One of the things I was doing with my decision to make the word weird mean more, which some people have already been doing for a while, but there’s a sense that it has something for us now that it didn’t have before. So what is the word weird? What is the concept weird in your understanding? And what makes California weird? erik davis And then the last book, and I think threaded through a lot of your more recent work, is becoming a theorist of this idea of weird or weirdness.

erik davisįor a lot of your career, a lot of your older books, I understand at least part of what you’ve been doing as being a theorist of California culture. But I think this is actually pretty helpful for understanding why so much strange and so much powerful technology comes out of such a small area of the globe.Įrik Davis, welcome to the show. And I found his work - it is very weird, but I find his work very, very helpful.Īnd trying to understand how to maintain an openness without losing a skepticism is a really important talent, a really important discipline, a really important practice. He’s written books like “TechGnosis” and “High Weirdness.” And he’s tried to make weirdness into an interpretive framework and to understand the role it plays in this place that he loves and chronicles. He is a historian of California counterculture. And Erik Davis is a guy who takes the weird quite seriously. now, which is obviously going to be a major topic of this conversation with Erik Davis.Īnd to take California seriously and to understand what makes it special, and what makes it frustrating, and why what happens here happens here, I think you have to take the weird quite seriously. And all that has created the technology industry. Something about Northern California culture, in particular, is it is this very strange braiding of technology and engineering and capitalism and mysticism and openness - a radical kind of openness. And this is more about the culture of it, and the culture of its weirdness, and what emerges if you’re willing to take that seriously. And it’s all about the politics of California and the politics of the Bay Area.

So this is the second in a little California twofer series. Are We Ready? Erik Davis discusses the “high weirdness” that has shaped California and the development of A.I. Transcript The Future Is Going to Be Weird.

The burning wire by jeffery deaver