https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/16/how-to-see-our-world-in-a-new-light/ (paywall)
“When you read speculative fiction, suddenly, you get to travel to these weird, imagined plausible alternative realities. And that can really broaden your thinking, because then when you return to your own life, you have this wider map of how the world might be—not how the world is—which makes your thinking more flexible.”
“One of the exciting things about technology is that it can give you leverage, and I realized that stories work in a really similar way. They’re entertaining, but they can also leave us with something, they can leave us changed, they can leave us with new ideas that we can actually implement in our lives.”
“We always want the permanent fix, but the world isn’t static.”
“I’m a child of immigrants, my dad is Dutch, my mom is Canadian. I grew up in a multicultural household in a very diverse city: Oakland. When we grow up, we all learn, okay, you’re an American, that means x, y, z, you’re a citizen, these are the political borders, etc, etc. But what our country means is an invention, a technology as much as the computer is.”
“Stories are Trojan horses for ideas. The very fact that I can use that metaphor proves the point. The Iliad was written thousands of years ago, and yet we all understand that metaphor today, even if we’ve never read the story.”
Complement with TechCrunch on Bandwidth, ZDNet on the Analog series, and how and why I wrote Breach.
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