Here’s a new way to look at the future.
We’ve officially made it through “The Extremely Online Decade of ‘Get Out,’ Fake Meat and Crystals” and are potentially entering a world of cyberterror and influencer I.P.O.s. Who can really say what the future holds at the dawn of the new year? Maybe we’ll just be able to look forward to an internet “that stops screaming at us.” Today’s edition of Sunday Best — and The Times’s Sunday Review — is a compilation of fiction, poetry and art that’s part of a yearlong project exploring life in the age of surveillance. Retire your Magic 8-Ball, ignore your predictive algorithms, and read on for a glimpse at what the next decade might look like. — Alexandra March |
Confessions of a Dating Profile |
 | | Max Loeffler |
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“You have to spend hours poring over high school Instagram accounts of your boss, take whatever bands he or she liked or crushes she had on boys or girls in homeroom and work up a profile that a contemporary adult person with a job would click on, chat with and eventually love. Not easy!” |
 | | Max Loeffler |
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“Aunt Nettie wasn’t Big Brother. Indeed, some called her Big Mother. She was congenial, user-friendly, consumer-tested. Aunt Nettie knew you better than you knew yourself.” |
 | | George Wylesol |
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“The ghost of your late wife / hovers in the air beside you. I have researched / the average time for widowers to remain / on their side of the bed, but it’s inconclusive.” |
 | | Max Loeffler |
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“It was days like this that used to make Landry wonder. Wonder if that same feeling of revitalization and promise existed before the vaccine, when people got old, got sick. Did the uncertainty of death — when and how it would arrive — make days like this one easier or more difficult to appreciate?” |
 | | Max Loeffler |
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“But we remember another time, before we went stealth, when it seemed like the entire nation was spitting, and sending their spit through the mail, all so they could say at a party, ‘I did it. I spat and found out’ whatever thing the spitting told.” |
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