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After we walked around for a while, everything seemed kind of sad and boring so we couldn’t tell anymore what we wanted.
Yeah, I’ve been to Mars, I said. It was dumb.
I couldn’t find anything interesting about that picture at all. There was nothing that was about to happen or had just happened. I couldn’t figure out even the littlest reason to paint a picture like that.
couldn’t do a fuckin’ thing except look at that stupid boat painting, which was even worse, because now I saw that there was no one on the boat, which was even more stupid, and was kind of how I felt, that the sails were up, and the rudder was, well, whatever rudders are, but there was no one on board to look at the horizon.
Celebrate fun. Celebrate friends. You’ve just come through something difficult, and this is the time for a table full of love and friendship and the exciting entrees you can only find at . . .
Everything we’ve grown up with — the stories on the feed, the games, all of that — it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re easier to sell to.
Violet was screaming, “Look at us! You don’t have the feed! You are feed! You’re feed! You’re being eaten! You’re raised for food! Look at what you’ve made yourselves!” She pointed at Quendy, and went, “She’s a monster! A monster! Covered with cuts! She’s a creature!”
It’s all from the feed credits. My idea of real life.
“We Americans,” he said, “are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they were produced, or what happens to them” — he pointed at his daughter — “what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.”
I stepped closer to him. “What does it mean?” I asked. “Because I’m sick of —” “Read it.” “I’m sick of being told I’m stupid.” “So read it, and you’ll know.” “Tell me.” “Read it.” “Tell me.” “You can look it up.” “You can tell me.”
I told her stories. They were only a sentence long, each one of them. That’s all I knew how to find. So I told her broken stories. The little pieces of broken stories I could find. I told her what I could.
And this would not have been an effective satire, in my opinion, if I hadn’t also been seduced by what I was mocking. It is the anguish of indecision that animates it. This is indeed a brave new world, but there is a cost.