I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

Recently, I had that uncanny experience of bumping into someone who I've not seen in...

Well, I don't know.

A decade?

We chopped it up a bit in an airport terminal after spotting each other passing through security.

Roaming graduated from high school.

It's your stepson still in flight school?

I see you've been traveling a lot.

Where you had it?

You got a new book coming out, right?

I noticed much of their conversation issued from what they gleaned from social media.

As if I were my own streaming station, with my own news show,

with my own searchable library of life events and random dinners to access at the ready.

Years ago, I had joked that in the future, along with birth certificates,

we would simultaneously create social media accounts and hospitals to track each person's journey from cradle to grave.

I know, I know how dystopian.

Today's poem guides us to the revelation that we become the machines we dream,

especially when what drives us is to be seen.

We find ourselves contending with the mechanization of human behavior that divorces us from our power,

which is the very real bodies we live in, and not the projected images of ourselves on screens.

A state of permanent visibility by Steve Healy.

The seeing machine has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole.

...