The not so great Borgification of the Internet. Roughly three decades ago I was an active participant on an incipient subweb. To think and write and breathe and fuck up with only your conspecifics to praise and criticize your thought represented a kind of baptism in fire for the brain except the purpose wasn’t to cleanse the brain but to plunge it into learning. This was very much analogous to a kindergarten recess without any adult supervision whatsoever. Anarchic interactions among mates in real time. The Internet arrived without an instruction manual. Like a new phone today. Unbox it, boot it, show your face, find a network. That’s it. You’re connected, you’re in, you’re enthralled, and there is no way out. The greatest trial of the capitalists, conceived and executed by them on a planet-wide cohort of the unwary met its endpoint. If you were on the control arm, a human alive today anywhere on this planet and not connected then extinction is all you have to look forward to. Be it due to old age or deep impoverishment or extreme remoteness, you’re done. E.g. the dinosaurs were not on the Internet and only a dim estimate of their story remains. ~1.2 billion humans alive right now will never, ever send a text, a tweet, or money. The disconnected have no money, have no use for money. What the jungle giveth the jungle taketh. They will never be surveilled or recorded in a database or experience that one life hack or download the great works or stream insipid photos of grandchildren on a connected device. The connected may never learn the ways of the disconnected who know nothing of this artificial intelligence born of sand. It is profoundly unsettling for me to know I exist on the crust of an otherwise molten rock along with the disconnected, hurtling away from other planetary bodies until one day the night sky will be devoid of any visible light whatsoever, the end of the Steliferous Era. I want to ask the disconnected now if they believe there is really only one person in existence in the universe where each of us is but one tiny insignificant part of the whole and if so what does that even mean to them. What I’m saying is time is running out.