This essay appears in Issue 4 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.
Ours is an era marked by unprecedented change—the kind of change humans weren’t designed to live through. The forward march of technology is relentless, everyone working tirelessly to auto-produce their own extinction. The environment requires that we adapt constantly, or disappear into obsolescence—every minute the landscape is changing, updating itself, and we are being called upon to either adapt to a present that does not exist, or face our own irrelevancy in the hyper-abstraction of the future.
Underneath this arachnoid web of modernity, a new generation—our generation—has been playing in a poisoned well, under the chemtrails of the information revolution we are trying to make sense of ourselves.
For this new generation, the stakes have never been higher. There are new ways to screw up, and screw up hard. Gone are the days when adolescent mistakes took the form of leaving the cattle door open or getting caught drinking at prom: One’s digital footprint and the global surveillance apparatus change everything.
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