Central irony of our age?

The central irony of our age: a powerful totalitarian drift promising individual empowerment. (Epigrams’R’Us, eh?)

Individually and collectively, we blithely speed towards a precipice. Or so it seems, of this jet-lagged morning, just back from a computer-, Internet-, and phone-less island sojourn.

Are we modern folk evolving as mere arms & legs for our smartphones? The reality of current tendencies may be even more sinister than that. I’m too sleepy to develop that notion any further just now. Here’s just one piece from a swelling chorus of unease, one that may be too restrained and coming too late, at least from my paranoid early-morning POV:

That’s Not My Phone, It’s My Tracker www.nytimes.comThe device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls.