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But I take it for granted that social change is driven primarily by emergent technologies, and probably always has been. No one legislates technologies into emergence—it actually seems to be quite a random thing. That’s a vision of technology that’s diametrically opposed to the one I received from science fiction and the popular culture of…
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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…
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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…
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I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have…
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Coming up with a word like neuromancer is something that would earn you a really fine vacation if you worked in an ad agency. It was a kind of booby-trapped portmanteau that contained considerable potential for cognitive dissonance, that pleasurable buzz of feeling slightly unsettled. Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 211, William…
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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…
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Tiny Wings is pretty. Just look at it! I can’t play it. I’m no good at it. But the visual work draws me back to try, and try again. At first I thought that Andreas Illiger had made or commissioned watercolor art/illustrations for the game. I recently discovered that he is actually procedurally generating the…
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A great article about making things with examples from one of my favorite authors… This is so relevant to our discussions in our foundations classes, it’s not even funny (via MAKE | Zen and the Art of Making)
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Incentivising exercise? how many miles should you have to run to get an achievement badge? (via Girl, Apple’s gonna make you sweat with a treadmill patent – Engadget)
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I’ve been trying out Scribus for typesetting of small books. I can’t get the justification right yet. Imposition of pages is through a PDF plug-in.