Author: eliotpeper

• Writing is a tool for making new ideas

  Over in Every, I wrote about how writing is more than a method for capturing ideas, it’s a way of exploring them: By externalizing your thoughts, writing puts you into conversation with yourself. It’s always easier to diagnose other people’s problems, and to identify opportunities they might be missing. Just so, writing from the heart…

• The beauty of playing the long game

  Over in the Boston Globe, I wrote about the surprising power of playing long games: I love projects with multi-decade timelines. They defy the limiting logic of quarterly earnings, KPIs, conversion rates, and all the other metrics that blind us even as they bind us to the status quo in a society where data is…

• The Four Laws of Making a Website*

  If you hire the best person in the world to build you something custom, it might be expensive, but it’ll be perfect for you.If you use a proven off-the-shelf product, it might not do everything you want, but it’ll do what it does extremely well because of economies of scale in development and testing.If you…

• Concept Art

  I love concept art because it isn’t the thing, it’s meant to inform the thing. It’s not complete, it’s suggestive. It doesn’t tell a story, it creates a vibe. Instead of illustrating what happens next, it seeks maximally resonant images. It’s visual poetry—a seed, planted. Artists: Daniel Lopez Munoz, Glenn Hernandez, Ryan Brothers, Ken Marceau…

• Wizards Meddling In the Source Code of Life

  Fiction is a uniquely capable vehicle for exploring the power and consequences of new technologies, grounding thought experiments in human experience and playing out second and third order effects. In his new science-fiction thriller, Upgrade, Blake Crouch imagines a near-future where every aspect of personal and public life has been revolutionized by genetic engineering, for…

• Writing Reap3r

  

  Big news: My new novel, Reap3r, comes out today. How far would you go to achieve your greatest ambition? Nothing is what it seems in this speculative thriller about a quantum computer scientist, virologist, podcaster, venture capitalist, and assassin coming together to untangle a twisted enigma that will change the course of future history. Everyone…

• The most useful, beautiful, and dangerous of humanity’s inventions

  Over in the Adjacent Possible, Rick Liebling interviewed me about writing Bandwidth: Planes are computers we fly in. Stoves are computers we cook on. Buildings are computers we inhabit. Nearly every manufactured object has a chip in it, and we deploy sensors to make everything that isn’t already a computer machine-readable. In doing so, we…

• What Writers Do

  Imagine you’re holding a laser pointer. You can point it at anything you want: a potted cactus, the Diophantine Equation scrawled across a whiteboard, the steaming cross section of a fresh baked croissant, a malfunctioning karaoke machine, a whorled knob of lichen encrusted bark, a lopsided smile, the green flash of a Pacific sunset, a…

• Refracting Reality Into Rainbows of Possibility

  I interviewed Monica Byrne about writing The Actual Star, an epic tale of self-discovery that spans millennia and questions the very meaning of civilization. Born of extensive research into Maya history and culture, this wildly ambitious speculative adventure will challenge you to reframe the past, present, and future. Monica is also the author of The…

• Narrative as Crowbar

  Over in Future, I wrote about unlocking expertise through storytelling: People have wandered the intellectual garden of forking paths for thousands of generations, but the internet is a profound accelerant for such cultural exploration. It is a shadow city with billions of residents. Everyone has a voice, even if nobody listens. Yes, there are assholes…