“The issue is that people mistake optimism for ‘blind optimism’ — the blinkered faith that things will always get better.” Pessimism around progress has seeped into almost every grain of society. But I see it […]

An essay series by Jon Askonas, politics professor at the Catholic University of America, on what killed consensus reality — and what’s coming next. The breakup of consensus reality — a shared sense of facts, […]

L. M. Sacasas considers what we should take into consideration whenever we talk about the “problem of attention” and when we try to do something about it. I’ve learned in listening to others tell their […]

Are you being played? That’s the question the author Adrian Hon poses in a new book about the “gamification” of modern life. Game-like incentives and rewards permeate our world. Is the world controlled by a […]

Prime Video’s The Peripheral premieres on October 21, 2022. A second season is purportedly already in active development. The novel is in many ways vintage Gibson: a bleak, dystopian future world chock-full of big thematic […]

It wasn’t science that convinced Google engineer Blake Lemoine that one of the company’s AIs is sentient. Lemoine, who is also an ordained Christian mystic priest, says it was the AI’s comments about religion, as […]

Hollywood has been enamored with aliens for as long as movies have been a thing, but perhaps no alien-themed movie has had quite the impact of Contact, released 25 years ago this month. But the […]

“Solaris” and beyond – Stanisław Lem’s antidotes to the bores of American sci-fi. The Polish writer Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) is perhaps best known for his novel Solaris (1961) – a visionary work of ‘first contact’ […]

It’s hard to believe that 40 years have passed since the release of John Carpenter’s The Thing. A tale of snowy isolation and creeping paranoia, The Thing follows a group of 12 men at an […]

For some, degenerate goblinhood is a period of renewal and resurrection into a new form: gnome mode. We’re in the darkest valley of goblin mode now, and gnome mode looks very attractive from our perspective […]

The story of literacy, Luther, and your left ventral occipital temporal region is but one example in a much larger scientific mosaic that is just now coalescing. Your brain has been altered, neurologically re-wired as […]

The history of the internet is repeatedly reduced to the story of the singular Arpanet. But BBSs were just as important—if not more. The standard history of the internet jumps from Arpanet to the web, […]

There’s a general sense that it’s bad for society—which may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers. “A lot of the stories out there are just wrong,” Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke […]

Multidisciplinary artist Saul Williams and Rwandan artist Anisa Uzeyman use the coltan mines in the hills of Burundi as a springboard to embark on an ambitious DIY sci-fi musical, Neptune Frost. Neptune Frost toys with […]

People Make Games take a took a tour of VRChat and interviewed a whole range of people to find how they were making this new frontier work for them. At the same time that tech […]

The online world is run by tech companies that we depend on but deeply distrust. New books by Justin EH Smith and Ben Tarnoff ask: is an alternative possible? It is now quite ordinary to […]

Now, after many Predator movies, get ready for Prey – a new take on the alien-hunter tale, placing the franchise in a whole different era: the Comanche Nation, 300 years ago. From 10 Cloverfield Lane […]

Why we might need something like tenure for many more people, to cultivate more thinkers in a doer’s world. Scientists tend to develop technology that is unique, and engineers tend to use existing technology in […]

“It’s like a science-fiction show that is painted on a very large canvas of space and time,” says the Game of Thrones co-creator. Chinese author Cixin Liu penned The Three-Body Problem and its sequels, The […]

Virtual Reality simulations showed firelight would make images on engraved stones move and flicker. In 1866, a French engineer named Peccadeau de l’Isle was working on the construction of a railway line in southern France, […]

We’ve felt the tremendous weight of power that profane tech companies hold. The power comes from us. Why don’t we take it and distribute it among ourselves? I spend a lot of time online. Too […]

Erik Davis’ first book, the celebrated Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, was published almost twenty-five years ago. Still in print, this cult classic of media studies continues to inform conversations […]

Scott Free Productions has come on board to produce the bestselling book “The Infinite Machine” on the history of Ethereum. Ridley Scott, Tom Moran, and Vera Meyer of Scott Free Productions will produce the feature […]

Algospeak is an emergent lexicon of euphemisms deployed by social media users to avoid blocking or downranking from the algorithms that govern the biggest platforms After Facebook paid a Republican dirty-tricks company to stoke fear […]

Government eavesdropping and corporate data harvesting are worrisome, but what most of us really fear, even if we don’t think much about it, is the public eye. Social networks are not attractive simply because of […]

Rob Madole explores the rationalist fictions of the tech overlords favourite author, Neal Stephenson. If the art of Science Fiction lies in translating the plausible into the prophetic, there’s no practitioner more successful than Neal […]

A conversation with one of the few people who have real historical perspective on digital communities. In 2003, Wagner James Au was a young freelance writer in the Bay Area covering massive multiplayer games like […]

Expensive and laborious to produce, a single woodcut could be recycled to illustrate scores of different ballads, each new home imbuing the same image with often wildly diverse meanings. Just like early modern woodcut images, […]

Kerry Thornley’s long-lost epic poem, Illuminati Lady, has been rediscovered and scanned courtesy of the Discordian Archives At long last, for your reading pleasure, we present Kerry Thornley’s poem Illuminati Lady, which Robert Anton Wilson […]

Who was Thomas Buchler, the late creator of beloved Torah program TropeTrainer? And can anything be done to revive his life’s work? For two decades, Jewish clergy across the country had come to depend on […]