The year is 2149 and people mostly live their lives “on rails.” That’s what they call it, “on rails,” which is to live according to the meticulous instructions of software. Software knows most things about you—what causes you anxiety, what raises your endorphin levels, everything you’ve ever searched for, everywhere you’ve been. Software sends messages on your behalf; it listens in on conversations. It is gifted in its optimizations: Eat this, go there, buy that, make love to the man with red hair.
Software understands everything that has led to this instant and it predicts every moment that will follow, mapping trajectories for everything from hurricanes to economic trends. There was a time when everybody kept their data to themselves—out of a sense of informational hygiene or, perhaps, the fear of humiliation. Back then, data was confined to your own accounts, an encrypted set of secrets. But the truth is, it works better to combine it all. The outcomes are more satisfying and reliable. More serotonin is produced. More income. More people have sexual intercourse. So they poured it all together, all the data—the Big Merge. Everything into a giant basin, a Federal Reserve of information—a vault, or really a massively distributed cloud. It is very handy. It shows you the best route.
Part of the pleasure of reading Want – a collection of 174 anonymous sexual fantasies submitted by women from around the world – is that the scenarios are often strikingly odd. One contributor dreams of being fed chocolate by the Hogwarts potion master. Another longs to have sex with her office door knob. Women are still seen as less sexual than men, but this book attests to a vivid imaginative hinterland, where the desires are far more inventive than the “Milf” and “cheerleader” tropes that dominate man-made porn. In one particularly detailed submission, a woman daydreams about breastfeeding an attractive cashier at the supermarket.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of independent bookstores are greatly exaggerated.
In “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore,” Evan Friss describes how these meccas to the printed word have defied similar predictions throughout the decades. Not only have they survived, but also they have shaped American culture, influenced retail trends, and even helped usher in Saturday banking hours.