Robert Crane reminisces:
"...I went alone down the steep bluffs above the Mississippi. There I found the old man denned up under the trees, a tramp, one of many millions for whom there was no place in this new world of shining machines - but he was not embittered, he drew his citizen's allowance and tramped the planet and he had stories to tell..." (p. 82)
That would be me if we were to live into such a future. The shining machines might remind us of old sf mag covers. An allowance is the least that we could expect although we might campaign for more. Denning under trees would be a way to eke out the allowance.
The tramp takes us back to an earlier Psychotechnic History installment, "Quixote and the Windmill," which is about technological unemployment. Even the first humanoid robot is unemployed. He too walks across the Earth but he will live for centuries and cannot get drunk.
The fact that one installment reminds us of more than one earlier instalment reminds us of:
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