For average working folks, America was becoming a puzzle. Who was buying all these two-hundred-dollar copper saucepans, anyway? And how was everyone paying for these BMWs? Were people shrewd or just stupefyingly irresponsible?

In all, his outfit required nearly two thousand man-years of research and development, eight barrels of oil, and sixteen patent and trademark infringement lawsuits. All so he could possess casual style. A style that, in logistical requirements, was comparable to fielding a nineteenth-century military brigade. But he looked good. Casual.

Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.

A very small group of powerful people is deciding what's going to happen with your data, and they're using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It's all about efficiency. And that's the really scary thing about it.

A life where bots tell us what to do every second - get up, go to work, do this, have kids with this person - is completely reasonable. Bots determine our economic opportunities We have already accepted that. All the decision making would be done by bots and we wouldn't even notice.

Anyone who has ever tried to share pizza iwth roommates knows that Communism cannot ever work. If Lenin and Marx had just shard an apartment, perhaps a hundred million lives might have been spared and put to productive use making sneakers and office furniture.

I suspect that democracy is not viable in a technologically advanced society. Free people wield too much ability to destroy.

My fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that's different but it's familiar enough that it freaks people out a little.

Food is the very heart of freedom. How can people be free if they can't feed themselves without getting sued for patent violations?

At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition.

I have an English literature degree. I wanted to be the next great American novelist from a very early age, but I put it aside for a while, because I got very realistic at one point.

I don't have a Facebook page. I don't use Twitter. I don't give anyone a lot to grab onto. Sometimes, I even take out the battery of my mobile phone so that I can't be localized.

But if they're so successful, why haven't parasites taken over the world? The answer is simple: they have. We just haven't noticed. That's because successful parasites don't kill us they become part of us, making us perform all the work to keep them alive and help them reproduce.

I think technology is spreading, and I think ones experience of technology is going to relate increasingly to class - not so much to country.

In the vast game of Darwinian musical chairs, whenever the music stopped there were large numbers of people without a seat—and some smartass had sold them guns.