“Come on,” Jil­lette said. “Steal some­thing from me.”

Again, Rob­bins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jil­lette to place a ring that he was wear­ing on a piece of paper and trace its out­line with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gath­ered. Jil­lette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned for­ward, prepar­ing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.

“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.

Rob­bins held up a thin, cylin­dri­cal object: the car­tridge from Jillette’s pen.

What is true: we are record­ing more infor­ma­tion than ever. Thus was coined the term infobe­sity, from infor­ma­tion and obe­sity. The term is obvi­ously loaded with judge­ment about whether we, as indi­vid­u­als or as a soci­ety, should really be stor­ing and keep­ing so much infor­ma­tion about what we all do, see and think. This denotes an under­ly­ing belief that there are sev­eral types of infor­ma­tion, roughly split between throw­away infor­ma­tion and valu­able information.

Holo­grams of human fig­ures are appear­ing increas­ingly often in air­ports as vir­tual assis­tants. And they may also be intro­duced in var­i­ous com­mer­cial activ­i­ties. But, as Joanne McNeil inquires, what kind of empa­thy can these humanoids expect to estab­lish with their users?

Punk taught us to have con­tempt for every insti­tu­tion, except Fugazi, until con­tempt and sus­pi­cion were the first and only reac­tions we had to every­thing. Good news was embar­rass­ing, suc­cess was shame­ful, and a happy child­hood an unthink­able transgression.