I’ve been thinking about how I wanted to talk about this book since it keeps buzzing around in my head. Without a doubt, Dan Delillo’s Cosmopolis is the scariest non-horror book I’ve ever read, and it is getting scarier by the day.

Because the horror of the internet isn’t in what it can do, but how fast it does it all. Business transactions happening in the blink of an eye. Currencies becoming worthless and everything collapsing so quickly you never know what led to it. People trying to keep up with the machines and losing their minds and souls in the process.

And this is all from a book that is now twenty years old! Today we are seeing that all even quicker with social media spreading misinformation like wildfire, and of course, the emergence of AI. It is still in its infant stage and is basically just a gussied-up search engine, but it has space to grow and is growing and evolving fast. And it is already taking over jobs.

I am someone who struggles with anxiety, and that often takes the form of fixating on time. Hours. Minutes when things get really bad. And to have this book talk about world-changing decisions happening in fractions of seconds too small to comprehend, that is a fear that grabs me by the chest and doesn’t let go.