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
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.
arguably citizens common country executive power
Executive power in any nation arguably has more in common with executive power in another country than with the citizens it should serve.
access great lead supposed work
Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.
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.
money
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
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.
gets politics pretend
I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.
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.
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.
feeling talk
I know that when I talk to my parents and my friends, there's a strong feeling of the world out of control and damaged.
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.
bubble early falsehood industry mirage obvious throughout
Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.