{"text":[[{"start":8.24,"text":"The writer’s latest book is ‘The Kitchen Book: Good Food for Every Day’"}],[{"start":13.12,"text":"The unexamined life is not worth living, according to Socrates. You can tell from this that Socrates lived in a time before the livestream, and specifically before the new Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush (“See What Your Dentist Sees”)."}],[{"start":29.16,"text":"The Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush is “an entirely new way to clean your teeth.” It looks almost exactly like the old way to clean your teeth. It is, of course, a lot more expensive. It has an “integrated 100k-pixel macro lens camera powered by machine learning”. It takes 28 live images per second."}],[{"start":49.68,"text":"If you brush your teeth for the dentist-recommended twice-daily two minutes, that is 6,720 images a day and 2,452,800 images a year. For context, there are slightly fewer frames than this in Stanley Kubrick’s entire filmography. The proud new owner of the Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush will have, by this time next year, created more images than The Shining, Doctor Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey put together. Every one of those images will be of the inside of their own red wet maw."}],[{"start":86,"text":"Let us rise up together and say: this is too much. Nobody ever tried to charge Socrates £419.99 for the privilege of watching his own gums live-streamed to his iPhone. I venture to suggest that if they had, the whole of western philosophy might have been quite different. “Some things are best left alone,” for instance; or perhaps “you don’t need to know everything to have a nice time”. We would, however, have ended up with the same fundamental truth: death is coming for us all."}],[{"start":116.4,"text":"It is a sobering fact that every toothbrush you have ever owned likely still exists somewhere, and will do long after you are gone. Save, perhaps, one or two happy hippies who got into soft-bristled bamboo brushes early, we are all generating a 300-strong trail of toothbrushes that will live, practically speaking, forever. Unlike us."}],[{"start":136.52,"text":"We can optimise many things: we can break down our meals into micro- and macronutrients; we can track every heartbeat with watches and rings; even our dreaming self can be followed by apps to monitor the unmanaged minutes. We can take in oxygen via IV, inject ourselves with peptides and, in some cases, undergo transfusions with the blood of our young. We can track and document every second of our lives. All of this, and we all still die!"}],[{"start":162.82,"text":"As much as we try to convince ourselves that we can cheat death, we will never be able to. The mouth of the grave will open wide for all of us, even those with two and a half million photographs of their back molars."}],[{"start":174.8,"text":"It took 661 people to invent the Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush. Was there nothing else, looking at all the burning world, that these brilliant and highly trained minds could have done? If Socrates lived today, would all that mighty intellect be turned, instead, to inventing a new kind of toothbrush?"}],[{"start":192.6,"text":"For this is the other thing about it all. Brush your teeth, by God. Floss, if you want to be Top Girl at the dentist. But when we have solipsistically optimised every second of our time — reading emails on the cross-trainer, wrist buzzing on a country walk, watching our own real-time gums on our phone screens instead of staring at our own unvarnished reflections — what time will be left for thought? What time will be left to examine the things that really matter?"}],[{"start":218.24,"text":"We have so little time on this earth, and the insides of our mouths really are the least interesting thing about being here. Every Kubrick movie, for instance. Almost any book. Any patch of something outside. Anybody else but ourselves."}],[{"start":232.36,"text":"The Dyson CameraJet™ Electric Toothbrush comes in two colours, blue and pink. There are matching Dyson toothpastes and a Dyson mouth rinse. I bet it will sell like hot cakes."}],[{"start":247.28,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1788748805_6718.mp3"}