Gladwell’s books, as a kind of casual narrative covering the years leading up to the “current” state of technology and connectivity in 2097. Our goal was to give Beam fans more about the world, but we also wanted to talk about the changes that technology might soon make (and is already making) to the way humans think and interact. So yes, it was a work of imagination and speculation. But it was also written as if that world truly existed, and it contained a lot of true facts about today’s world — stuff that really existed — right up to the day we wrote it. (For