Here's a nice fearsome internet passage from Thomas Pynchon's most recent novel, Bleeding Edge.
The speaker is the heroine's father, and you could understand this as part of the venerable "old man shaking fist at sky" trope:
"[Y]our Internet... this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid." (420)
But this is also a Cold War thing. This passage stems from a rant about the 1950s:
"Everyone thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives."
And those "some" are the ones who created the internet: "Yep, and your Internet was their invention..."
Where else would I read a post like this, if not on Infocult?
Posted by: Brian | June 20, 2014 at 18:21
Fine praise, Brian. Thank you.
Infocult: lives only to serve the abysses of the human mind.
Posted by: Bryan Alexander | June 20, 2014 at 18:48