August 20, 2021
Automated Luxury Updates
“Not that the vision is a new one. John Maynard Keynes’s famous essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” imagines a world with far less work and far more leisure; Shulamith Firestone wrote about “cybernetic communism.” Yet the most…
July 27, 2021
Aren’t We Already Cyborgs?
“Cyborgs” are, fundamentally, just subjects of “human augmentation”—the use of technology to correct and enhance physical limits. At present, physical limits are typically brought about through disease or accident or birth variant. There has been…
July 27, 2021
Why is China Cutting Renewable Energy Subsidies?
Once seen as the global leader in the transition away from fossil fuels, China is struggling with an identity crisis, shifting priorities concerning renewable energy, allegations of human rights abuses, and the wrong kind of hydrogen. Only a couple…
June 24, 2021
Tiny Universes and the Stories They Hold
A few years ago, science and tech media began reporting on the phenomenon of “spacetime foam,” alternatively called “quantum foam.” Though it has only recently received media attention, it is not necessarily a new theory; in fact, it’s been around…
June 24, 2021
When Gadgets Fail-Tech Hubris Roundup
Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wax wings melting because he used them too ambitiously. Dr. Frankenstein created a monster that destroyed his loved ones. In reality, just as in myth, technology is often used with hubris, or is hubris itself;…
May 21, 2021
Gadget Oddities Roundup
We never seem to tire of new technology. It flows into our lives, sometimes providing solutions to problems we were very aware we had and, more often than not, creating solutions to problems we never knew we had. Over the past few months, as people…
May 21, 2021
Re-reading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine
As most people know, H.G. Wells was a utopian socialist. And, in many ways, we can legitimately call Wells’s famous novel, The Time Machine, a kind of late-steampunk, socialist fable—late steampunk because it depicts advanced technology arising from…
April 25, 2021
Strange Superpower Roundup
Consider this my meta-analysis of strange superpowers. After reading a number of posts purporting to list the weirdest, strangest, most esoteric superpowers, I’ve compiled a list of what I think are the weirdest among the actual, non-satirical…
April 25, 2021
Crime Control and Public Spending: Two Ships Passing in the Night
When it comes to policing and public safety, governments tend to “buy in bulk.” So even when resources are tight, police departments get tons of money from municipal coffers. Those municipalities must often cut other services to fund the police,…
March 21, 2021
Three Weird Retrofuture/punk Subgenres
Bruce Bethke has a wonderful post describing what led to his creation of the word “cyberpunk” and his publication of a short story of the same name, forty-one years ago in 1980. He writes, “I would have bloody well trademarked the thing” if he’d…