Every time he enters his flat after a completed day of work. The flat which, of course, he doesn’t unlock with a chip. He’s not a fool, after all, and won’t get one implanted. So, hello, flat. “Hello, programmer,” his flat would say if it were networked and smart, which, of course, it isn’t, since the programmer isn’t a fool. The flat resembles any other flat. Of all the IT engineers, sound designers, cloud architects, transport-planning AI administrators, television personalities, actors, systems biologists, smart-city engineers, and the like. It’s on one of the blocks of a gentrified neighborhood, let’s say Hackney, where a real hubbub of urban life is taking place these days. With pubs and all that. People form their surroundings, the surroundings form people. For the most part an endless cycle of gray. Buildings often demonstrate a cliché-reinforcing reality. Naturally, the blocks are somehow environmentally friendly, but not too much, not to the extent of building hanging gardens or anything. You just insulate square crates. Then install airtight windows into the boxes—not too big, in order to save energy. And, of course, recessed balconies, referred to as whispering galleries, where one can live out one’s propensity for hatred of all life forms other than one’s own without seeing one’s neighbors. Inside, standard implementation of incompetence in the realm of taste: open kitchen, expression of the technocratic rationalizing away of space. Who would want the smell of onions and cabbage fumes in the parlor, the space that used to be reserved for reading books, sitting in front of the fire, and listening to mellow music? All the wooden floors finished too brightly, two little closets. Showers with glass partitions so you can look at your partner naked. (What partner?) Then comes the furniture, stuff that looks as if it were chosen by a child playing designer. Some crap or other that nobody finds comfortable. There has to be a sofa; flats are drawn up around kitchens and couches. Sofas, complete helplessness in furniture form. The new, universally efficient human deposit boxes are an expression of unkindness bordering on contempt. In these crates, people sit and congratulate themselves on having made it. They’re pleased about their middle-class existence with a middle-class motorcar. Self-driving, obviously.

The programmer heats up a premade meal, eats alone sitting at the table with a view out at other blocks of flats where other individuals are also sitting alone at oversize tables. A drone flies past the window.

It’s a good life

At home

Where the others can no longer sit around the fire.