Category: futures

• 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 …

• 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 …

• 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

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