Unadorned …

… Nakedness in a Digital Age. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What we call Silicon Valley is a collection of suburbs connected by El Camino Real, the old Spanish highway of the California Mission era. The logic and the allure of the Valley’s digital “superhighway” belong to the postwar American suburban impulse, against the congestion and contest of the city. The loneliness social media aspires to repair is the loneliness of empty streets, Dairy Queens, the loneliness of high school, the loneliness of Mexican gardeners, the loneliness of lawns. The advantage of shopping online, Silicon Valley encourages us to believe, is that one need not contend with bodies, with business hours, with complete sentences. The loneliness social media aspires to repair becomes the loneliness social media creates and exports to the world as “connection.”