One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate,” Friedman says. Former “Seastedders” Come Ashore To Start Libertarian Utopias In Honduran Jungle | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation (via bmdesign) Neal Stephenson’s Snow…

I didn’t have the emotional range. I could only create characters who have ­really, really super highs and super lows—no middle. It’s taken me eight books to get to a point where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationships with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet…

Bester had been doing it in the fifties—a Madison Avenue hepcat who had come into science fiction with a bunch of Joyce under his belt. He built his space-opera future out of what it felt like to be young and happening in New York, in the creative end of the business world in 1955. Paris…

No, the way out of the trench war is usually to adopt openly the “old-fashioned” side that is being critiqued, while finding some way to flip it completely into something strange. I think of Cézanne in painting, who amidst the impressionist revolution found a way to retrieve the solidity of objects without relapsing into academicism,…

Digital art offers new hope for art at a time when the traditional media seem to have exhausted their potential. Gilles Beloeil, on digital art and the new Renaissance (via notgames)