Jeff Bezos sells me a holodeck.

Not as fully-appointed as the facilities you’ve seen on television, but the part of me that reads has never been happier in my LIFE

But there are people who recoil at this

I am one of those people. I think it’s gross. The devil’s agreement one makes with this device is that you permit an enormous corporation an outpost in your backyard.

It skeeves me a little. I think it should skeeve anyone.

It’s in your house, it’s on your network, it’s handling your data:

A multi billion dollar company.

Hoovering up data about the things you put into your BRAIN. Explicitly. Because you want it to.

Because you need more shit for your brain. You’re hooked on feeding it now.

I put up with this revolting transhumanism—consumer cognitively parasitized by corporation—because the upsides are, well, magical.

You tell the thing what you want to read.

30 seconds later, you are reading it.

This is some Reading Rainbow ACID TRIP shit.

The convenience of summoning any book you want, at any time, even if it’s 3 AM and the book shop is closed.

No weight penalty. Nothing heavy to haul around.

The process is so painless.

When I was a kid, I played Deus Ex. I was about 17 years old at the time.

I was able to understand that DX was a cartoon version of its subject matter. But it nonetheless captured my imagination, asking

"What if the entire planet could be managed by mere mortals?"

In the story, of course, this has disastrous consequences. The systems are too vast and complex. The answer ends up being:

"They'd ruin everybody's life until they ran the whole system off a cliff."

But the genie was out of the bottle, for my young mind at least. The idea of secret cabals of the ultra wealthy and politically connected, exerting influence over the unfolding of history...

It was appealing. To imagine at least that someone was in a driver's seat.

Somewhere.

And look, it's not like there aren't clubs.

There are, literally, clubs. The Ivy League buys little hangouts in different major cities, so alums can efficiently transact that lucrative network. There's douchier, nouveau riche versions of the same. Cliques, associations, name it.

But it turns out, there's no board room somewhere secret.

In practice, there's no global board of directors. The system isn't that tidy. It's all the chaotic grasping of people desperate to keep themselves safe, and therefore powerful.

The alignment of the elites is emergent.