I don’t know that I’ve ever read a Zadie Smith novel; I feel sure I must have tried once, but perhaps bounced off it due to the lack of familiar generic handholds.

I think it is clearly time for me to try again, because this interview with Smith by Ezra Klein (via Alan Jacobs) was just hit after hit of incredibly intense recognition—the words of someone who, it seems, looks at the world in a very similar way to myself, and draws similar conclusions.

When you wake up in the morning and you turn to your social app, you are being instructed on what issue of the day is what to be interested in. The news has always played some element in doing that, but this is total. And it’s not even, to me, the content of those thoughts. There’s a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics expressed on these platforms to the right or to the left. To me, it’s the structure — that it’s structured in a certain way. That an argument is this long, that there are two sides to every debate, that they must be in fierce contest with each other — that is actually structuring the way you think about thought.

And I don’t think anyone of my age who knows anyone they knew in 2008 thinks that that person has not been seriously modified.

And that’s OK. All mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you. The social life of a 16th-century village modifies you. But the question becomes: Who do you want to be modified by, and to what degree? That’s my only question.

And when I look at the people who have designed these things — what they want, what their aims are, what they think a human being is or should be — the humans I know and love, this machinery is not worthy of them. That’s the best way I can put it.

And I speak as someone who grew up as an entirely TV-addicted human. I love TV. I love reading. Modification is my bread and butter. And when the internet came, I was like, hallelujah. Finally, we’ve got a medium which isn’t made by the man or centralized. We’re just going to be talking to each other, hanging out with each other, peer to peer. It’s going to be amazing. That is not the internet that we have. That is not what occurred.

(This is just one passage of many that kicks that way; I’ve gone with the media critique because it’s more thematic to my usual writings here, but it’s all fantastic, thoughtful stuff.)

I wonder if my identification is predominantly rooted in our shared generation cohort, as Smith discusses later in the interview: she’s a little older than me, and it should go without saying that the circumstances of our upbringings were wildly different. But we both grew up in a very particular Britain at a very particular time in history—a time-space which is now quite literally history, an era that people write books and make films about, much like they did with “the Sixties” or “the War” when I was an adolescent.

Time’s tide makes driftwood of us all, of course. Perhaps we’re both at the age where it becomes impossible to ignore that fact, as youth is wont to do.