I went to my library to borrow a book. Imagine my surprise.
The man behind the counter informed me, “They’ve all been digitized.
“No more dust or mold,” he said, “torn pages or overdues.
“It’s the way of the future – a digital world. What have we got to lose?”

Digitize our artworks, our music, and our laughter.
Digitize the past, the present, and everything thereafter.
Digitize the whole human race before it’s obsolete.
If we lose a few along the way, we can always step and repeat.

Mashups, theft and plagiarism. Photoshopped forgery.
What’s mine is yours is ours is theirs in the great big digital family.
You voice your protest but it’s been copied before you’ve even said it,
Going briefly viral on YouTube, then exposed as a fake on Reddit.

Like worms on the hook of progress, we can flail and we can fidget
But the time has long since passed when we could safely extract the digit.
An umbilical cord of zeros and ones pumps our empty hearts.
We’re copied, backed up, hacked and hacked up before we even start.

Illuminated by retinal screens, in states approaching vegetal,
We click and like and share and shout and think we’ve said something credible.
But when eyelids grow heavy, jaws grow slack, and we’ve lost a bit of our fervour
Our lives are swept up and stored on some vast subterranean server,

Where we spend our nights in digital dreams and rejoice in our digital days,
Forever preserved in cyberscream like an army of Dorian Grays.
I’ve heard they can digitize tastes and smells, after all, it’s only chemicals.
Let’s digitize our hopes and fears. Hey, let’s digitize our genitals!

Digital printers build up layers of something resembling our death.
In a thousand years it’ll look just like us, but horribly out of breath.
Lifelike phantoms, we’ll rise to take selfies, no flicker of doubt in our eyes,
For nothing can age or fade or rot when it’s been digitized.

All our history is now a document in the hands of a demographic.
Endlessly edited down to a meme that maximizes traffic.
A commercial simulacrum, a social brand exercise.
We’ve already lost ourselves to ourselves…

We’re totally digitized.