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Take Mark Zuckerberg. Please. Always the leading contestant in the long-running Worst American pageant, he has already sold two million Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which are now as primitive as pinhole shoe cameras were for starter incels.

 that a software update has given smart glasses a camera, speakers and a microphone as well as AI, “letting users ask questions about what they were looking at, from zoo animals to historical landmarks.”

That’s not what the kind of men who wear these glasses, tech’s dopey acolytes, will be asking about. The answer will be “adult human females, backing away.”

The more updates Meta adds, the thicker and heavier the glasses. Not good for the weird co-workers who are Meta’s target demographic but you know the glasses will become vanishingly slim and hide-able. Then everyone will wear AI glasses whether they need them to read or not, at which point smart people will shun them.��  

But as I say, this tech damage is old. I was only thinking about societal collapse because I threw my back out and couldn’t hold the new 900-page print Robert Galbraith mystery on my lap. I read it on the dying Amazon technology that is Kindle and reread old paperbacks until the pain retreated.

I did this as I watched Anderson Cooper on CNN recite daily Trump news. My paperback of choice was Gary Shteyngart’s 2010  about American self-destruction.

In his novel, people wear an “apparat,” a device that broadcasts net worth, health stats, etc. to every other apparat in the room, precluding conversation. With China being the supreme global power, the only reliable currency is yuan-pegged. Post-human services corporations sell eternal life to billionaires. Print books, considered “stinky,” vanish forever. A credit crisis swallows the U.S., riots begin, and the National Guard hunts down Low Net Worth humans to kidnap and kill.

And the U.S. is at war with Venezuela. The word jabbed at my brain from two directions, the book and the TV screen.

Everything Shteyngart predicted 15 years ago was coming true. It was as if Shteyngart’s fiction was being read by Cooper as current news: an angry President Xi; the wellness craze; Putin and Xi ; Trump endangering the dollar by attacking the Fed; the National Guard invading U.S. cities; and the American air attack .��

I became light-headed. Must be overmedicating, I told myself. Either CNN was making it up (possible), Cooper was speaking only to me personally via thought waves (maybe), or Cooper was reading the book aloud (possible on Audible).��

Venezuela? Simultaneously, via an old book and a dying American cable news show?

Or maybe the book was intolerably prescient (probable), thus proving my thesis that it’s not dystopian if it’s normal.

I was no smarter than the lazy 2010 book critic (they existed then) who summed up the novel as “the bleakness of Super Sad’s over-surveillanced and politically restrictive America is relieved by a sweeping romance,” massively missing the point.

I was just as unaware. I had called “Super Sad” a comedy. The joke’s on me.

American journalists who once survived by timidly calling MAGA Trump “politically restrictive” are today alone on their apparats, on Mediums and Substacks. AI rules. Will CNN survive? Will Trump’s missile attack become a Venezuelan land war?

Shteyngart, who emigrated from the old Soviet Union at age 7, predicted this 15 years ago. The saddest and funniest of Russian-American writers, he knows his history.