To navigate this world is to practice a new kind of literacy. Not just reading and writing, but —the ability to choose what enters your brain, to recognize the algorithmic strings, and to occasionally, defiantly, look away from the glowing screen and into the quiet, unmediated dark. The most radical act in the age of endless content may simply be to sit with your own unamplified thoughts.

The walls of her apartment dissolved. She was no longer in her cluttered studio. She was standing on a vast, dark plain under a sky full of static. In front of her, a single screen floated—an antique cathode-ray tube, fat and humming.