by
Dave Eggers
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Wes grinned. His eyes bulged with inspiration. “We can!” he said. “I’ll send a strongly worded letter. And you can stand beyond the gates with a picket. Maybe one of us writes a novel.”
rude
The day of this announcement, this call for surveillance in the woods, Delaney was at her station, halfway up Mt. Lassen, an expired volcano in northeast California. It was then that Delaney was re-radicalized. She stared down at the alpine lakes strewn around the base of the mountain, and she chose war. She pictured a conflagration, a revolution, a burning-down. What these companies had done was nothing less than radical speciation. In a few short decades they’d transformed proud and free animals—humans—and made them into endlessly acquiescent dots on screens. Citizens in cities had given up their liberties early in the twenty-first century, but the natural world had remained wild, and people could stay hidden, could move freely. But the last vestige of freedom—the ability to move through the natural world unobserved—fell away on a Friday, and no one noticed.
come on don't preach at me
As she walked home, Delaney fumed. This was the Every’s doing—another public space brought within their field of surveillance. She was angry, too, that she knew nothing about this new restriction. But how could she have? There was no longer local news. Starved of advertising and attacked as inherently exploitive and predatory—people no longer trusted filters, curators, observers and intermediaries—journalism had died quietly and alone.
ok this analysis seems sus to me
Soon many hundreds of people who had been living in tents and shanties under nearby highways found the company’s outer barrier far safer and cleaner and warmer. In a few weeks there were hundreds of humans living in tents in a ragged ring between the Bay’s rough and rising sea and the Every campus, providing the starkest reminder of what happens when a society has a threadbare safety net and no plan for those who fall through it—and, more pointedly, what happens when the largest companies in the state and the nation and world somehow find ways to avoid paying taxes.
Delaney could see the building, no more than a hundred yards away; its façade bore the word HEREME in four-foot letters. Kiki was looking at her screen.
“Oh no,” she said. “It’s telling us to get on the highway. That couldn’t be right. Just let me …” She tapped away for a few moments as Delaney tried, gently—for she felt anything could send Kiki over the edge—to tell her that the building was in front of them. Finally, as Kiki waited for her screen to refresh, Delaney managed to lead Kiki’s eyes to rest on the HereMe sign.
“Okay,” Kiki said, “but I want to be sure.” And again she waited for her screen to confirm what was before her.
“I can make it from here,” Delaney said, and Kiki gave her an exhausted, grateful, half-mad look, and then tapped her earpiece, through which a new call had arrived.
mildly funny
So she needed Idaho. She needed to sit by the river and think. She put in a request for time off, and in the meantime she requested a low-pressure rotation, citing the emotional drain of HereMe. She was placed in New World Order, where the team of six was tasked with ranking all that could be ranked, which was everything. That week was M-themed, so she ranked the world’s best mammals, mothers, monarchs, magicians, mail carriers, Malawians, Malaysians, mannerisms, maps, masseuses, and Marxists. They ranked mathematicians, MBA programs, medicines, measurements (No. 1 = millimeter), Mercurys (Freddie first, then the element), midwives, meteorologists, middleweights, mimes (Marceau 1, Melania 2), Misters (Rogers 1, Mister 2), mountains, mutineers, and muffins.
again mildly funny
What's your story? It's all in the telling. Stories are compases and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. [...]
[...] Scheherazade, like a working-class hero, seized control of the means of production and talked her way out.
just thought this was funny. referring to Scheherazade from 1001 nights
[...] Fairy tales are children's stories not in who they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one.
I used to go to Ocean Beach, the long strip of sand facing the churning Pacific at the end of my own city, for reinforcement, and it always put things in perspective, a term that can be literal too. The city turned into sand and the sand into surf and the surf into ocean and just to know that the ocean went on for many thousands of miles was to know that there was an outer border to my own story, and even to human stories, and that something else picked up beyond. It was the familiar edge of the unknown, forever licking at the shore.
beautiful