old. Its application to AI is entirely new.
The Pope’s patron saints are Francis of Assisi, Mary, and the prophets. Swartz’s implicit patron saints are Jefferson and the Wikipedia community. Andreessen’s declared patron saint is a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto. These genealogies are the argument before the argument begins.
III. The Shared Diagnosis
Here is the most important structural fact of this four-way comparison: three of the four documents agree on what technology does to human beings.
Kaczynski, writing in 1995, before the internet was a mass phenomenon and before social media existed: the power process — comprising four elements of goal, effort, attainment of goal, and autonomy — is a fundamental human psychological mechanism. Industrial-technological society denies people genuine power processes by depriving them of their autonomy and reducing their scope for the exercise of effort. The consequence is mass psychological illness: depression, alienation, the proliferation of “surrogate activities” that substitute manufactured satisfaction for the real thing.
Swartz, writing in 2008: “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” The privatization of knowledge destroys democratic autonomy — the capacity to participate meaningfully in the governance of one’s own community and life. What Kaczynski calls the power process, Swartz calls democratic citizenship. Both are describing the same underlying need: the capacity to act with purpose and genuine agency in a world that makes sense.
Leo XIV, writing in 2026: “The ‘new ways’ of working are not necessarily better. While AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work.” The encyclical’s deepest concern is not economic but psychological and spiritual: that human beings will begin to understand themselves through the machine’s categories — as data points, productivity inputs, optimization targets — and lose the sense of their own dignity in the process.
Three traditions, three vocabularies, one observation. The observation has since been confirmed by exactly the empirical research Kaczynski could only speculate about. He predicted psychological breakdowns. Today: the WHO reports nearly one billion people suffer mental disorders; youth show increased depression, anxiety, and social media addiction. He believed people would lose agency over their lives. Digital surveillance increases control, algorithmic management shapes work and consumption, automated hiring systems make opaque decisions about people’s economic futures.
Andreessen sees none of this. We believe everything good is downstream of growth. We believe technology is fundamentally constructive. We believe a Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.
The three who share the diagnosis are not conspiracy theorists. They are a mathematician who read Ellul, a 21-year-old who loved Wikipedia, and the Pope. The one who denies it is a billionaire investor whose financial returns depend on the acceleration of the very technologies whose consequences the other three are describing.
This asymmetry is not coincidental. It is structural. And it is the central fact of AI governance.
IV. The Tower of Babel
The most powerful single image in these four documents appears in the one that has received the least public attention. The story of Babel appears in the Book of Genesis at the origins of humanity. After settling in a plain in the land of Shinar, the people decided to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens.” Fearing being scattered across the earth, they sought to guarantee stability and power for themselves, and above all to “make a name” for themselves. It was an impressive feat: a single language, a single technology, a single direction. However, the project concealed a profound danger. It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other.
The Pope did not write the Andreessen manifesto when he wrote this description. But read them together and the correspondence is exact.
Andreessen’s “techno-capital machine” spirals perpetually upward, driven by a single logic — growth — that overrides all other considerations. It speaks one language: market signals. It admits of one value: productivity. It has one measure of human worth: economic output. We believe everything good is downstream of growth. This is Babel. A single language. A single direction. A tower whose top Andreessen expects to reach in his lifetime.
Kaczynski saw the same tower and reached a different conclusion about what to do with it. In his terms: modern technological society is a totalitarian force — an order in which individuals are “adjusted” to fit the requirements of the system and those outside the system are seen as pathological or “bad.” This tendency gives rise to expansive police powers, mind-numbing mass media, and indiscriminate promotion of drugs designed to conform to the needs of the technological environment.
Babel, again, in darker and more paranoid language. The tower stands. The question is what to do about it.
Swartz said: democratize the tower’s information. Make what is being built inside it available to everyone who needs it. Leo XIV says: the primary choice is not between a “yes” or “no” to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem — between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.
Andreessen says: build the tower faster.
Kaczynski said: burn it down.
V. Four Anthropologies
Every political philosophy rests on an anthropology — a theory of what human beings fundamentally are. The four documents offer four distinct answers. Understanding the differences between them is not a philosophical exercise. It determines everything about what governance means and who it is for.
For Andreessen, the human being is a productive market actor. Flourishing is measured by wages, productivity, and access to cheap goods. We believe a Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud. A person who cannot compete in the techno-capital machine has, by this logic, lost the very quality that defines humanity. Dignity is conditional on economic performance. It is, in the end, a theory of worthiness rather than inherent worth.
For Kaczynski, the human being is fundamentally a hunter-gatherer — a creature evolved for small-group, goal-directed, autonomous activity in a natural environment. The power process has four elements: goal, effort, attainment of goal, and autonomy. Goals must demand substantial effort — neither trivially easy nor overwhelmingly unattainable — to yield fulfillment. Industrial society’s fundamental sin is that it systematically removes genuine challenge from most people’s lives while making self-determination impossible on any matter that actually counts. This anthropology has real insight — the Sense of Coherence research, the psychology of autonomy, and the evidence on meaning and work all support its core claim. But it is a theory of the solitary individual, with no adequate account of solidarity, community, or democratic participation. In Kaczynski’s world, humans do not have obligations to each other. They have biological needs for goal-directed activity that industrial civilization frustrates.
For Swartz, the human being is a political creature in the Aristotelian sense — a being whose fullest expression is civic participation, whose dignity rests on access to the information and knowledge needed for democratic life. To deny a person access to publicly funded research is not merely a commercial inconvenience. It is a denial of citizenship. The manifesto’s moral force derives from this single claim: that knowledge is the precondition of democratic life, and therefore its privatization is a form of political oppression with structural victims, not just commercial losers.
For Leo XIV, the human being is made in the image of God — imago Dei — bearing a dignity that is prior to any economic arrangement, any social role, any productive capacity. “We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. True progress always stems from a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen and a will that seeks what unites.” This is not a claim limited to Catholics. It is a political claim in the classical sense: that human dignity is inalienable, that it cannot be quantified by productivity metrics or market signals, and that any system — including an AI system — that reduces persons to data points has committed a fundamental moral error regardless of whether its designers intended harm.
Now observe the structure. Andreessen and Kaczynski are both reductive — both conceive of the human being in terms of a single fundamental drive (market participation; biological power process) and both therefore miss what the other two traditions center: solidarity, community, and the person’s intrinsic value as a member of a civic and spiritual community. Swartz and Leo XIV, despite their radically different vocabularies, are describing the same person — a being whose dignity is intrinsic, whose claim on justice does not depend on economic productivity, and whose fullest expression is found not in isolation but in community.
This is the most important distinction the four documents draw. Not left versus right. Not secular versus religious. The distinction is between anthropologies that reduce the person to a single drive and anthropologies that honor the full complexity of human dignity.
VI. The Power Process and What the Research Shows
The most intellectually significant convergence across all four documents is between Kaczynski’s “power process” and what the social and medical sciences have independently confirmed about human psychological needs.
He predicted psychological breakdowns as industrial society removed genuine autonomy from most people’s lives. Today: the WHO reports nearly one billion people suffer mental disorders, with depression prevalence rising alongside technological integration and urbanization. Youth show increased depression, anxiety, and social media addiction.
Aaron Antonovsky — the Israeli medical sociologist who developed the concept of Sense of Coherence — described the same underlying need in different language. Human beings require that their world be comprehensible (structured, predictable, explicable), manageable (that they have the resources to meet its challenges), and meaningful (that engagement with those challenges is worth the investment). These three dimensions map almost exactly onto Kaczynski’s four elements of the power process: goal (meaningfulness), effort (manageability), attainment (comprehensibility), autonomy (the precondition of all three).
Two researchers, working in entirely different traditions, with entirely different methods, arrived at nearly identical descriptions of what human beings need to flourish. The difference is that Antonovsky developed a program for creating those conditions — the salutogenic framework, the study of what makes people healthy rather than what makes them sick. Kaczynski developed a mail bomb.
The Pope’s encyclical is, in the deepest sense, a salutogenic document applied to the specific conditions of AI capitalism. Pope Leo XIV calls for renewed attention to schools as places where people learn to “seek and love the truth,” and emphasizes that in the “fourth industrial revolution” represented by the digital transition, “AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks” but “it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work.”
Kaczynski’s power process. Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence. The Pope’s vision of dignified work. These are not competing descriptions. They are the same empirical reality, approached from three different directions. The convergence should give pause to anyone inclined to dismiss any one of them.
Andreessen addresses this empirical reality directly: he denies it. The techno-capital machine generates abundance. Markets produce better outcomes than centralized planning. Growth solves every problem including the problems caused by growth. These are not arguments from evidence. They are articles of faith, stated with the conviction of someone who has done very well from the machine and is not experiencing its underside.
VII. The Worker and the Machine
Each document has something to say about what happens to people whose livelihoods are transformed or destroyed by technology. The divergence here is perhaps the most concrete expression of the anthropological differences identified above.
Kaczynski: technology systematically destroys meaningful work by first making survival too easy and then making self-determination on anything that matters impossible. The industrial worker is a cog. The white-collar professional is a more comfortable cog. The solution — the only solution — is to destroy the system that has made them both into cogs.
Swartz: the information worker whose knowledge is extracted, privatized, and sold back to them at a profit is being robbed. The researcher whose publicly funded findings are locked behind a paywall, unavailable to the public that paid for them, is the victim of a specific kind of institutional theft. The response is democratic reclamation: take the information back, share it, build the commons.
Leo XIV: “The ‘new ways’ of working are not necessarily better. While AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work.” The encyclical goes further: “A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few… As with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.” The prescription is regulatory: establish governance frameworks centered on the dignity of the person, the common good, and — in the phrase that is perhaps the most radical in the entire document — the preferential option for the poor.
The preferential option for the poor, applied to AI governance, means this: the measure of any AI system is not what it does for the investors, the executives, or the credentialed users who can adapt. It is what it does for the truck driver in Laredo, the medical coder in Chattanooga, the paralegal in Columbus whose job is next. If the system makes their lives more comprehensible, more manageable, and more meaningful, it is serving human dignity. If it makes their lives less so, it is not — regardless of what it does to productivity metrics or investor returns.
Andreessen: technology guarantees high employment regardless of its level. Markets generate more jobs than they destroy. Three hundred years of history prove it. Workers who cannot adapt to the new economy are unfortunate but not the proper subject of policy concern, because the machine generates more wealth than any redistributive scheme could distribute, and interfering with the machine slows the generation of that wealth.
This is the complete landscape of positions available on the question of what to do about workers displaced by technology. Three of them involve some form of accountability — to the system (Kaczynski), to democratic solidarity (Swartz), or to a governing standard of human dignity (Leo XIV). One of them — Andreessen’s — involves none. It is faith in the machine. It is the position that currently governs.
VIII. On Enemies
What each tradition identifies as its enemy is, in some ways, more revealing than what it identifies as its goal.
Swartz’s enemies are structural: the systems and legal arrangements that privatize knowledge. Academic publishing monopolies. Copyright law weaponized against sharing. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which turned the act of downloading academic articles into a federal felony. His enemies are not people. They are arrangements of power — ones that can, at least in principle, be changed through democratic action.
Kaczynski’s enemies are also structural, but his analysis of the structure leads him somewhere Swartz would not follow. The system itself — industrial-technological civilization in its entirety — is the enemy. Not a specific law, not a specific monopoly, not a specific governance failure. The whole thing. Because the whole thing, in his analysis, is irredeemably corrupted. “Efforts to reform or restrain the system are useless. The only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether.” This conclusion — that the system cannot be reformed, only destroyed — determines his prescription. It also, as we will examine, reveals the specific error at the heart of his thinking.
Leo XIV’s enemies are identified with care and genuine theological precision. The technocratic paradigm — an order in which technology and market logic colonize every domain of human life and reduce all questions to questions of efficiency — is the structural force he opposes. He identifies specifically the “epistemic, economic and political asymmetry” and “the new monopolies of AI” as the structural threats to the common good. He names no individuals. He calls for dialogue, not confrontation. He offers principles, not ultimatums. His enemies are real — the concentration of power in a few private hands, the systematic exclusion of democratic publics from governance decisions that will shape their lives — but he addresses them in the tradition of a shepherd rather than a general.
Andreessen’s enemies are people and ideas, named with a specificity that is remarkable: sustainability, tech ethics, and risk management. The “ivory tower.” “Credentialed experts.” “Decelerationists.” And — the move that forecloses debate rather than engaging it — the claim that any deceleration of AI constitutes murder. Deaths caused by the AI that was “prevented from existing” are deaths for which the critics are responsible. This rhetorical move is not an argument. It is preemptive silencing: if you question my preferred policy, you are a killer.
It is worth noting what this enemy list includes: safety researchers, ethics scholars, risk managers, and people who think about sustainability. These are the people whose professional function is to ask whether technology is working as intended and causing the harms it risks. In Andreessen’s schema, asking those questions is equivalent to being “against life.” Coming from a man with $42 billion in assets weighted toward the companies whose critics he is attacking, this is not merely intellectually dishonest. It is a conflict of interest dressed as a philosophy.
IX. Where Kaczynski Went Wrong — And What That Teaches Us
The hardest intellectual task this essay sets itself is explaining, with fairness and precision, where Kaczynski’s argument breaks down. He is not wrong about the diagnosis. He went catastrophically wrong about the prescription. Understanding why illuminates, more clearly than any other comparison available, why the democratic and theological responses are not merely preferable but necessary.
He made three specific errors.
First, he misidentified the cause. The problems involving power, autonomy, and societal control are incorrectly attributed as intrinsic to technological development, rather than as a separate field that exists in human nature that both uses and takes the form of technology. Technology does not automatically destroy autonomy. Ungoverned technology, deployed by concentrated private power without democratic accountability, destroys autonomy. This is a governance problem. Its solution is democratic governance — not annihilation of the technology itself. A hammer is not responsible for what it builds. The question is who holds it, for whose benefit, and subject to what constraints.
Second, he misidentified the prescription. Having correctly diagnosed that industrial society was destroying human autonomy and psychological wellbeing, Kaczynski concluded that reform was impossible — that the system could not be changed from within, only destroyed from without. “The only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether.” This conclusion does not follow from the diagnosis. It follows from something else: Kaczynski’s isolation. A man who spends seventeen years alone in a ten-by-twelve-foot cabin, with no community, no family, no political relationships, no experience of collective action — that man genuinely cannot imagine how a system might be reformed. His inability to imagine reform was itself a symptom of the condition he was diagnosing. He had experienced the autonomy loss so completely, the psychological suffering so totally, that the forms of resistance that experience makes possible — solidarity, democratic organizing, civic institutions, the movement that gathers in a room and decides together what to do — were simply unavailable to him.
The cabin was not just where Kaczynski lived. It was why he reached the conclusions he did.
Third, he had no theory of the other person. The deepest structural flaw in Kaczynski’s manifesto is its isolation — not geographical but philosophical. His human being is a solitary creature with biological needs. The manifesto has no theory of solidarity, no theory of democratic community, no theory of what happens when people face shared problems together and develop shared responses. He could not imagine Wikipedia — the place where Swartz felt that extraordinary gust of fresh air, where people were working together to do the most good for the world. He could not imagine the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, any of the instances in which democratic citizens, facing the same concentrated power he was analyzing, built collective institutions that changed what the power could do.
This is where the crucial contrast with Jacques Ellul becomes illuminating. The two men could not have been less alike. Kaczynski was an atheist, a mentally ill loner and a misanthrope whose solution for technology’s ills was violence and terror. Ellul was a deeply religious academic, thinker and family man, a happily married father of four. Both read the same intellectual tradition. Both arrived at the same diagnosis. Ellul’s response was faith, community, active resistance through human relationship, and the patient work of building institutions that could provide a counter-weight to technological power. He did not recommend destroying the system. He recommended living truthfully within it, in community with others, in ways that refused its deepest logic.
Leo XIV is Ellul’s intellectual heir. So, in his own way, is Swartz. They both read the tradition that Kaczynski read and drew the opposite conclusion — not because they were naive about the power of the system, but because they had what Kaczynski had lost or never possessed: a theory of the other person, a belief in solidarity, and an experience of collective life that made reform imaginable.
What the cabin teaches us, finally, is this: the most important thing the AI governance debate requires is not a better analysis of the problem. Three traditions have already produced rigorous analyses that largely agree. What it requires is the maintenance of the community, solidarity, and democratic imagination that make the constructive response conceivable. The People’s Conference, the encyclical, the civic institutions being built around AI accountability — these are not merely policy mechanisms. They are the institutional expression of the alternative to the cabin. They are the proof that Kaczynski was wrong about the only thing that ultimately matters: whether reform is possible.
X. The Matrix
We can now see the four documents in their full structural relationship. They do not form a simple spectrum from anti-technology to pro-technology. They form a two-by-two matrix of positions that is considerably more illuminating.
Kaczynski and Andreessen are not opposites. They are the same error in different directions. Kaczynski looks at the system and says: it cannot be reformed, destroy it. Andreessen looks at the system and says: it is perfect, accelerate it. Both positions are, at their core, a refusal of democratic engagement — a conviction that the question of how technology is governed cannot be answered through collective deliberation, only through force (Kaczynski) or through market inevitability (Andreessen).
Swartz and Leo XIV occupy the same structural position: both accept the diagnosis and prescribe a constructive response rooted in democratic solidarity and human dignity. One was killed by the state for acting on it. The other leads 1.4 billion people and published 42,000 words demanding that the state govern technology in the service of the common good.
The matrix reveals something that neither binary opposition — pro-technology versus anti-technology, left versus right, religious versus secular — can reveal: the most important divide is between those who believe democratic governance of technology is possible and those who do not. Kaczynski and Andreessen both believe it is not — one because the system is too powerful to reform, the other because markets are too efficient to improve on. Swartz and Leo XIV both believe it is possible — and more than possible, necessary and urgent.
The question the matrix poses to the reader is not which manifesto you prefer. It is which position on democratic possibility you hold.
XI. The Two Cities
Augustine’s framework, which the Pope invokes at the center of his encyclical, is the most useful lens available for understanding the full four-way comparison — not because it is theological, but because it describes something observable about how civilizations organize themselves.
“Two loves have built two cities: the earthly city, the love of self even to the contempt of God; the heavenly city, the love of God even to the contempt of self.”
Strip the theological language and the observation remains: every era produces two competing civic visions. One is organized around the love of concentrated power — the conviction that the few who have the strength, intelligence, or capital to dominate the arrangement should do so, and that this produces the best outcomes for everyone else as a consequence. The other is organized around the love of the common good — the conviction that power must be accountable to all those who bear its consequences, and that human dignity is not conditional on productive capacity.
The AI governance debate is a contest between these two cities, stated in 21st-century terms.
One city is being built on the Andreessen manifesto: the love of the techno-capital machine, the conviction that growth is all and critics are murderers, the patron saints being the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto and the father of anti-democratic accelerationism. It concentrates the gains of the most productive technology in human history in nineteen billionaires and calls this the natural order.
One city was being built by Aaron Swartz: the love of the commons, the conviction that knowledge belongs to everyone, the patron saints being the anonymous contributors to human understanding everywhere. It was destroyed by the state before it could be completed. He was twenty-six when he died, and the academic articles he tried to free are still behind a paywall.
One city was being built by Kaczynski — except that what he was building was not a city at all, only a cabin, and then a bomb factory, and then nothing. His city could not be built because it had no citizens. You cannot build a community on a theory of the isolated individual. You cannot build democratic governance on a prescription of annihilation.
One city is being called for by Leo XIV: “Safeguarding the human in the time of Artificial Intelligence is a common and shared responsibility. Let us not remain resigned spectators, but rather weavers of hope.”
Weavers of hope. The phrase is simple and the tradition behind it is 2,000 years deep. It is also, in the current moment, a precise description of what the constructive response to AI governance requires: not the rejection of technology (Kaczynski), not the worship of it (Andreessen), not the individual act of civil disobedience that the state can crush (Swartz), but the patient, collective, democratic work of building institutions and governance frameworks that hold technology accountable to the dignity of every person it affects.
Conclusion: An Invitation
This essay does not resolve the debate these four documents open. It cannot, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The question of how artificial intelligence should be governed — who should have input, what standards should apply, what institutional forms the accountability should take — is genuinely contested, genuinely uncertain, and genuinely important enough to resist premature closure.
What the four manifestos offer, taken together, is not an answer but a set of questions that are sharper than the ones currently being asked in the policy debate.
Is the diagnosis correct? Three independent traditions — a mathematician who read Ellul, a 21-year-old who loved Wikipedia, and the Pope — agree that industrial and digital technology systematically erodes human autonomy and produces mass psychological suffering. The empirical evidence increasingly supports them. The tradition that denies this diagnosis has a $42 billion financial interest in the denial. Before accepting any policy framework that does not address the diagnosis, it is worth asking whether the framework has engaged honestly with the evidence, or whether it has simply asserted that the evidence is wrong because the machine has been beneficial on net.
What theory of the human being underlies the governance framework? The White House AI policy of March 2026 is implicitly built on Andreessen’s anthropology: the human being as a market actor, whose flourishing is measured by productivity and access to cheap goods. The Catholic Social Teaching embedded in Magnifica Humanitas offers a different anthropology: the human being as imago Dei, bearing inalienable dignity regardless of economic performance. The democratic civic tradition offers a third: the human being as a citizen, whose dignity is expressed in participation rather than production. These are not abstract philosophical differences. They determine which harms count, whose interests are consulted, and what success looks like.
Is reform possible? This is Kaczynski’s question, the one his terrible answer does not discredit. He concluded that reform was impossible and built a bomb. The democratic and theological traditions conclude that reform is possible and build institutions. The evidence of history — the labor movement, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, all the instances in which organized citizens changed what concentrated power could do — supports the constructive traditions. But the possibility of reform is not self-executing. It requires the maintenance of precisely the community, solidarity, and democratic imagination that the technological conditions being described tend to erode.
Who is the governance for? The preferential option for the poor is not a sectarian demand. It is a methodological principle: begin with those who bear the greatest costs, and assess the governance framework from their perspective. The 3.5 million truck drivers Congressman Khanna mentions. The workers whose jobs are disappearing faster than any retraining program can respond. The children growing up in algorithmically mediated environments whose effects on their psychological development are only beginning to be understood. The communities hollowed out by prior waves of technological displacement who are now facing another one. Any governance framework that cannot answer the question “what does this do for them?” is not governing AI. It is rationalizing the status quo.
Four manifestos. Thirty-one years. One crisis.
The first was written by a man who murdered people and whose diagnosis has been confirmed by the subsequent thirty years of empirical research. The second was written by a young man who died trying to democratize knowledge and whose argument has been vindicated by everything that has happened since. The third was written by a billionaire whose financial interests align precisely with its conclusions and whose patron saints include a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto. The fourth was written by the head of the world’s oldest continuous institution of moral teaching, published ten days after its author signed it on the 135th anniversary of the encyclical that first demanded that industrial capitalism answer for what it does to workers.
These are the choices available. Not between technology and no technology. Not between progress and stagnation. Between Babel and Jerusalem. Between the machine and the person. Between the love of concentrated power and the love of the common good.
The question the four manifestos leave open — the question they are, taken together, addressing to the reader — is the question Augustine posed in a different context, that Jefferson posed in the Declaration, that Swartz posed with his life, and that Leo XIV poses in 42,000 words delivered to the world from the Vatican in May 2026:
Which city do you want to live in?
And — the harder question, the one that requires more than a preference — what are you going to do about it?
The Manifesto of the Trump Class of 2026
“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world.” — Aaron Swartz, Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008
“Industrial-technological society denies people genuine power processes by depriving them of their autonomy and reducing their scope for the exercise of effort.” — Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future, 1995
“We believe the techno-capital machine will solve all human problems. Deceleration is murder.” — Marc Andreessen, The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, 2023
“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” — Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 2026