One evening, taken apart

Picture an ordinary evening. At six a phone buzzes during homework; at seven a photo of dinner is posted and checked for likes; at eight there is an argument with a stranger in a comment thread. At nine the person lies in bed, still angry, and at ten there is a last scroll.

Put the evening's five moments in the order they happened.

Tap them in the order they happen, first to last. Each tap gets a number.

• A last scroll
• An argument with a stranger in a thread
• Lying in bed, still angry
• A phone buzzes during homework
• A dinner photo is posted and checked for likes

Every one of those took attention and none gave it back. The buzz cost a switch and the likes were the lever. The thread spent a sentence on someone who never asked, before an audience nobody could count. The anger was residue carried into bed, and the scroll had no last page.

The dinner photo got forty likes. A post about the homework, the week before, got two. Using chapter 2, what will next week's evenings have more of?

• The same mix. Likes do not change what people post.
• Dinner photos. What the crowd paid for gets repeated, and the shown self drifts toward it.
• Homework posts, to balance it out.

Three more lessons were in that evening. The dinner photo was a recording, lesson 7: an audience nobody can count, kept for ever. The reply in the thread took two seconds, lesson 9: the feeling acted before thought arrived. And the anger in bed was lesson 14's narrow reading: one threat in view, the rest of the day dark.

Now the last part of the course: what the person is joined to. Start with the air in that bedroom. About half of the oxygen made on Earth is made in the sea, mostly by plankton too small to see, NOAA estimates. The words in the argument were given by other people, and the anger came from a stranger.

The sea makes about half the world's oxygen. Who in that bedroom made the air being breathed?

• Nobody in the room. It was made by plankton and plants far away, and came in through the window.
• The person, by breathing.
• The trees outside the window, on their own.

Go further. The carbon and oxygen in the body were made inside stars, and the hydrogen is as old as the universe, NASA says. The feed on the phone was built by people never met, and the mood at ten came from it. Each thing in the evening came from somewhere else first.

Picture a web of people in which each person who gets a harsh reply passes it on, in some form, to three others. Move the steps and watch how many people are holding it. Made up to show the shape.

Move the control.

Now the two halves together. Lesson 12's line has to be kept in every direction, because in a web this tight a harm sent out has paths back. The other person breathes the same air and uses the same words. And the evening as it happened, with the shown self taken off, is the plain one, lesson 8's word.

A person finishes the course and says: so the evening was taken from me by the phone. Using the whole course, what is the fuller account of it?

• The evening was pulled at by a buzz, a lever, a thread and a feed, and the person was also joined, all evening, to the sea, the stars and other people. Both are true at once.
• Nothing was taken. The person chose every tap.
• The phone is to blame, and the fix is to throw it away.