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 […]

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 […]

Regarding INC5760131 or How to Navigate the Reply-All Apocalypse

It began with a software engineer in India. The man’s email signature says that he works in “Dreams Sustainment (Offshore).” His note with the subject line “Regarding INC5760131” referred to some technical issue that was virtually incomprehensible to anyone who was not among the email’s intended recipients. And there were a lot of unintended recipients. Somehow this […]

Writing in Analog

I’ve been talking with other writers about AI. We huddle in our conversations like anarchists. Some have been using ChatGBT as a tool and are quite happy. Some fear for their careers and think recent, rapid advances in large language models are very, very bad.  I’ve turned off autocorrect on my computer. Is that enough? […]

To Volcanoes (at Gmail), with Love

This was originally published in 2018, but I’ve been thinking about it for several reasons. First, because Catapult, the publication that ran this essay, is shuttering its delightful online magazine; second, because it was edited by the brilliant Nicole Chung, whose new book is out this week; and third, because I recently saw a venting […]

Felicia, the Fermilab Ferret: Micropoems

For years, now, I’ve had a scrap of digital paper on my computer desktop with four words on it: Felicia, the Fermilab Ferret. A memorial to an extraordinary life. A reminder to channel the legendary little animal’s spirit into something strange and new. Little poems, perhaps. And, now, finally, I have. But first: her story. […]

In Utah, Out of Service

Last night I spent time with a friend who doesn’t have a cell phone. Can you imagine that? He shrugged and said he finds he doesn’t really need one. He had a flip phone for a while, then 3G went offline and he decided not to re-up. I wanted to cling to the hem of […]

Science Metaphors: Hysteresis

This post originally appeared April 19, 2019 My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit […]