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The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting. The perfect story to tell such a dark and anxious child.
just enough pure pain to trigger the excitement that only rage could bring.
A leatherback, she’d once read, must cry two gallons of water every hour, just to keep its blood less salty than the sea.
the backgammon dice began to resemble a creature built up through time, thin at both ends and fat in the middle, not unlike the Little Prince’s drawing of the snake that had eaten an elephant. There was only one way of making a two or a twelve, but six ways to roll a seven.
A quarter of the world suffers from insomnia.
sleepless souls waiting for oblivion that wouldn’t come.
Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it.
Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn’t care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.
Taciturnity was just desire that hadn’t yet blossomed.
We joined up with five other Chess Club nerds to play Diplomacy—John Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, and Henry Kissinger’s favorite game.
We played another game—years ahead of its time, where seven ancient cultural groups of the Mediterranean—Assyrians, Babylonians, Illyrians, Cretans, and their ilk—evolve from the Stone Age into the Late Classical and beyond. We didn’t know it, but that game was an advance scout for the renaissance about to hurtle the whole pastime of board gaming into the modern era. It checked all our boxes: no luck, open information, multiple paths to victory, and incentives for creative play—a game more about the ride than the arrival.
Neither Rafi nor I saw what was happening. No one did. That computers would take over our lives: Sure. But the way that they would turn us into different beings? The full flavor of our translated hearts and minds? Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution. Sure, they predicted personal, portable Encyclopedia Britannicas and group real-time teleconferencing and personal assistants that could teach you how to write better. But Facebook and WhatsApp and TikTok and Bitcoin and QAnon and Alexa and Google Maps and smart tracking ads based on keywords
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He was working for himself at last. Staking out his right to enjoyment. Playing in the world.
She made him feel like the game of life was won simply by playing it.
NEITHER INA NOR RAFI ever believed that the universe was guided by an agent that had their welfare at heart.
They went to the Catholic church one week and the Mormon Sanito church the next.
And he’d never once told her how it beguiled him.
He looked stung, but he didn’t spin out into a funk. Age and the island had cured him of that impulse.
She couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a real fight. She could say almost anything to him now, and given a few moments, he’d thank her for her honesty.
Rafi knew better than to ask how she recognized perfect. He didn’t need to know. Never again in life would he let perfect be the enemy of good. He had lived that way once, and it almost cost him everything.
Maybe if she loved one single woman, and not a mix of several.
THEREAFTER NOTHING FELL OUT AS IT MIGHT OR OUGHT
“Aristotle said that happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.”
my father had told me once that a man’s worth was measured by how much money other people were willing to let him lose. And a corollary: the strength of a man’s character was measured by how much he was willing to lose on others’ behalf.
real search engines were just appearing, and people still published paperbound books listing all the most interesting website addresses to type into your browser.
We humans are built to compete, built to spout opinions, built to seek prestige and shiny, built to watch our accounts and ratings grow, built to impress our friends and vanquish our enemies. Or maybe we’re just built to play.
“It’s like he always knew we were doomed to blow up someday, so he’s decided to blow us up in advance and get it over with.”
I thought she was going to decompensate.
“If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose.
leaving him, by his own estimates, almost nine percent more productive every week than if he had been saddled with belief.
the image of the more beautiful world that the islanders believed could happen was lodged now in their collective imagination.
Because he had chosen sides, Didier tried harder than ever to present the material without any bias. Now he was beginning to see that bias and material were not separable.
The claim was met by collective doubt, but also by something like doubt’s more sanguine little brother, curiosity.
The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers.
Every time users posted anything, they gave away all kinds of information about who they were, how they behaved, and what they valued.
They intended to raise the next generation of AI agents by training them to play every board and video game worth playing. At first the procedure consisted of teaching the machines the rules of a given game, explaining the goals, and letting the AI find its way forward by trial and error.
because the machines were not explicitly programmed, their trainers could not look under the hood to see how they worked their wonders. Or rather, the humans could look, but all they saw was a tangled network of weighted connections as mysterious as any living brain.
Games now ruled humanity. Mobile games that consisted of little more than tapping on the screen when a box popped up were destroying people’s lives. Dragon quests with thirty million streaming subscribers. Video games that spawned theme parks and film franchises. Four thousand new board game titles published each year. Sports themselves were already out of control, but e-sports were growing faster than any physical sport ever had. The combined revenues of all competitive recreations now dwarfed all but a few other industries.
Curiosity was the core inner value of all the strongest players.
PLAYGROUND GOT AWAY FROM ME. I logged in one day to discover that I couldn’t understand a good third of the posts.
There were flame wars and all-out partisan conflicts. There were threats of violence and incendiary statements that in any other form would have been grounds for slander suits. Roll-your-own facts were doing a brisk business. Creative hate made big Playbucks. Cults bred as fast as bacteria. So did influencers, deepfakes, conspiracy theories, and scrollable doom-peddling. We let crazy things go, banning as few users as possible. We were an experiment in real democracy. The future had to be a level playing field, free for all voices.
A self-assembling posse in the Investments subdomain encouraged tens of thousands of users to buy small lots of a failing stock. The price skyrocketed, putting a squeeze on hedge fund short sellers, who ended up losing billions. The press billed that as grassroots Davids beating capitalism’s Goliaths. I knew it wasn’t that, but I didn’t have an account and wasn’t posting my opinions. This was the first time that a lot of people realized that the stock market had become a variant on Texas Hold ’Em with no relation to fundamentals.
We scraped the data of a hundred thousand users, analyzed it, and sold it to a political consulting firm, who used it in a hyper-savvy campaign of digital targeting to put their man in office. When news of that broke, it caused a flurry of hypocritical breast-beating around the world. I was called to testify before Congress, and for four hours I was the most famous CEO in the country. But the legislators were too benighted by the whole rise of social media to stay on course or to grasp what was happening. Once we established the legality of our end-user agreements and our use of the data, they
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A liberal congresswoman from Massachusetts asked, “Why shouldn’t your site be regulated, the way all other public utilities are?” “Because we’re not a public utility. We’re just a platform. A neutral platform. Playground encourages all flavors of human ideology, and we believe in protecting the free speech of our users.”
you called yourself a creative destroyer. Would you still use those words to describe yourself?” “No,” I said into the microphone. “We’re using disrupter these days.”
Sow the wind and reap the maelstrom.
“As Arthur C. Clarke has observed: ‘How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.’
She struggled for weeks and hated every sentence she produced. Every time she sat down to start typing, the memory of how much The Sea Around Us had shaped her life paralyzed her. The depth and beauty of that book was like some angry water god. But as the weeks of writing went by, she stopped competing with that masterpiece. She shed her self-consciousness about words and began to write as if she were young again, talking to her friends, letting them in on the secret of an enchanted world that she had stumbled on by accident,
a seahorse the size of her little fingernail clasped a few strands of her flowing hair with its prehensile tail and held on as if hitching a ride on God.
to swallow seawater by accident, and with it several million phytoplankton and zooplankton, including hundreds of that titanic jellyfish’s tiny relatives.
