Before It Started Before It Started I was once like you—waking each morning to an alarm clock, jarring you from sleep, trudging to the bathroom to look at your sunken eyes and wonder how long the bags had been there under your eyes. I was once like you, shuffling out the door to fight traffic to get to a job that slowly and desperately sucks the will to live out of you, feeding some capitalistic juggernaut Leviathan—praise be to him! I had a person in the office who yelled on the phone about their positive Herpes results and "Damn that bastard!" I had a suitemate that took his lunch at the desk, spewing bits of food across the table between bites and comments about the weather that were wrong and a football game you either did not watch nor will watch nor ever had plans to watch where the food rests in crevices for weeks and turns to mold just the same as you realize you are wasting away and dissolving in this place. I was once like you—listening ...
This morning I went to Neeva Search to see if rain was on the forecast. I had been up since 5 AM and noticed that there were quite a bit of clouds moving overhead. During a hike along a local nature trail I could feel the crispness of morning retreating and the mugginess of an oncoming rainstorm permeating the air. I never did search for what the weather was going to do; instead, I went to Neeva and saw that they were shutting down on June 2nd. I have quite liked Neeva Search from when I first started using it about six months ago. I was disheartened to see that it could not keep its doors (tubes? ports?) open any longer. What they were doing was admirable. Google has amassed a veritable fortune through what Shoshana Zuboff has dubbed "Surveillance Capitalism." It would be easy to try and replicate that, easier still to lay down and admit Google's dominance in the internet search and ad-server realm. Neeva tried to fight back. The whole philosophy of Neeva was to have a ...