Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Fermi Paradox is what it suggests for the future of our human civilization. Namely, that we have no future beyond earthly confinement and, quite possibly, extinction. Could advanced nanotechnology play a role in preventing that extinction? Or, more darkly, is it destined to be instrumental in carrying out humanity’s unavoidable death sentence?

Ms. Nakamura said she has been more surprised by completely new kinds of racism on some popular online video games that now count players around the world. For instance, in China large numbers of users began earning a living playing Lineage 2, winning virtual weapons in the fantasy role-playing game and selling their online loot to people in the United States who did not have time to play as many hours to arm their characters. Many of the players chose to play as a female dwarf, a class in the game that can more easily win treasure on solo missions. And so other players began killing all dwarfs in the game, often adding anti-Chinese slurs in the chat section of the game as they did, says Ms. Nakamura.

“What happened was that female dwarfs become an unplayable race” in the game, she said. “They basically became a racial minority,” she added, “with the same status as immigrant workers—they become a race, which is an interesting thing.”

“Race doesn’t happen because of biology—it happens because of culture,” she concluded.

A “hacker” is a technologist with a love for computing and a “hack” is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn’t mean to compromise the Pentagon, change your grades, or take down the global financial system, although it can, but that is a very narrow reality of the term. Hackers tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access; they tend to adore computers; some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality greatly varies (and much, even most of hacking, by the definition I set above, is actually legal). But once one confronts hacking empirically, some similarities melt into a sea of differences; some of these distinctions are subtle, while others are profound enough to warrant thinking about hacking in terms of genres or genealogies of hacking — and we compare and contrast various of these genealogies in the class, such as free and open source software hacking and the hacker underground.

The slowness of books, the habits of mind they build, Shteyngart suggests, may be a key to knowing what it’s like to be inside oneself, not part of the crowd or the audience or Twitterverse. “Reading is difficult,” Lenny says to Eunice. “People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age.