[b]Dave Eggers
But that’s one lifetime.
Yeah.
But while doing that one I’d want to be able to have done other stuff. Whole other lives- the one where I sail…
I know, on a boat you made yourself.[/b]
Now of course we just grin and bear it.
But Mercer, you run a business. You need to participate online. These are your customers, and this is how they express themselves, and how you know if you’re succeeding. Mae’s mind churned through a half-dozen Circle tools she knew would help his business, but Mercer was an underachiever. An underachiever who somehow managed to be smug about it. See, that’s not true, Mae. It’s not true. I know I’m successful if I sell chandeliers. If people order them, then I make them, and they pay me money for them. If they have something to say afterward, they can call me or write me. I mean, all this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it’s fucking dorky.
Supple and demand, he thought. And then all this fucking “analysis”.
What would happen, Zeitoun asked the captain, if you and I went below the deck, and just went to our bedrooms and went to sleep?
The captain gave him a quizzical look and answered that the ship would most certainly hit something – would run aground or into a reef. In any event, disaster.
So without a captain, the ship cannot navigate.
Yes, the captain said, What’s your point?
Zeitoun smiled. Look above you, at the stars and moon. How do the stars keep their place in the sky, how does the moon rotate around the earth, the earth around the sun? Who’s navigating?
The captain smiled at Zeitoun. He’d been led into a trap.
Without someone guiding us, Zeitoun finished, wouldn’t the stars and moon fall to earth, wouldn’t the oceans overrun the land? Any vessel, any carrier of humans, needs a captain, yes?
Clearly this traps some more than others. Like, for example, gravity.
It’s the usual utopian vision. This time they were saying it’ll reduce waste. If stores know what their customers want, then they don’t overproduce, don’t overship, don’t have to throw stuff away when it’s not bought. I mean, like everything else you guys are pushing, it sounds perfect, sounds progressive, but it carries with it more control, more central tracking of everything we do.
Then the next thing you know we’re all comrades.
The flash opened up into something larger, an even more blasphemous notion that her brain contained too much. That the volume of information, of data, of judgments, of measurements, was too much, and there were too many people, and too many desires of too many people, and too many opinions of too many people, and too much pain from too many people, and having all of it constantly collated, collected, added and aggregated, and presented to her as if that all made it tidier and more manageable–it was too much.
And, for some, that’s before breakfast.
In hospitals I feel palpable comfort. I feel the competence, the expertise, so much education and money, all of the supplies sterile, everything packaged, sealed tight. My fears evaporate when the automatic doors shush open.
Not counting the emergency room of course.