bleeding edge

Maxine’s father explains that the Internet, her generation’s “magical convenience,” grew out of Defense Department research during the cold war, and he rants that it “creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time.” He adds, darkly, that “as it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet.”