Why do newer fads appear so much more destructive toward the old stories? Must everything new be a lowest-common-denominator caricature of the old? Maybe it's just the endless voracity of marketing departments, the need to shill a patent with every adapted scene, to shift merch and cross-promote and revolutionize the para-dig'em. But maybe our relationship to technology has also shifted in its favor. Technology used to be location, not action. It was something held, directed and harnessed. A steam locomotive was a set. A self-driving car is an actor. A rotary phone was spoken into. A smartphone has its own yarn to spin. A bottled missive riding the ocean currents was personal intent. Algorithmically labeled psych dimensions in a user personality profile are to the mens sana what a butcher's cleaver is to the corpus.

 

None of this is necessary, of course. It is misuse. But its pervasiness does show the obsolescence of monkeys defined more by their thumbs than by their thoughts.