Nick Harkaway
Nick Harkaway
Nick Harkawayis a novelist and commentator. He is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker and Tigerman; and a non-fiction study of the digital world, The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
appeals beings consumer human identities mainstream mapped perfectly putting recent sold technology
Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.
male
I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.
connery extremely grew moore movies ridiculous roger sean spies
I grew up on the Roger Moore and Sean Connery Bond movies, so the DNA of my spies is extremely ridiculous and goofy.
constantly incredible
I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them.
reader though
I am an avid reader of comics, though I came to them late.
delight happiness run seem
Happiness is boundlessly weird. Other people's choices often seem to delight them, where I would run screaming.
exciting library plan staggering
Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
amount enormous life whether
An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.
amazon art dedicated production trust works
Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
All my characters are me, in one way or another.
adopting ancient capacity cease fancy felt handy literate lose people perspective simply society socrates written
In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.
hard
Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.
To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.
The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.