Playground

by Richard Powers

She had been made for water, gliding through a place edgeless and muffled, free of the blows that had always assaulted her in the world of air.

moana was the great watery goddess all around them.

Huh!! She was a water goddess!

the next big step in evolution: a whole new kind of being, one that will make companies seem as slow, small, and powerless as companies make human beings.

Truth!! We ARE powerless- we depend on ALL companies to survive. Most people would die in short order if all companies suddenly stopped.

If she was Queen of anything, it was the Queen of song learning.

ME!!!!!

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 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.

SUPERB synopsis of where we are these days. And that is TRAGIC!! Charlie Kirk and many others would still be alive if social media wasn't poisoning all of our minds.