<i>Gerald took off his glasses and rubbed them a little on the tablecloth. He was bewildered. How could this be, he kept thinking to himself. No--how, literally, could this be?</i><p><i>He couldn't have known it, but at that very moment, the same conversation, and the same bewilderment, was being had, in offices over lunch hours, around dinner tables in startup work condos, all across America. Something had shifted.</i><p><i>In later years this age would come to be known as: The Dawn of the GenZ School of Itinerant Design. GenY art historians with goth hair and overcoats tried and failed to analyze it as a "return to the retro-aesthetics of MySpace and Geo-cities, heralded by Glitch", but the labels never stuck. Older, wiser and more bitter professionals, fustily defogging their glasses while seated defeatedly at their architect-style slanted drafting desks (with optional standing desk accessory), would oftentimes mutter to themselves, alone at night in their downtown 23rd-floor apartments, lit only by the synthetic warm-LED glow of their ironically chosen "Banker's lamps", a different name for this cultural watershed: "The End-times' Madness." But nobody listened to them anyways, and they didn't much care.</i>