Links of the week May 16 2022 (20)

Immersed in building a character and a voice and a narrative arc that showed how the experience of trying to quantify emotions had changed the narrator, I didn't think much about the fact that the technology itself would hardly stay static over the several years required to write a novel. Which led to a craft question I had not previously considered: How do you write about a subject-in my case, technology-that is constantly changing?

As I came to realize, this was a two-fold problem. First, there was the actual hardware and software that was always advancing. When I began writing, I thought I was writing about a futuristic technology-an app that attempted, through a series of biometrics and user surveys, to assess one's emotions; now, while the technology is not quite as advanced as in my novel, these kinds of apps are more or less reality. And second, there was the ever-developing political context of internet technology, which, as I was writing, rapidly moved from personally unsettling to geopolitically destabilizing.