Hello dear reader,

Gut check: think about your phone.

If you are thinking about your landline phone–if, in fact, you even still have one–color me surprised.

Presumably you are thinking about your mobile phone, which is almost certainly of the “smart” variety–that is, a pocket-sized computer more than 100,000 times the processing power of the fastest computers used by the Apollo space program.

With your phone, you can do amazing things: take beautiful pictures (and “share” them), access an inexhaustible volume of human knowledge and experience, pick out your next haircut. Even, you know, call people.

But anyway, how does thinking about your phone make you feel?

Exhilarated at the superhuman powers it gives you?

Grateful to have lived long enough to hold one of these marvels in your own hand?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

Anyway, hold that thought. It does pertain to today’s essay, I promise.

Thanks for reading! And here’s that link again: https://essaysofotto.blogspot.com/2021/02/sowing-discord.html

All my best to you and yours!

-Otto