Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

03 Jun 2009, 14:56 p.m.

Failure And Imagination

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2009 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

As it scrolls off my blog's front page: this entry borrows "informational topology" from the excellent science fiction novel Blindsight by Peter Watts, available as a free ebook from his site. If you have not already watched his awesome vampire domestication PowerPoint, I urge you to check it out (and then put on some Target Women to recover from the darkness).

Blindsight is fairly dark. It's a book positing that the future is more complex and terrifying than we can imagine. So rereading it is either a fantastic or a terrible match for me when I feel helpless. Especially since Siri Keeton is, in his secretarial, synthesist capacity, unpleasantly like a certain type of project manager.

Comments

Zed
http://www.mememachinego.com/
05 Jun 2009, 2:43 a.m.

Blindsight rocked hard. I found a 25¢ used copy of Watts' Starfish on the book truck in front of the East Bay Center for Creative Reuse; I've been looking forward to getting to it. But I never did watch the vampire domestication PowerPoint -- thanks for reminding me it exists!

(But before Starfish or anything else, I need to contend with the three books I have out of the library... happy problem, relatively.)