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
