Unflattening

“It starts early […] nearly as soon as they can make tracks of their own, they are sorted out and put on tracks, assigned paths, and sent forth to receive instruction.”

The standardization and flattening of our perspective begins at an early age. Accompanying the idea of young humans making “tracks of their own” is the silhouette of a toddling baby, indicating that the system starts shaping humans almost as soon as we can walk. Sousanis’s use of the passive voice indicates humans’ lack of agency in these proceedings; systems rather than personal inclinations determine people’s fates.

“Not only space, but time and experience too, have been put in boxes […] divided up and neatly packaged into discrete units […] for efficient transmission.”

Here Sousanis references the boxes that frame his text. The box is a figure of containment and limitation. Ironically, human society has boxed up the vast and potentially endless phenomena of time and experience in order to maximize efficiency. This establishes a theme that will feature throughout the book: the tension between true perception and efficiency.

“What had first opened its eyes wide […] darting, dancing, […] animated and teeming with possibilities […] has now become shuttered, […] its vision narrowed.”

Sousanis contrasts a curious newborn human who is open to a sense of infinity with the closed-off adult “shuttered” by conditioning. The wide, dancing eyes of the infant that travel from object to object and continually make new sense of the world give way to static, blinkered vision and a decreased sense of possibility. For Sousanis, the transition from childhood to adulthood constitutes a loss of