5 items tagged “charlie-stross”
2023
Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?
It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're [sci-fi authors] not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it.
2018
Every bitcoin proof-of-work mined is an incremental addition to a vast distributed summoning ritual powering the demon-soul at the heart of the maze, the computational equivalent of a Buddhist prayer wheel spinning in a Himalayan breeze.
2017
[On a startup using machine learning to encourage people to get addicted to apps] This technology is so unethical it needs to be criminalized globally, before it evolves into a Fermi Paradox solution... and I generally DON'T think banning technologies is a good idea. But this is like a neuroscience homebrew dirty nuke.
2016
Lovecraft-inspired fiction and cookbooks (unrelated!)
Have you considered the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross? They are novels about a secret UK government department which fights off lovecraftian threats while suffering through the typical burucracry you would expect from the UK government.
[... 49 words]2007
Unpacking the Zeitgeist. On WoW corpse spamming: “There are thirty years’ worth of future shock condensed into this one news item [...] a harsh warning about the difficulty of accurately portraying plausible futures in literature.”