I vacillate…between thinking that we’re doomed because we have given ourselves over to a stupid system that’s now backed up by guns. And then a much more utopian view that we’ve always lived in stupid systems and that we’re always making them better.
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My proposition is that we are not in history anymore, we are in hyperhistory. If we want to discuss about hyperhistory, when everything is written, when not only the important things are written but everything is written, then we have a lot of questions to answer. What is important? Who has the power? What is freedom?
The future is on the whole a wonderful thing because it will bring us new things that we haven’t seen before. And that’s why we stick around.
There’s already a kind of cognitive investment that we make, you know. At a certain point, you have years of your personal history living in somebody’s cloud. And that goes beyond merely being a memory bank, it’s also a cognitive bank in some way.
I think reading and writing are really two forms of the same act, which is a discourse with one’s own mind, and ideally a discourse with another mind. As a reader it’s the author’s, and as a writer it’s the reader’s, you know. But the two sort of feed into each other, and for me writing is just and record of my own becoming.
With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. And by that I mean writing has encountered a situation similar to what happened uh, to painting with the invention of photography. A technology so much better at replicating reality that in order to survive, painting had to ors— or, uh, alter its course radically.
What is genre? I think it’s probably a set of assumptions, and it’s a loose contract between a creator and an audience. But for most of you, genre is something that tells you where to look in a book shop or a video store.