The Shape of Reality to Come, a collection of essays about VR, AR, AI, Amazon, grunge, creative cities, Microsoft, and tips for engineering a renaissance, now exists in physical form in the reality we all happen to share, or perhaps experience as a consensual hallucination. This is my sixth book, and it’s my slimmest to…
This morning I read an article on The New Yorker website that wasn’t actually about Trump. Rightly tagged “Rabbit Holes,” Jia Tolentino’s “The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s ‘Africa’ Remixed to Sound Like It’s Playing in an Empty Mall” sent me scurrying through YouTube in one of those oh-it-appears-people-are-doing-this-now moments that seem to be how…
Yesterday over lunch, Stroodle Doodle creator Eric Neuman told me (in so many words) that unicorns are bullshit. Meaning that the urge to become a billion-dollar startup is counterproductive to actually growing the immersive media industry. I nodded my head vigorously. The key to VR’s growth, we agreed, was for a lot of people to…
Orchestrated object reduction, or Orch OR, is the hypothesis that consciousness is the result of quantum vibrations picked up by structures in the brain called microtubules. I woke up this morning thinking about this, and in a flash it felt as though I understood the nature of consciousness, before the feeling evaporated as I became…
In the late eighties, when I was in high school, there was a kid named Wylie who sat in front of me in Washington State History class. I wouldn’t say we were friends, but casual acquaintances. Wylie got in a serious motorcycle accident and spent a considerable amount of time in the hospital. One morning…
Futurists have figured out the most failure-proof job–no one will live long enough to find out whether they’re good at it. Futurism is a sort of applied science fiction. Those of us who have adult memories from the twentieth century have experienced wonders that rival the science fiction of our childhoods. Start with the artificial…
Over the summer I spent some time reflecting on what I’m doing in the emerging immersive media industry and why I’m doing it. I began to address these questions by producing a document that details ten principles that guide my work. I modeled this on Amazon’s Leadership Principles, and in fact straight-up stole one of…
I haven’t played my vinyl in months, and my CDs only get played in my car. One of the jokes of my life is that I distinctly remember myself at sixteen saying, “Steely Dan is music for people in their forties.” Then, early in my forties, I had an epiphany, “Hey, I kind of like…
Go outside and locate a three-story building. That building is about as tall as the typical ring of Saturn is thick. This was one of the fascinating things I learned watching Kingdom of Saturn: Cassini’s Epic Quest on Amazon Prime last night. When you’re a kid and you’re drawing Saturn, you typically draw a single…
Picture our moral imagination as a series of concentric circles. At the center of this model is the self. As we grow, we generally move outward from there. Our capacity for empathy guides us to invest in the suffering of our immediate families, then our various tribes, communities, and nations. The moral innovators of our…
