I am pressing my fingertips down onto the keys of my laptop, a sequence of movements that is somehow making these words appear on a screen in front of me. At some point, over the next couple of days, once a sufficient number of words has appeared on that screen in a manner I can just about live with, I will sign in to my e-mail account and send a file containing them to an editor several thousand miles away. Not long after that, you will be able to read these words on a screen much like the one I am looking at, or perhaps on a smaller screen, one that you hold in the palm of your hand as a talisman against the passing minutes and hours.Let me ask you a question about all of this: Do you have the slightest idea how any of it works? Because I certainly don’t. My computer, my phone, my mind—I don’t know what’s going on with any of these things. I don’t understand them; I just use them. (And perhaps one of the effects of not understanding them, of just using them, is not understanding the extent to which I am used by them.)