ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the Internet is on the verge of ending books, and how people have come to know them. People author their lives using phones, which allow typing, but this writing for the most part immerses them in everyday life and does not encourage distance from it. It explores these changes in the ways we connect and communicate. As global cultural dissemination has been attained in our post-Fordist moment, we can get out the message but we have lost the distance of books from the realities they describe and discuss. The unbinding of texts, replaced by multitasking phones, represents the triumph of connection over reflection, perhaps a natural outcome of postmodern alienation. China combines economic development, consumer capitalism, the Internet, culture industries, with political illiberalism. Marx and Lenin already understood international imperialism and colonialism as essential for European and American capitalism. The outsourcing of jobs, commodities, and culture to the Third World perpetuates uneven development, on which capitalism rests.
