Keep Your Augmented Reality. Give Me a Secret Garden.

Growing up not too far from NY in the late 70s, there were a lot of in-between or unclaimed places where we could meet up and play and let our imaginations take over, mostly in the woods. It was exciting to have that freedom, and I think very important to learning to trust ourselves. Between over-development of the land, electronic devices, lyme disease, and over-scheduled kids, I doubt this happens much anymore.

But where is Dad?

Brilliant. We all need to maintain times and spaces that are free of the ever-more-deceptive digital realm.

"But then she finds an unkempt garden. While fixing it up, she gets better, learns to be nicer, makes friends and helps an ill boy get better, too." As Jordan Peterson puts it: Clean your room. It's a small start that leads to bigger and better things.

Interesting but still depressing...Musk has not come up a new "self-drives" and the Boring Tunnel 25.0? And the Castro Muni Station and in fact all the Muni station. In a better San Francisco some far reaching city government of the future, heh, OK don't laugh, would have put up a mag lev underground railway system that served the entire city and the region. I would like to head off the author in case his next novel includes humans and flying cars...I would much rather see flying suits or better yet the teleporter from Star Trek...

Gardens indeed. Enough with two dimensions and fake reality. Quick, before it's too late. Raise your eyes, meet reality!

A fine piece of (mostly) dark fantasy! The narrator's matter-of-fact acceptance of total surveillance as her everyday reality, coupled with the knowledge that this "reality" isn't technologically far off, made it all the more eerie. But I can't help but think that the REAL fantasy element lay in the idea that the narrator's mother would so readily accept - even seize upon - the teenagers' "rebellious" desires and actions, healthy though they were. In all likelihood, she'd actually go emotionally and verbally ballistic, then figure out ways to keep her child even more tightly controlled and surveilled. And the narrator would learn the sad lesson that stepping into the unfiltered, unmediated world only results in the powers that be clamping down even harder to ensure that her world becomes even more strictly curated.

We do need spaces of our own determining, but that does not imply they need to be secret. The fight for a measure of self-determination is not so much a fight between the generations, or about some mythical space of privacy. Learning to live relatively peaceably, even while engaging the myriad conflicts all around us, is the art of defining the self in relation with others. We need that now more than ever.

I love secret gardens; but I cannot love the disapproval in this article.

The Secret Garden is one of the books that made a strong impression on me when I read it as a child. This is a brilliant and disturbing take on that story out of another kinder and gentler world, when the technical surveillance and brainwashing that exists even now couldn’t have even been imagined by writers like Ray Bradbury.

I shut off the phone and go outside in the wide world of early spring and find a spot where no one will bother me (easy where I live) and do a painting. Like meditation it calms me and makes me happy. It surrounds me with beauty and nature and the sounds and sights of birds getting comfortable with me and butterflies coming up close and even bees checking out the bright colors. There is a whole other world we are ignoring that is spectacular and rewarding.Its called Real Life.

The Secret Garden was one of my favorite books along with Burnett’s other works. I think that the blinders people construct based on white privilege are as dangerous as any sci-fi future. Living in gated communities, shopping at high end malls, going only to vetted cultural events. The future scenarios won’t change the desires of people today to avoid the ugly parts of our world. Would that the glasses of privilege could be taken off so easily.

I’m ready to throw away my phone and the internet and read a book on the porch.

Has Dr. Rajaniemi been watching Black Mirror? This sounds a lot like the Black Mirror Season 4 episode, "Arkangel," from the daughter's perspective. The episode was about a dystopian near-future involving parental surveillance in the extreme, as well. The mom shut off parts of the daughter's field of view and essentially spied on her every move. Scary stuff.

Just loved this.

Shades of "Black Mirror", a thought provoking piece. Growing up outside NYC, in the 60's and 70's, there were still places that we could escape, patches of nature tucked away in the midst of suburbia that was gobbling it up. Patches to play and connect with each other and nature, away from the peering eyes of parents, police, propriety. To be free to explore and imagine. Most of those places are now gone, overrun and overwhelmed by "progress." A few have escaped destruction, and when I go back to visit, I still seek them out - because they still represent what they always have, the untrammeled places where one can be alive in a way that no digitized version can ever duplicate. A place far more simple, yet for more complex and interconnected than any digitally "connected" world.

That was well-written and horrifying. I’ve often wondered how I would be a teenager in these times. I used to drive my car through the corn fields blasting The Cure and smoking cigarettes with a sense of privacy and freedom that teens today may never have experienced. I like to think I would have tossed my cell phone with the family tracking apps right out the window, but that’s because I had tasted true freedom. I knew the thrill of realizing that not a single soul knew where I was or what I was doing. Kids these days have never even tasted that to know what they’re missing.

Thank you, NYT, for putting this thought-provoking fiction in your opinion section. Many brilliant touches. Like "drone mews" - I never thought of that before but now it seems as inevitable to me as cell phone towers. A big take-away was using augmented reality to *hide* things - a powerful insight. And helicopter parents literally seeing things through their child's eyes. Imagination is crucial if we are to make wise decisions about the issues we face today.

we're just going to let this happen ? like, we're just gonna accept this? this was a moving piece, but i'd love an alternative vision to the tech-heavy surveilance-based future we seem so ready to accept. the more tech develops the more energy it uses— remember how streaming an hour of video uses (total) as much energy as two refrigerators use in a week? but it's like invisible labor, in that we don't "see" it (you can easily find the article on good old google). or, like how amazon web services (which hosts most of the internet) runs mostly on coal !? this sort of technological progress is unrealistic, and to not only accept by Expect is seems flat out wrong.

Seeing things for what they really are...isn’t that our greatest desire and our greatest fear? I love the voice in this fiction, and the astonishing fact that it is provided to the world in a newspaper. Speculative fiction is where truth can be approached safely. Keep it going.

So sweet and so sad. It's the best piece I've read in the last few days. And I thank the author for a subtle and solid portrayal of hope.

I recommend the book "Your Own Best Secret Place" by Byrd Baylor, illustrated by Peter Parnall. I have my own secret places, but I won't tell you where they are.