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The idea would be that not only do you have a multigenerational project of building a new world, but obviously the human civilization occupying it would also be new. And culturally and politically, it would be an achievement that would have no reason to stick with old forms from the history of Earth. It’s a multigenerational project, somewhat like building these cathedrals in Europe where no generation expects to end the job. By the time the job is near completion, the civilization operating it will be different to the one that began the project.

what the Mars scenario gave me – and gives all of humanity – is the idea that the physical substrate of the planet itself is also a part of the project, and it’s something that we are strong enough to influence. Not create, not completely control, not completely engineer because it’s too big and we don´t have that much ability to manipulate the large systems involved, nor the amount of power involved. But we do have enough to mess things up and we do have enough to finesse the system.This, I think, was a precursor to the idea of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is precisely the geological moment when humanity becomes a geological force, and it’s a science-fiction exercise to say that 50 million years from now, humanity’s descendants, or some other alien civilization, will be able to look at Earth and say: “This is when humanity began to impact things as much as volcanos or earthquakes.” So it’s a sci-fi story being told in contemporary culture as one way to define what we are doing now. So, that was what my Mars project was doing, and now we are in the Anthropocene as a mental space.

if humanity’s impact on the Earth is mostly negative in ecological terms, if you mark humanity’s impact as being so significant that we have produced a new geological age, then we have to think differently in our attitudes towards what we are doing with our biophysical substrate. And one of the things I think the Anthropocene brings up is that the Earth is our body, and we can finesse it, we can impact it, we can make ourselves sick.

The founders of this anarchist society made up a new language because they realized you couldn’t have a new society and an old language. They based the new language on the old one but changed it enormously. It’s simply an illustration of what Orwell was saying in his great essay about how writing English clearly is a political matter.

There are advantages and disadvantages to living a very long time, as I have. One of the advantages is that you can’t help having a long view. You’ve seen it come and seen it go. Something that’s being announced as the absolute only way to write, you recognize as a fashion, a fad, trendy—the way to write right now if you want to sell right now to a right now editor. But there’s also the long run to consider. Nothing’s deader than last year’s trend. 

Obviously, the present tense has certain uses that it’s wonderfully suited for. But recently it has been adopted blindly, as the only way to tell a story—often by young writers who haven’t read very much. Well, it’s a good way to tell some stories, not a good way to tell others. It’s inherently limiting. I call it “flashlight focus.” You see a spot ahead of you and it is dark all around it. That’s great for high suspense, high drama, cut-to-the-chase writing. But if you want to tell a big, long story, like the books of Elena Ferrante, or Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years trilogy, which moves year by year from 1920 to 2020—the present tense would cripple those books. To assume that the present tense is literally “now” and the past tense literally remote in time is extremely naïve. 

I’ve spent my life writing science-fiction novels that try to convey some of the strangeness of the future. But I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly.

the change that struck me seemed more abstract and internal. It was a change in the way we were looking at things, and it is still ongoing. The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.

The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change—whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. And yet we’ve been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990—as though the neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense. We’ve been paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it.

for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

a collective identity crisis. For most of human history, the idea of reinventing yourself or freely shaping your identity — of presenting different selves in different contexts (at home, at work, at play) — was hard to fathom, because people’s identities were fixed by their roles in a rigid social hierarchy. With little geographic or social mobility, you were defined not as an individual but by your village, your class, your job or your guild. But that started to change in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a growing individualism that came to redefine human identity. As people perceived themselves increasingly as individuals, their status became a function not of inherited categories but of their own efforts and achievements. This new conception of malleable and fluid identity found its fullest and purest expression in the American ideal of the self-made man, a term popularized by Henry Clay in 1832.

the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities. But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion.

the “American Plan.” From the 1910s through the 1950s, and in some places into the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of American women were detained and forcibly examined for STIs. The program was modeled after similar ones in Europe, under which authorities stalked “suspicious” women, arresting, testing and imprisoning them.

If the women tested positive, U.S. officials locked them away in penal institutions with no due process. While many records of the program have since been lost or destroyed, women’s forced internment could range from a few days to many months. Inside these institutions, records show, the women were often injected with mercury and forced to ingest arsenic-based drugs, the most common treatments for syphilis in the early part of the century. If they misbehaved, or if they failed to show “proper” ladylike deference, these women could be beaten, doused with cold water, thrown into solitary confinement—or even sterilized.

beginning in 1918, federal officials began pushing every state in the nation to pass a “model law,” which enabled officials to forcibly examine any person “reasonably suspected” of having an STI. Under this statute, those who tested positive for an STI could be held in detention for as long as it took to render him or her noninfectious. (On paper, the law was gender-neutral; in practice, it almost exclusively focused on regulating women and their bodies.)

‘technological sadness’ – the default mental state of the online billions

If only my phone could gently weep. McLuhan’s ‘extensions of man’ has imploded right into the exhausted self.

Social reality is a corporate hybrid between handheld media and the psychic structure of the user. It’s a distributed form of social ranking that can no longer be reduced to the interests of state and corporate platforms. As online subjects, we too are implicit, far too deeply involved

The Information World War has already been going on for several years. We called the opening skirmishes “media manipulation” and “hoaxes”, assuming that we were dealing with ideological pranksters doing it for the lulz (and that lulz were harmless). In reality, the combatants are professional, state-employed cyberwarriors and seasoned amateur guerrillas pursuing very well-defined objectives with military precision and specialized tools. Each type of combatant brings a different mental model to the conflict, but uses the same set of tools.

There are also small but highly-skilled cadres of ideologically-motivated shitposters whose skill at information warfare is matched only by their fundamental incomprehension of the real damage they’re unleashing for lulz. A subset of these are conspiratorial — committed truthers who were previously limited to chatter on obscure message boards until social platform scaffolding and inadvertently-sociopathic algorithms facilitated their evolution into leaderless cults able to spread a gospel with ease.

There’s very little incentive not to try everything: this is a revolution that is being A/B tested.

if there's one thing we've learned from more than a decade of Facebook scandals, it's that there's little reason to believe that Facebook possesses the requisite will and capabilities. Indeed, it may be that there is no automated system or system of human judgments that could serve as a moderator and arbiter of the daily lives of billions of people. Given Facebook's ambition to put more and more of our daily lives behind its walled garden, it's hard to see why we would ever trust Facebook to be the one to fix all that's wrong with Facebook.

Facebook users are eager for alternatives to the service, but are held back by the fact that the people they want to talk with are all locked within the company's walled garden

rather than using standards to describe how a good voting machine should work, the industry pushed a standard that described how their existing, flawed machines did work with some small changes in configurations. Had they succeeded, they could have simply slapped a "complies with IEEE standard" label on everything they were already selling and declared themselves to have fixed the problem... without making the serious changes needed to fix their systems, including requiring a voter-verified paper ballot.

Okay, hackers, it's time to use your powers for good.

The "public internet" is for the poor Pledging to keep the "public internet" neutral is great, but what happens when companies stop wanting to offer their services on it? Googlezon has the answer: In their proposal, they say that it's perfectly OK for companies and consumers to buy non-neutral, non-public "special services" online. If you're a media company that streams videogames, for example, your customers want a guarantee that the game won't stall out because of a crappy "public internet" connection. So you make your game available only to people with the special service "gamer package." Your customers pay you; you pay Googlezon; now there's a superfast connection for the privileged few with money to burn. And what happens when news websites start delivering their pretty pictures and infographics in 3D? Verizon has already suggested 3D is a perfect "special service" to deliver in a non-neutral way. In five years, the public internet is going to look boring and obsolete. Where's the 3D? Where are all the cool games and streaming viddies? The public internet? Yeah, that's just for poor people. But guess what's going to remain on the public net, the place where you go when you don't have money? Certainly there will be educational resources like Wikipedia. But mostly it's going to be advertisement-saturated free content from major entertainment companies. And of course there will be many opportunities to give your personal information to Facebook, or gamble away your non-existent savings on Zynga games. (Sorry - did I say gamble? I meant "pay for premium poker game content.") Put in brick-and-mortar terms: There won't be any produce markets on the public internet, but there will be plenty of liquor stores.

Googlezon will be a gatekeeper not just for new web services but also for content. The companies can choose to support services from any small business they like, and block others. Same goes for sites providing news or entertainment. Googlezon might make an agreement with the New York Times to load its pages faster than the Washington Post. And Googlezon might not load io9 at all, unless of course you're reading this blog via the Google Reader (as part of the "special service" package called "blogs and podcasts")

My father would have been unable to “teach to the test.” He once complained about errors in a sixth-grade math textbook, so he had the class learn math by designing a spaceship. My father would have been spat out by today’s test-driven educational regime.

A career in computer science makes you see the world in its terms. You start to see money as a form of information display instead of as a store of value. Money flows are the computational output of a lot of people planning, promising, evaluating, hedging and scheming, and those behaviors start to look like a set of algorithms. You start to see the weather as a computer processing bits tweaked by the sun, and gravity as a cosmic calculation that keeps events in time and space consistent. This way of seeing is becoming ever more common as people have experiences with computers. While it has its glorious moments, the computational perspective can at times be uniquely unromantic. Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to. And yet it seems we benefit from shining an objectifying digital light to disinfect our funky, lying selves once in a while. It’s heartless to have music chosen by digital algorithms. But at least there are fewer people held hostage to the tastes of bad radio D.J.’s than there once were. The trick is being ambidextrous, holding one hand to the heart while counting on the digits of the other.

The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.

our expectations are generally unexcited and restrained.  The bold imagination of 20th-century American visions seems to have gone for a nap.  As Smithsonian’s article notes, “Most Americans view the technology- driven future with a sense of hope. They just don’t want to live there.”  We’re actually less excited than that

When it comes to specific emerging technologies we often greet them with broad, deep skepticism and fear, including human genetic engineering, robotics, drones, and wearable computing: 66% think it would be a change for the worse if prospective parents could alter the DNA of their children to produce smarter, healthier, or more athletic offspring. 65% think it would be a change for the worse if lifelike robots become the primary caregivers for the elderly and people in poor health. 63% think it would be a change for the worse if personal and commercial drones are given permission to fly through most U.S. airspace. 53% of Americans think it would be a change for the worse if most people wear implants or other devices that constantly show them information about the world around them. (emphases in original)

The heroic days of NASA in the popular imagination are long flown: “One in three (33%) expect that humans will have colonized planets other than Earth.”  Indeed. a few more Americans actually see teleportation happening.

During the entire history of America, the US has not been at war for 17 years. That's incredible, mainly because if you talk to people who maybe aren't that much that interested in history, they would say, “That’s crazy. What are you talking about? There’s no war.”

Our relationship with war and how our country functions in the world is so warped and twisted. Every time the word “war” is introduced into the cultural discourse, you know that it is already corrupted. That's why it’s paired here with “back to normal,” because it's another combination of phrases that stood out…Everybody keeps talking about things getting back to normal. Then the pronouncements that this is a war and we’re fighting an invisible enemy. It just seems so disturbing really because what that means is that we're about to start doing things that are ethically questionable. To me, what was happening is that the pronouncement was made so that anything goes, and there's no culpability, nobody will be held responsible for making any decisions whatsoever because it was war and things had to be done.

if I think about how “war” has been used strategically in this context of COVID-19, it doesn’t feel like rhetoric that was raised to be alarmist, but almost to be comforting. That this is a familiar experience. We have a handle on it. We are attacking it like a war. War is our normal.

There is a sense, in fact, in which mapping is the essence of what Google does. The company likes to talk about services such as Maps and Earth as if they were providing them for fun - a neat, free extra as a reward for using their primary offering, the search box. But a search engine, in some sense, is an attempt to map the world of information - and when you can combine that conceptual world with the geographical one, the commercial opportunities suddenly explode.

it's hard to interpret the occasional aerial snapshot of your garden as a big issue when the phone in your pocket is assembling a real-time picture of your movements, preferences and behaviour

There's no technical reason why, perhaps in return for a cheaper phone bill, you mightn't consent to be shown not the quickest route between two points, but the quickest route that passes at least one Starbucks. If you're looking at the world through Google glasses, who determines which aspects of "augmented reality" data you see - and did they pay for the privilege?

Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems

Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one's identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.

The Man Who Lied to His Laptop condenses for a popular audience an argument that Nass has been making for at least 15 years: humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.

At first blush, this sounds absurd. Everyone knows that it's "just a computer," and of course computers don't have feelings. And yet. Nass has a slew of amusing stories—and, crucially, studies based on those stories—indicating that, no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares. For example: In one study, users reviewed a software package, either on the same computer they'd used it on, or on a different computer. Consistently, participants gave the software better ratings when they reviewed in on the same computer—as if they didn't want the computer to feel bad. What's more, Nass notes, "every one of the participants insisted that she or he would never bother being polite to a computer" (7).

Nass found that users given completely random praise by a computer program liked it more than the same program without praise, even though they knew in advance the praise was meaningless. In fact, they liked it as much as the same program, if they were told the praise was accurate. (In other words, flattery was as well received as praise, and both were preferred to no positive comments.) Again, when questioned about the results, users angrily denied any difference at all in their reactions.

UW researchers hypothesized that babies would be more likely to view the robot as a psychological being if they saw other friendly human beings socially interacting with it. “Babies look to us for guidance in how to interpret things, and if we treat something as a psychological agent, they will, too,” Meltzoff said. “Even more remarkably, they will learn from it, because social interaction unlocks the key to early learning.”

“The study suggests that if you want to build a companion robot, it is not sufficient to make it look human,” said Rao. “The robot must also be able to interact socially with humans, an interesting challenge for robotics.”

such attitudes among students can develop from the notion that all of education can be distilled into performance on a test -- which today's college students have absorbed from years of schooling under No Child Left Behind -- and not that education is a process in which one grapples with difficult material.

Her prediction: Companies will soon sell robots designed to baby-sit children, replace workers in nursing homes, and serve as companions for people with disabilities. All of which to Turkle is demeaning, "transgressive," and damaging to our collective sense of humanity. It's not that she's against robots as helpers—building cars, vacuuming floors, and helping to bathe the sick are one thing. She's concerned about robots that want to be buddies, implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver.

y: We are already cyborgs, reliant on digital devices in ways that many of us could not have imagined just a few years ago

"We are hard-wired that if something meets extremely primitive standards, either eye contact or recognition or very primitive mutual signaling, to accept it as an Other because as animals that's how we're hard-wired—to recognize other creatures out there."

The assumption that one is not being recorded in any real way, a standard in civilization for more or less all of history, is being overturned.

CEOs have become slaves to the PR department in a bizarre inversion of internal corporate checks and balances

“Your word against mine” can be a serious and drawn-out dispute, subject to all kinds of subjective judgments, loyalties, rights, and arguments; “Your word against my high-definition video” gives citizens and the vulnerable a bit more leverage.

some students ask why they should be required to convince anyone of anything. "After all," they say, "we are all entitled to our opinions, so all we should have to do is express them clearly. Here's my opinion. Take it or leave it." This point of view both misunderstands the nature of argument and ignores its greatest value

In an Age of Information, what most professionals do is research, think, and make arguments. (And part of the value of doing your own thinking and writing is that it makes you much better at evaluating the thinking and writing of others.)

Words such as "show how" and "explain" and "illustrate" do not ask you to summarize a reading. They ask you to show how the reading is put together, how it works