This next one is called "Emerson's Lament."
And I don't remember much of my junior year in high school,
but I do remember reading Emerson
and this one particular line that always stuck with me.
And it found its way many years later into something.
And I'm going to read that one.
And it's also about mass surveillance,
when I was thinking a lot about that
and how we're willingly kind of walking into it with smiles
on our faces.
"Emerson's Lament."
Nonetheless, I've become a professional cartographer.
I work for the government.
More specifically, I work for the military.
My maps could locate an early Egyptian lip balm
on the edges of the Manzala Lake if one needed to be recovered.
Most recently, the US Navy used my maps
to capture a runaway firefly that
escaped from a research facility in San Diego, California.
Authorities caught up to the tiring insect
37.5 miles into the Pacific and returned
it to service the next day, despite its exhaustion,
despite its refusal to offer light.
It died one week later, but that is another story.
My work with mapmaking was adopted
by Roger L. Easton during his earliest developments
of the global positioning system.
Since then, one might say I've become
a legend within the community.
I've arm wrestled the elusiveness
of fugitive discoveries and won.
I am, as Emerson once wrote, the transparent eyeball.
I am nothing.
I see all.
[CHUCKLES]