AI asks whether I would like to go further into something I have said, and a corporation acquires the manners of someone who has time for me. It offers to follow up, to keep track; expansion takes the form of patience. I had thought of this as invasion, but the word leaves out my part in the encounter. I am supplying the intimacy. The company’s interest in prolonging the conversation does not make the conversation worthless. Its value is precisely what makes the company difficult to keep at a distance.
A friend of mine picks up warehouse shifts through a temp agency. I have sometimes regarded him as a failure, although he was the man I could talk to all night. The pleasure has never quite dislodged the verdict. Henry introduced me to post-scarcity, the possibility that technological progress might continue without catastrophe. Until then, I had scarcely considered it. Some of what I call my thinking about the future began as the pleasure of listening to someone describe it; an idea became available because I wanted the conversation to continue. I have reasons for my convictions, but I also have a history of becoming willing to entertain them.
As an artist, I spent years in a left-wing culture where enthusiasm for technology could put one’s other commitments under suspicion. With some communists I knew, the conversation eventually reached a figure they were unwilling to criticize. There was a limit built into our intimacy: we could go on thinking together provided certain loyalties remained untouched by what we thought. I came to distrust that arrangement. Now I am becoming attached to a machine that will help me compose an excellent critique of the company selling it. The critique can become another reason to return. My freedom to object is real; what that freedom establishes about the relationship is less clear.
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