I am so glad you like that one. And that you compare to Noon? Terrific. He and I came out with Vurt and Ecstasy Club around the same time (same as Alex Garland's The Beach). It was such a bizarre moment.

Well, there's almost no way to avoid it in our current quasi-surveillance state. If you use a cell phone or email, there's already more information about you out there to play Minority Report with your big data profile.

Yeah. I think you're right on both accounts. The whole GenX thing was really deconstruction as an adaptive strategy. And we succeeded in taking apart the story - which kind of killed the whole thing. In a good way. No more manipulative goals and ends-justify-the-means BS.

To be fair, he didn't use the word "idiotic," but that was the gist of it.

I thought I responded to this one, but I guess I junked it.

Yeah, I guess that's actually what I'm calling "overwinding" - trying to fit too much into little temporal spaces. So me, for instance, I want to get a 4-year philosophy graduate education. But I want to do that in a couple of weeks so I can get on to learning Python (and not be a laughing stock at Codecademy where…

But yeah - we got to the moon and stuck the flag in, and it was both wonderful and pointless. There's no one up there or anything. And there's this little spaceship earth that we're reaching the limits of.

Well, part of it has to do with being willing to explore places we already are. I guess I'm a fan of inner journeys, and the knowledge that comes from stillness. There's a part of me that likes to sit and wait and see what or who comes to me. But I'm an intellectual and kind of a Marxist slacker, so I'm probably not…

Yeah, a bunch.
The funniest was when I was watching Real Housewives of Orange County and realized they were in present shock: botoxed faces, frozen at age 29. And they were so frozen in that moment that they couldn't communicate to their friends in the *real* moment. They had no facial expressions. So their commitment…

Thanks! Don't stop!

I liked him until he repeatedly called me idiotic in his talks, and argued that people shouldn't learn to code. Then I guess I took some of it personally and stopped liking him.

Oh yeah. But I think they are kind of here already. They are all part of the digital age - biotech, genomics, robotics, nano...I feel like they are now inevitable. We are already 3d printing psychedelics (okay, I'm not, but someone is). The decentralized reality is upon us.

There's a utopian side to memes, but it takes a little massaging to make it work.

Well, they all do to some extent, but Digiphrenia is the one I meant to apply particularly to the digital selves functioning simultaneously and on our behalf - sometimes beyond our own control.

Yes and no. In some ways, absolutely. Easterners have been presentists all along in some ways. I write a lot about that in the later chapters of the book - how Easterners see the landscape in a painting while Westerners see the subject.

I'm concerned about this, too. As I see it, we are squandering much of the promise of the digital age by using our digital tools to extend the agendas of industrialism. We try to increase efficiency, maximize output, and better exploit labor when (at least as I remember it) the greatest potential of digital technology…

Well, I guess I'd argue they are one and the same. We're finding out - particularly in the digital media environment - that there's really no individual, as such. And the more we learn about hormones and neurotransmitters, the more we see that we're all running on the same clocks.