 The internet itself is eerie in its emptiness these days almost like you’re floating around in outer space. Everyone else has found somewhere to land. Social media planets Facebook, Twitter and Instagram glow brightly with life and energy. They release continuous communication transmissions in their millions, many of them containing the same information—non-urgent, fragmentary re-tellings of the very recent quotidian mundane. Note: I think you start to write like this for awhile automatically after reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora (2015), a novel that contemplates the future feasibility of multi-generational space exploration. Spoiler alert: it looks super impossible. One possible reason for failure: given the current trajectory of human learning, it is reasonable to speculate that, during the course of a space journey lasting more than a century, the people of planet Earth will become so dumbed down, because of the devastation wrought by social media on human knowledge, that they will forget that they sent a spaceship somewhere way out there, way back when. Comments are closed.
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