Vonnegut wrote repeatedly about the harm that mass media & recording had done to certain important ways people exist socially. It must have been on his mind qui

Vonnegut wrote repeatedly about the harm that mass media & recording had done to certain important ways people exist socially. It must have been on his mind quite a bit. Notably, the social (and economic, for that matter) value of "small" talent. Being able to sing a little. Being a pretty-good dancer. A fair storyteller. Decent at a sport. All of that's worth way less when everyone can experience the best the last 100 years of the whole damn globe has to offer at the press of a button. The cost is the devastation of a whole bunch of ways of relating to one another socially and deriving personal value, on a small scale. Whatever survives of those small talents withers into quirks, lonesome hobbies, and pathologies, or simply dies entirely. All this media-plenty is great, sure, but it presses on us and molds us with inhuman scale. We see—we can hardly avoid—the greatest others can be, and are less, ourselves. I think he'd find Web, in 2021, horrifying. I don't think it's implausible to speculate that he might see it as socially apocalyptic. Like social Ice-9—an unstoppable, deadly force, wrecking the globe forever, but originally a human invention.