network

The world gradually draws into

a global unit, knitted together

by the networks stitched

into everyone's private arrangements.

There is increasingly the threat

of an objective penalty

for being excluded from the game,

from these networked arrangements.

At the same time seeing these arrangements

clearly and objectively from the inside

is impossible.

Only by being cut adrift, stranded on the outside,

does one begin to make out

the workings of the game -- 

to make out that it is a game

and not a "natural" state of things.

A "natural" state of things

may or may not ever have obtained.

That no longer matters.  The thought of a "natural"

state of things troubles and distracts.

The time of nature has passed 

like the dinosaurs.

All that is left,

effectively, is the present

drawing toward it

as a magnet attracts iron filings

the mechanical regime of a future

from which the players of the game,

enclosed as in bubbles

by their socially enforced subscription

to what is perceived as an inevitable

and necessary condition,

would not be able to escape

even if the inchoate impulse to escape

were to become a conscious motive