Playground

by Richard Powers

She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.

As forgetful and reconciled to the horror of life as Evelyne herself had grown.

Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

But Facebook and WhatsApp and TikTok and Bitcoin and QAnon and Alexa and Google Maps and smart tracking ads based on keywords stolen from your emails and checking your likes while at a urinal and shopping while naked and insanely stupid but addictive farming games that wrecked people’s careers and all the other neural parasites that now make it impossible for me to remember what thinking and feeling and being were really like, back then? Not even close.