It isn’t just any English professor who told the New Yorker this: “You’re talking to someone who has only owned a smartphone for a year—I resisted,” he said. Then he saw that it was futile. “Technology in the last twenty years has changed all of us,” he went on. “How has it changed me? I probably read five novels a month until the two-thousands. If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” He waggled the iPhone disdainfully. “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” It’s James Shapiro, as good a stand-in as any for what’s thought of as Judeo-Christian civilization, which nowadays, for those who hold onto that term,…
Humanity Is Over! (If You Want It)
Who can stop themselves now from being lured into the wilderness of black mirrors?
Lots more where that came from.
