We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.

The future is not Google-able.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything.

For me, the melancholy of the late XXth Century is walking late at night by the Mont Blanc pen store and seeing these things always strike me as simulacra of luxury items. They seem like fakes.

There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.

It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is - that evil is inherently banal.