Filed for December 1999 from the not-too-distant future
Imagine a device about the size of a deck of cards.
It fits in your pocket.
It weighs less than a paperback.
Its front is almost entirely made of glass.
Tap that glass, and you can:
This device is real. It is coming. And very soon, almost everyone you know will carry one.
We will call it the smartphone.
To understand what the smartphone represents, start with the most familiar tool of the serious mind: the library.
Today, in 1999, reaching serious knowledge requires movement. You go to the stacks. You search a card catalog (or, if you’re lucky, a web terminal on a shared computer). You wait for interlibrary loans. Information lives in buildings, on shelves, in limited copies.
The smartphone dissolves that geography.
Inside this small object is a permanent, portable ticket into something larger than any single library: a networked collection of encyclopedias, dictionaries, textbooks, lecture notes, research summaries, and how-to guides on almost any topic that human beings have bothered to write about.
In many cities, the same question is being asked in very different ways:
If a society is structured in a way that leaves people hungry while food is thrown away, what counts as a moral response?
One answer says: steal. If the system itself is based on exploitation, then taking from large corporations—especially when they discard surplus goods anyway—can be framed as a small act of justice. Under this view, shoplifting from big-box stores or supermarket chains becomes a kind of micro-reparation: a way of clawing back value from an economic order that was rigged from the start.
Another answer says: build parallel systems. Instead of sneaking goods past the scanner, ordinary workers and volunteers quietly organize an alternative supply chain: surplus food is reclaimed with permission, rerouted into a mutual-aid network, and distributed for free from a folding table in the middle of the city. No questions asked, one bag per person, no money accepted.
Both approaches are trying to address the same reality: people are hungry in a world of abundance, and much of that abundance is controlled by institutions whose priorities are profit, not care. But they make fundamentally different bets about how to change that reality, and at what cost.
This essay looks at those two paths side by side. It does not deny the anger that fuels the first. It simply asks a harder question: Which underground do we actually want to grow?
