Second Life?

It’s hard but not impossible to be a hermit in our digital age. If you don’t get them, they’ll get you. That's to say the internet of everything records your comings and goings no matter how much you may want to keep to your self. You don’t need an actual security camera, many devices actually are built to track patterns of consumption and ambulation. A decade ago a hermit could simply pay cash and innocently drive through a toll booth emerging no worse for the wear. Now you can’t pay if you want to and if your easy pass is not being recorded, say you don’t have one, your license surely will be. Someone should write a new version of l984 in which the great grandchild of Winston Smith is trying to escape from the dragnet of technology. In fact, it’s astonishing how prescient Orwell was in the first go round. But imagine a world where virtual reality is competitive and people really have to decide if they prefer to live a totally digitized cyberspace existence over life in the natural world with increasing fires and floods due to global warming. In the futuristic saga perhaps the body will be the first thing to go with the promise of immortality in cyberspace providing competition to materialized existence. After all Second Life is not only a game but it’s also a functioning society. Such a universe might be free of conflagration though freedom itself would be a term that had little or no meaning to the extent that thought would be comprised of mind games produced by the manufacturer.