When your fears are predictable, then so are you, which means that you (and your digital demographic) are ripe for manipulation.

Reality fades, even physical reality, when we have no one to help us concentrate on what is right in front of our faces.

The how questions generate quantitative propositions that computer programs can handle. As we translate the experience of life into machine language, we risk our minds becoming something like satellite servers to make things easier for the computers—which do not and cannot care. When we confuse the convenient with the significant, the death princip

The pursuit of truth is the first bulwark in a defense of the self. Believing a lie means serving a master, living or digital. That is a plausible end station for us: deluded and unfree, living and dying in a tedious alternative reality.

Sadopopulism replaces the American Dream with that American nightmare. It directs the attention of a fragile middle class toward those who are doing still worse, rather than toward those who collect the wealth and decline to be taxed on it.

It was hard for people to find spontaneous human connections when they felt that they had to demonstrate conformism to get through the day. What they cared about came to seem shameful and secret.

Digital oligarchs distract us with promises of a high-tech future while pinning us with brain hacks to the untenable present.

Our current mood of discarding the past, usually on some self-righteous ground, has to do with our engineered inability to concentrate and tolerate.

What I write is unpredictable, but it is not random. It rests in larger structures, physical and moral, even as it acts within them and alters them. It owes something to twentieth-century people whom I admired. It expresses values that I have learned from the past (when else?), which I am combining and applying in my own particular way. This chapte