May 03, 2010

lust removed from nature

Over the weekend I discovered Popular Highlights magically appearing in the book I was reading on my "Kindle."[1] As widely reported, Amazon is collating the highlighting activity of its readers, and making that activity visible to readers on the Kindle...and on the web. So now you can satisfy that previously impossible-to-satisfy desire to know the most popular highlighted passage in Dan Brown's Lost Symbol, or Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture, or Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed.

Or this one from Don DeLillo's White Noise:

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.

Welcome to the future.

[1] Where "Kindle" = Kindle app on the iPhone and iPad, the combination of which is absolutely unstoppable. Anyone interested in a first gen Kindle Kindle? Make me an offer.