“November 30, 1999

Dear Bill Gates,

I swam past your dream house the other day, but didn’t stop to knock. Frankly, your underwater sensors had me worried. I would have liked to take a look at Winslow Homer’s Lost on the Grand Banks. It’s a great painting, but, speaking as a friend and fellow citizen, at $30 million you paid too much.

HIGHEST PRICE EVER PAID FOR AN AMERICAN PAINTING!!!

So why are you so interested in a picture of two poor lost dory fishermen, momentarily high on a swell, peering into a wall of fog? They are about as high as they’re ever going to be, unless the sea gets uglier. They are going to die, you know, and it won’t be a pretty death.

And as for you, Bill, when you’re on the Net, are you lost? Or found?

And the rest of us—lost or found—are we on it, or in it?”

From Allan Sekula, Dear Bill Gates, 1999.