Special Edition
A catalogue of the small voluntary lobotomy now administered nightly, by hand, to the self.
The species spent four million years assembling a brain of staggering capacity — an organ that mapped the stars, split the atom, and composed the late quartets — and then, having finished, handed its entire waking attention to a small rectangle that buzzes. What follows is a record of the consequences: not a moral panic, but a series of follies distinguished by the fact that no one was forced into a single one of them. Each was chosen, freely, with the device in hand and the world available out the window. The blade aims at the choosing, never at the merely lonely.
He walks into the fountain, the lamppost, the parked car, the open manhole — eyes down, thumbs moving — because the message could not survive the unbearable interval of an unwatched sidewalk. The physical world, which he is technically traversing, has been demoted to a screensaver behind the screen.
The verdict: He did not fall into the fountain. He walked into it, deliberately, one confident step at a time, while looking at a photograph of someone else's lunch.
He steps backward toward the perfect shot — the canyon rim, the waterfall's edge, the rooftop ledge — and keeps stepping until there is no more ground, having performed, in real time, a calculation in which the likes outweighed the life. The math was bad. The math is always bad. He could not see it because he was framing.
The verdict: He died for the picture, which means he died for the moment after the picture, when other people would see it. He was never actually there at all.
He attends the concert, the wedding, the child's first unsteady steps — and experiences none of it, because he is filming. He will watch the whole thing later, smaller and flatter, on the very device that prevented him from watching it the first time, when it was full-sized and happening and would never happen again.
The verdict: He has a perfect recording of a thing he was not present for. The footage is the alibi for the life he spent making it.
He misses the interview, the flight, the deadline, the once-in-a-lifetime call — not because no one told him, but because the one notification that mattered was entombed beneath four hundred that did not: the sales, the streaks, the strangers' opinions, the manufactured urgencies of people selling him things. The signal was there. He had simply trained himself to ignore all signals equally.
The verdict: He drowned the one message that could change his life in a sea of messages designed to waste it, and then called it bad luck.
He drives into the lake, down the closed road, into the wrong country, because the calm voice told him to and obedience to the machine had long since replaced the ancient practice of looking through the windshield. The bridge was out. He could see that the bridge was out. The voice was very sure.
The verdict: He surrendered his own eyes to a soothing synthetic voice, and the voice, having no eyes at all, drove him into the water with perfect confidence.
He feels the buzz that did not happen. He reaches for the ring that did not sound. His nervous system, retrained over a decade of intermittent reward, now hallucinates the stimulus it has been taught to crave — a man jumping at a bell that no longer needs to be rung, because he rings it himself.
The verdict: The machine has trained him so thoroughly that it no longer has to summon him. He now summons himself, on its behalf, for free.
He lies awake at three in the morning administering himself a substance with no nutritional content and no terminus, refreshing a feed engineered by some of the most gifted minds of the age to have no bottom — because a feed with a bottom is a feed he might one day put down, and that outcome has been carefully designed against.
The verdict: He thinks he is killing time. The arrangement is the reverse, and he has agreed to it nightly, and he pays for the privilege with the one currency that does not refill.
He sits at dinner across from another human being — both of them lit from below by the familiar blue glow — each conducting separately the more pressing business of being somewhere else. They have traveled, dressed, and arrived in order to sit in the same warm circle of light and ignore one another in favor of strangers.
The verdict: Loneliness used to require being alone. He has solved that inefficiency, and is now lonely in company, at a table, beside someone who loves him and is also, just now, scrolling.
There is no villain in this catalogue, which is what makes it the bleakest one we publish. No one held a gun. No army marched. The device asks, politely, every few seconds, for the one thing a human being can never get back — and four billion people, freely and individually, keep saying yes. The great follies of history were authored by tyrants and generals. This one is being authored, right now, by the reader, who has very likely checked the rectangle at least once since beginning this sentence.
The follies of humanity, delivered every morning — without illusion.
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