Category: futures
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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,
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Cory Doctorow on writing Attack Surface
Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Attack Surface, is inseparable from the zeitgeist—both are riven by insurrection, corruption, misinformation, and inequality—and the near-future it portrays illustrates how technology and politics are inseparable. The story follows a self-taught hacker from San Francisco …
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Silence
Turn it off.
The feed was the information infrastructure that empowered nearly every human activity and on which nearly every human activity relied. A talisman that lent mere mortals the power of demigods. Doctors used it for diagnosis. Brokers used …
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Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias
Global pandemic. Raging wildfires. Political upheaval. Never-ending Zooms. Twenty-twenty is the dystopia Hollywood has always dreamed of, sans a satisfying narrative arc.
In times like these, nihilism beckons. Just give up, history seems to be saying. There’s nothing you …
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What If a Tech CEO Tried to Save the World With Geoengineering?
OneZero just published an exclusive excerpt from my new novel (warning: minor spoilers):As the climate crisis grows increasingly dire, a radical question is appearing on more politicians’ lips: What if we geoengineer our way out of the mess? The
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Why companies are hiring sci-fi writers to imagine the future
Katie Underwood interviewed me for a Pivot Magazine feature on how business leaders are commissioning science fiction that challenges them to think differently about the future:In recent years, major multi-national companies like Nike, Google, Apple, Ford and Visa, and
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How Reading Books Instead Of News Made Me A Better Citizen
In this new essay for Techdirt, I share an “attention experiment” I conducted during the 2016 election that was life-changing—and ultimately inspired the Analog Series. The lessons I learned from it feel uncomfortably relevant today.Here’s a taste:
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William Gibson on tracking reality’s Fuckedness Quotient
I interviewed William Gibson about tracking reality’s Fuckedness Quotient, how to avoid terminal shortsightedness, and the creative process behind his new novel, Agency:I think I’ve learned that we need, individually, to find those areas in our lives where