After a slow lunch at the Wedgewood I ran into an old friend who once worked in book publishing but left to make his fortune in what we now call “electronic games.” Does he miss the world his new line of work helped to alter? Apparently. “Had I known what games would do to books, films and music, I never would have sold my soul to ___.”

Interesting that he should resort to the supernatural to account for his actions, and that had he stayed in publishing, none of this would have happened.

We live at a time when there is so much to apply our minds to, yet the content has never been so limited. In Literature, the magic of Harry Potter gave way to the narcissistic bloodsucking of Twilight. Part of me understands this, while another part blames an infantile culture of elimination that chooses the one over the many and the market as its arbiter.

Maybe it is time to read these books closer, as allegories, as evidence of the “invisible hand” Adam Smith wrote about in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” or what Karl Marx wrote in Volume One of Das Kapital: "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” With knowledge comes understanding.