In the 1980s, when I first began to suspect an out-of-control, technologically dependent world was emerging in every phase of human life, I started writing a novel with the tentative title “Plantation America.” It was mynovel, one that I returned to periodically but never seriously intended to be published.
Other studies have revealed that the income disparities of our time are equal to, or exceed the extravagances of the Gilded Age during the last half of the nineteenth century. The same is true for the 1920s before the stock market crash that ushered in the Greatof the 1930s. The major difference is that modern technology today has enabled powerful entities to engage in practices that create income inequality on a grander scale than ever before.
Horace becomes increasingly fixated on what he thought was an electronically driven world that seemed to be taking over the very power we have to think for ourselves. He also became obsessed with what he believed was an electronically driven system that spied on everyone. He becomes obsessed with the idea that the entire world is being reduced to the status of an electronically controlled labor force that is replicating in modern life the plantations and slave labor forces of another era.
My first response was, “No, I am not willing to share the data I have created." My second response was based on several decades of returning periodically to my therapeutic novel. I realized Horace, who valued his privacy and felt it was under constant assault, may have sensed something most of us did not anticipate until almost half a century later.