Category: philosophy

• Interview on Balance the Grind

  Hao Nguyen interviewed me about creative process, motivation, and workflow for Balance the Grind: When I start something, I finish it. Finishing projects is enormously empowering and propels me forward with tremendous momentum into new projects. It’s a snowball effect for creativity. And: I follow my curiosity. I used to read books that felt ‘serious’…

• Ted Chiang on the most interesting aspect of time travel

  Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience…

• Government is a technology, so fix it like one

  The Roman Empire, the Iroquois Confederacy, and the United States of America are human inventions as surely as airplanes, computers, and contraception are. Technology is how we do things, and political institutions are how we collaborate at scale. Government is an immensely powerful innovation through which we take collective action. Just like any other technology,…

• Renovating the American Dream

  Visiting Europe in 2019 reveals that the US is a failed state where physical and social infrastructure has been steadily degrading since the 1970s. America needs to rediscover what it means to invest in a better future for everyone. Complement with io9 on economic inequality in Cumulus, this La Soga interview, and the America I…

• Podcast interview about how technology shapes society

  I went on the Future Fossils podcast to discuss what the future extrapolated in the Analog Novels can teach us about the present: http://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/115 “We haven’t figured out the new societies we want to build, given the new realities we’ve already invented.” “If you start thinking about the entire internet as an AI, then Google…

• Fellow travelers make the best teachers

  I’ve learned so much more from peers than from experts. Seek out kindred spirits, grow alongside them, help them achieve their dreams, and accept their help with grace. We are each other’s catalysts. Complement with the power of small things, the growth corkscrew, and most successful people have no idea what made them successful. Get…

• The power of small things

  Like water molecules slowly eroding a landscape, our individual choices, no matter how small, shape history. Complement with the growth corkscrew, simple and difficult, and how to create meaning instead of trying to find it. Get new posts delivered straight to your inbox: This blog exists thanks to the generous support of loyal readers. Become…

• The growth corkscrew

  We don’t grow straight up. We branch and twist and turn back on ourselves, always reaching toward the light. Complement with look to the liminal, simple and difficult, and why most successful people have no idea what made them successful. Get new posts delivered straight to your inbox: This blog exists thanks to the generous…

• Richard Powers on human civilization as a computer game

  “The player will start in an uninhabited corner of a freshly assembled new Earth. He’ll be able to dig minds, cut down trees, plow fields, construct houses, build churches and markets and schools—anything his heart desires and his legs can reach. He’ll travel down all the spreading branches of an enormous technology tree, researching everything…

• Nick Harkaway on Algorithmic Futures, Literary Fractals, and Mimetic Immortality

  I interviewed Nick Harkaway for the Los Angeles Review of Books about how to make sense of the future, the power of speculative literature, and how he wrote his mind-bending novel, Gnomon: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-interview-with-nick-harkaway-algorithmic-futures-literary-fractals-and-mimetic-immortality “Gnomon muscled its way into my head and it gets to people in a way that seems to be equivalent—that sense of something…