M6N

York South–Weston has not changed as much as you would think. The railway still cuts through it. The houses are still small. There is a new transit line now that took so long to build it became a punchline, and when it finally opened, the people who got up early took it to work the next morning without ceremony, because that is what you do with a tool. You do not celebrate it. You use it.

My father is gone. He loved cars and he rode the bus, and the second thing was a choice he made every morning so that my mother and I would have the first. He died before any of this — before the box you can talk to, before I understood what I had been watching all those years. He never saw a data centre. He would not have been impressed by one. He would have asked what it was for, which is the only question in this blog worth asking, and he would have waited for a plain answer.

So here is the plain answer, Dad, and it is the one you taught me without ever saying it.

That is the entire economy, and the entire singularity, and the entire meaning of your life and my mother’s, in five sentences. The machine does not change a word of it. The machine is just a very good hammer, and it has shown up in the hands of every reader on earth at the same time, and the only question is what we are all going to build.

My mother is still here. I am going to go live with her, for a while, in the neighbourhood that made us both. I am going to keep building things with the hammer and selling them, and keep writing the longer book, and keep looking up at the web to see what it says. And every so often, when someone I love is standing on the bank not recognizing the river, I am going to do the thing Siddhartha did.