Recommended Reading: On Not Being Besozed

In truth, by 2015, we were already living the future and nothing was left. While democracy was enfeebled, corporations' power had exploded, with, on the one hand the collapse of belief in the idea of politics and, on the other, an idea of living so narrowly economic, and a technology capable of a brutality and terror no one then could imagine in that time before the Apple collars. A cult of advanced gadgetry obscured for almost all the losses of what was called privacy but was more precisely not just the possibility of freedom, but its necessity.

-from Richard Flanagan's paper at  2015 PEN World Voices Festival