Zadie Smith On Her Generation

“When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.”

— At NYRB, Zadie Smith reviews that Facebook movie and Jason Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto. It’s one of those phenomenal reviews that both does the reviewing and is a sort of sociological treatise. It sums up what worries me about my generation better than pretty much anything I’ve read on the subject.

And, because, as she says, “what we actually want to do is the bare minimum,”  I’ll point you in particular to the third page. (Hell, I’m a lazy Facebook addict myself.)

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Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.

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