‎"The disruption posed by technology is even voiced by one of his characters, Walter Berglund, in Freedom. "'This was what was keeping me awake at night,' Walter said. 'This fragmentation. Because it's the same problem everywhere. It's like... the internet, or cable TV – there's never any centre, there's no communal agreement, there's just a trillion bits of distracting noise … All the real things, the authentic things, the honest things, are dying off.'"

Jonathan Franzen, on ebooks corroding values


TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
... The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats, The Second Coming