Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories, and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all bulbs in the world seem impossible now - the grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more than enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don't last long - they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything.

Gravity's Rainbow
The Story of Byron The Bulb
T. Pynchon
Penguin Books, 1995 edition, page 654.

(Required reading for paranoids. The whole book, of course, but if you don't have time for that sort of project, just read the Byron the Bulb bit - it's T.P. at his side-splitting best.)