"They get us, all right, we're all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us . . . We're being played, Maxi, and the game is fixed, and it won't end till the Internet—the real one, the dream, the promise—is destroyed."

I'd slept on Bleeding Edge, Pynchon's latest, but it's a terrific, necessary novel.