Davin Heckman is an Assistant Professor of English at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. He is the author of A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (Duke University Press, 2008) and his home on the web is <www.retrotechnics.com>.
 According to Davin, "Electronic writing allows us a unique opportunity to peel back the surface and peer into the underlying mechanisms and assumptions inherent in all systems of representation.  As part of a developing canon, readers/writers working in this medium have an
opportunity to challenge the basic assumptions of literature in ways that resemble what critics have been doing for the past century, but which appear with greater clarity and relevance.  As part of the emerging field of 'new media,' consumers/producers have a similar
opportunity to question the role that technologies play in daily life.  While this particular piece, 'Endings Eventually End,' tends to focus on the fringes of American culture, it also speaks to more generalized eschatological anxieties brought about by the sense of a shrinking world and the notion of rapid cultural, economic, ecological, and technological change. Most importantly, it should serve as a warning to people who have not made adequate preparations for the coming planetary alignment and the epidemic of gastro-intestinal disturbances it promises to unleash."