It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source.
The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility.
An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.
I'm caught somewhere between introversion and extroversion. Performance is natural to me, joyful, but it is also exhausting. I can feed on it, but the expense is high, too, like being a carnivore: I have to chase down my meals.
Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.
We are bodies which think, and we're at home with steampunk because it is an ethos of design and creativity which acknowledges the humanly physical: that which we can understand with our fingers.
Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.
I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.
Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.
I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.
A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride.
Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.
All my characters are me, in one way or another.
Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.
The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.
We tend to assume that data is either private or public, either owned by one person or shared by many. In fact there's more to it than that, above and beyond the upsetting reality that private data is now anything but.
Knowledge is not just power - it is control.
