This book, wow...

White Noise

Don DeLillo's White Noise. Maybe just a little bit.

"I found out what it's designed to do. It's designed to solve an ancient problem. Fear of death. It encourages the brain to produce fear-of-death inhibitors."

And...

"Do I scale the sheer facade of a ninety-story building wearing a clip-on belt? What do I do, Winnie? Do I sit in a cage full of African snakes like my son's best friend? This is what people do today."

And...

Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don't know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don't know what we are watching or what it means, we don't know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness soon to pass.

And, of course...

In the altered selves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of each item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living.