Do goldfish suffer paranoia?

From the time you get up till the time you go to sleep—even beyond that, if you use a digital sleep tracker—the average twenty-first-century citizen is subject to constant surveillance, caught in a interrogative crossfire, a sticky network fixing your locational, attitudinal and general behavioral spoor 24/7, holding it for the digital spiders that come to collect all this lovely data and cart it off to Big Data centers for digestion and construal in ways that help the spider collective spin ever stickier, ever more extensive webs that ostensibly aim to maximize your material pleasure and security while minimizing personal peril and pain.

The future is here. That’s right. And just around the corner lurks a world where ubiquitous internet connectivity has every public space and every public surface absorbing new information as fast as it disburses (some of) what it already knows, and where private spaces no longer exist, the very notion of privacy enjoying a cachet similar to that of ‘perversion’ or ‘poopy.’

Just saying, eh? Plus just who or what it is that’s calculating what will make me happy, and why I don’t need pain, not to mention who or what’s out to get me and how best they might be stymied?

The better part of bravery. There’s much more to it than that, of course. But I don’t want the Powers That Be to know everything I know about them and their game, eh? Paranoia is the mode du jour.

Sara remains silent. Though she is looking at me strangely. “What?” I ask her. Still she says nothing.

Note: One good thing about blogging: nowhere is it written you have to provide hard evidence or authoritative quotes or anything for the propositions you present. So I’ve let the following rip just because I was in the mood and because I wasn’t out to please an academic supervisor or my mother or anybody.