Walking Books, Target-Intelligent Robots, and the Strange Comfort of Indestructible Memory
From the essay
My mind does this repeatedly: it moves forward into the future–and then, almost against my will, turns back toward literature. I am back in the Soviet Union. I am young, reading with my friends, encountering literature that was never merely literature. It was oxygen. It was a way to remain a person inside a system meticulously designed to produce obedience rather than thought. Solzhenitsyn was one of those writers. I read him avidly – not because he was comforting (he was not), but because he was real in a world structured around managed unreality.
Adapted from PDF pages 1.