Shopping on Amazon was ugly to her, in all senses of the word. It cut us off from allowing our sense of touch and our tacit knowledge to play even a small role in the decision to consume and accumulate objects that fill our homes, our offices, and the world around us.

Here, consciousness is doubled once through the gaze of the dominant culture and then redoubled as the algorithm’s fun-house mirror amplifies the ideals conveyed through that gaze. With search, it happened to information; with commerce, it happened to products; with social media, it happened, finally, to our selves. If technological capitalism can

As far as I could tell, what distinguished the productization of AI so far had been not its impressiveness but the speed with which corporations had insinuated it into our lives despite its frightening unimpressiveness.

If those with wealth and power can make reality-bending declarations about the future, so can the rest of us.

At that time, when I didn’t know much Spanish, but I was trying to learn, I once wrote I am hungry to talk. What I wanted to say was I am afraid to talk. But the truth is that the issue of language also had to do with hunger. It had to do with desire, with the desire for what is most fundamental in life—apart from water, food, air—which, in my

“It’s sort of like, how do I see myself in the world, how do I understand my place in the world?” she told me later. “I understand that it’s a systematic, seismic problem—capitalism—and I’m not going to undo Jeff Bezos’s empire. I don’t think that the point is that it’s going to change. I think the point is more, for me, this belief that these