Toward a theory of cuteness aggression

I want a dog. For a while now, my awareness of this has been getting louder. It was when I encountered these little gentlemen that the urgency of the situation became undeniable. (If you value your hearing turn down the volume before you hit play.) I’ve lived with many canines – parents’ dogs, roommate dogs, […]

The internet and the overmind

When the internet was young, David Bowie was asked by a skeptical journalist whether it would ever have any real impact on the world. Wasn’t it just a fad whose transformative potential artists were exaggerating in a bid to stay relevant with the youths? It was 1999, and while this stance is easy to mock […]

Puppet shows for the AI

A place is set at a lavishly decorated table. The drape of the tablecloth is just so. Light twinkles off fine crystal goblets. Two nicely-dressed people take their seats. One of them pours wine into his companion’s goblet and passes it to her. She takes the cup, takes a sip, and smiles. Cut. The elaborate […]

Feast your eyes

Around 2011, there was a lot of chatter about an algorithm supposedly so scary Google wouldn’t release it. It would allegedly help you find people just from snapping images of their face. As with so much of today’s reality, what was a cool and spooky ghost story in 2011 has become just another intrusive and […]

Hell is (too many) other people

“Is it okay to still have children?” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked her social media followers in 2019. She was addressing a growing reluctance among young people to consider parenting; both because of concerns about overpopulation and because of concerns about what kind of world new children would be coming into. This openness about rethinking parenthood […]

The future is a myth that is true and false

Yesterday I was at a science fiction symposium on London City Island, a strange, clean little post-industrial peninsula in the Docklands. A small group of academics had gathered – the sorts of people who get PhDs in science fiction studies – to consider the question: If science fiction is about the future, what is the […]

The worms under the English Riviera might save your life

“The English Riviera”. A phrase that sounds like a classic example of British acerbic humour, and I had already emotionally prepared myself to laugh despondently at the sight of some especially bleak industrial waterfront. But when I drove down to the South Coast of England, through hours of the most glorious “sunlit uplands” countryside you […]

Redux: Floater

This post originally ran on October 11, 2011. Back then, I didn’t really understand why people would use these sensory deprivation pods. In the wake of the past 5 years, I can only hope one day we can all have our own sensory deprivation pods. The second I close the hatch behind me, it occurs […]