[From the unpublished work, The Grid: Essays for adults.]
Introduction
I knew we were screwed when my science fiction short stories started coming true within one week of completion.
It seemed wonderful; the dream of a futuristic Eden come true. Hardware sizes shrank, and did so, over and over again—what once filled a building, now barely filled a human hand. Speed increased and memory capacity exploded, parsecs beyond even a science fiction writer’s imagination. Cameras miniaturized and sprouted wings. Algorithms were the necromancers’ magic spells that conjured these things to life; these algorithms learned our wants and weaknesses, manipulated us at the behest of anonymous whims, herded us like cattle into a binary feedlot, in which we dumbly masticate our cuds, woefully and wantonly ignorant of the fact the feedlot is but a waystation on the journey to the slaughterhouse. Prices plummeted downward and dropped to the point that billions of people logged on and plugged in, and never tuned out. Our chins sagged, our spines curved, our eyes and muscles and minds softened into self-sought dullness.
Upon this network, the social media sites, acting as digital drug pushers and arms merchants, feasted upon our narcissism, pettiness, and inanity. In the end, all these things were silken threads of a vast spider’s web, into which the flies willfully flung themselves—and then never dreamt of escape.
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