Margaret Atwood on Doomscrolling: ‘I Want to Keep Up With the Latest Doom’

Margaret Atwood has spent most of her 86 years writing prolifically across subjects and genres, from speculative fiction to poetry to children’s books—often plumbing the depths of her own relationships and experiences to do so. But it’s only now that the celebrated writer is putting her own life to paper. In her recently published memoir, Book of Lives, Atwood chronicles everything from her youth in the Canadian wilderness, to her early professional years toiling in relative obscurity, to the various grudges and score settling she’s finally able to undertake freely—since the people involved, she notes, are now largely dead.Of course, Atwood long ago ascended from being defined merely as a writer. She has become, particularly since her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale experienced a timely resurgence during the first Trump administration, something of a sociocultural and political expert, asked to opine on everything from dictatorships to reproductive rights to social media. Her takes, it must be said, are often very smart and very good. They’re also, as I learned during a lengthy and expansive conversation with Atwood for The Big Interview podcast, still decidedly reassuring: In a 2023 interview with WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs, Atwood said that she was still optimistic about the United States. Despite everything that’s happened thus far during Trump 2.0, she tells me her stance hasn’t changed.As a Canadian myself, the child of a writer, and someone who doesn’t believe in god, interviewing Margaret Atwood is probably as close as I’ll get to having a truly religious experience. Atwood was sharp, hilarious, and generous with her time—even leaving her landline phone off the hook when it wouldn’t stop ringing—as we talked about the merits of jumping from gig to gig, the ins and outs of political resistance, doomscrolling, and much, much more. Here’s our conversation.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.KATIE DRUMMOND: Margaret Atwood, welcome to The Big Interview.MARGARET ATWOOD: Thank you very much.Thank you for being here. Now, we always start these conversations with some very quick questions, like a warm-up for your brain. Are you ready?I'm always ready.Typewriter or computer?Right now, computer.Spiritually though.Spiritually, typewriter.Pierre Trudeau or Justin Trudeau?Oh, whoa. Woo. What a question. That is very loaded. Do I get a choice of neither?Yes. Neither is an option.OK.You elect neither?Unfortunately, I cannot elect “neither” because nobody's called that. But I don't belong to a political party and I usually vote on the basis of what the person is likely to do.Fair enough. What is the best and worst part of literary fame?The best part of literary fame is you don't have to work for a university and you can't get fired.Love that.The worst part is selfies.Are you often asked for selfies?In very odd places, such as the ladies' washroom. Do I allow selfies? We're not gonna go there because then I'll get just so many more requests for them.OK. If Gilead took over Canada, which province would rebel first?Quebec?I thought you would say Quebec or Alberta.Yeah, either one. I mean, you can have both if you want. I don't know about Alberta. They've had some pretty, um, Gilead signs recently.You're not wrong. For those unfamiliar with Albertan politics, I would describe it as the most Texas of the provinces.But not very Texas. I think it's another one of those places that's very divided between rural and urban.That makes sense. If you could live for one year inside any book, which book would you live inside?Do we want peace and quiet or excitement?Well, that's up to you, but excitement.Well, and you have to say whether you'd be the maid, whether you'd be the central character. It's pretty specific. It's like a past life. People who think they've had past lives, they're never a ditch digger. They're always Cleopatra. So any book that I would like to live inside, well now, what a question … For peace and quiet, Anne of Green Gables.Well, that sounds lovely. I think we can do that.Yes, it's before World War I, no bad things had happened. No bad 20th-century things had happened yet.What is a misconception about you that you secretly enjoy?I think I would offer up the rumor that was going around in about 1960, 1970, that I dressed up in pre-revolutionary French court dress, including the wig, and prowled the streets of Toronto at night in this getup.Why would you be doing that?I don't know, nor do I know where this rumor came from, but it was a rumor.That's a really good one.The only thing I can suspect is that the rumor was supposing I'd been alive since 1780, and was still wearing the same outfit while looking for my prey.Name something humans will still be arguing about in a hundred years.Gender.I like that. Now, let's go back to the beginning because we are, of course, here on the occasion of you publishing a book all about your 86 years on earth, which I just finished reading over the weekend. It was a remarkable book. You wrote your first story at 6 years old. You say there wasn't much else to do in the Canadian wilderness. I, as a Canadian, am inclined to agree …No, only when it's raining. You have to put “when it's raining.” When it's not raining, there's lots of other things to do.Fair. I think what was particularly interesting to me, and what I didn't know about your history, was that you spent very large portions of your childhood in a very remote part outside of Ottawa …Much further north than that. So up north in the Canadian boreal forest, either up the Ottawa River on the Quebec side or over in Sault Saint Marie, which is, as you know, at the eastern end of Lake Superior. What was I doing there? My dad was a forest entomologist, and those were the months, after the ice went out, until after it froze, until it was freezing up, that's when insects are active and can be studied. Then in the winters we would be in a city where he would write up his research.So you are spending months and months at a time in the wilderness. How did that shape you as an adult?Be prepared to improvise 'cause things break, right? You can't call the repair person 'cause you don't have a phone. There isn't one. So be prepared to improvise. Never throw out a bendy piece of wire. You will need one. Just saying. If you wanna get lost in the woods, come with me.My dad, in addition to being a scientist, was also what I call one of the old bushy guys. So one of the old woodsman-type of people that used to be fairly common in Canada, but probably aren't anymore.I mean, you see them on the streets of Toronto. They have big beards and flannel shirts, but they're cosplaying …Uh, those are not …No, I know. They're called hipsters now. The other piece that surprised me, although it shouldn't have been surprising, was how many years, decades, you spent in what sounded like relative financial precarity. You don't just fast-forward to having written dozens and dozens of books.No, not at all. No writer does.So you got a job at a marketing research firm. After leaving Harvard, you jumped from gig to gig. You were a lecturer, a teacher, a writer in residence, while you were publishing these early books. Lots of people, I think now more than ever, jump from gig to gig. That's the economy that we live in. Would you rather have hunkered down writing books or was there real value for you, in hindsight, in moving from role to role to role?I think it's very valuable, particularly if you're writing novels, to have some kind of experience of how people actually live when they're not at quote, “creative writing school,” which didn't exist when I was doing those things.I did have a poet, an older known female poet, say to me very early on, in about 1961, “If you want to be a writer, you have to drive a truck.”Good luck with that as a woman.Yeah, good luck with that as a short female in the 1960s. It wasn't possible, but translating that into other things, like other types of jobs, I think that's right.When did you realize, or was it a realization at all, that your own life and those experiences, and the people you met and your parents and so on and so forth, would be a source of storytelling and characters and inspiration? Did that happen organically?I think organically, for sure. My parents were both big storytellers. My mother told a lot of stories about her family, which was extended and eccentric and from Nova Scotia. It was the norm in those days to have an extended eccentric family if you were from Nova Scotia. She had lots of stories about her youth, which took place before motor cars and television or any of those things, and were pretty interesting and funny. My dad was funny, too, but his stories were about other things. They were usually about horrifying adventures he'd had in the backwoods.I don't think it was so much about the material that they were telling as the fact that they were telling it. Stories don't have to be about dwarves and Cinderellas, they can be about people you've known.I noticed in the book that you refer to your dreams more than once. There are a few very moving passages about your parents dying in particular. It is a very poorly understood field. Scientists don't know why we dream. It is a great medical mystery. How do you think about dreams and dreaming, and what is their significance to you?It is a universally shared human characteristic. And we suspect it also happens among dogs.I have two dogs and they definitely dream. They're moving. They're making little yipping noises. It's wild.It's an interesting area, and lots of cultures have been very attentive to their dreams. But in general, and you know this yourself, you have dreams that are just kind of taking out the trash and little bits of this and that, and other ones that appear to you to be quite significant.So why do those ones appear to be quite significant? Because they connect with something that's going on in your life. If you have a problem, let's say it's a creative problem, let's say it's a scientific problem, and you go to sleep, you often have the answer when you wake up because your brain has been working away at it.So going to sleep or going for a walk are often helpful when you're waiting for answers to come out of left field.Do you write your dreams down?I have done, I've written some of them down, and people have said also that if you keep a dream journal, you're likely to remember them better in the morning.I noticed that you recalled one dream in the book from when you were 13, a nightmare that you had. I thought to myself, “She either wrote that down or she has a really frighteningly good long-term memory.”I have a frighteningly good long-term memory. Sorry.I'm very impressed.My brother said after reading my memoir—he's a man of very few words—he said, “You seem to have an unusually detailed memory.”I mean, he's correct. I can't remember what happened to me yesterday morning.Well, that's different. I can't remember what happened to me yesterday morning, but you remember things of significance, not just what you did yesterday morning. Not what you had for breakfast. It's things that stand out. So catastrophes, things that are very funny, stupid things you did.You have had a remarkable career, and in many respects, an unlikely one. As we've talked about already, it's not easy to make even a basic living as a writer. Do you think you would make it as a writer if you were in your twenties today instead of 60 years ago? What would be different today?Well, a lot of things would be different, but it's a meaningless question because I would be quite a different person at 20. Then I remind you that pantyhose had not even been invented when I was 20. It was the dark ages.But when you look at young writers …First of all, in Canada anyway, when I was 20, there was not very much competition. Because only a lunatic would've chosen to be a writer. There were a lot of lunatics in the bohemian underground writing community at that time.These were not the most able of people. I was quite abnormal amongst them. I wasn't an alcoholic. I wasn't a drug addict, and I didn't want to commit suicide. So what business have you got being a writer? So now it's been more professionalized, I think, through lots of advice, seminars, and creative writing schools and people saying, “Here's what you have to do and this is how it works.” We didn't have a clue. Not one single clue. I didn't know what an agent was. I had no idea what should be in a book contract or any of those things.So, it's more professionalized and more respectable. So more people think they're gonna go into it, right? They get a certain amount of flim-flam shoved their way. You know, you're gonna write a first novel and you're gonna get a six-figure advance and then you'll be famous. And that doesn't happen very often.Or, let's put it another way. We were in Ireland at a bed and breakfast and we had a very good breakfast and we said to the man, “This is a really good breakfast.” He said, “I used to be a chef.” And we said, “Oh, where were you a chef?” He named the restaurant. And we said, “Oh, what a coincidence. We had dinner there last night.” Pause. “How was the dinner?” We said, “Well, we thought it was pretty good.” Pause. “Anyone can cook a good dinner once.”You have a hit with a book. Now do it again. Then do it again, and do it again.Exceedingly unlikely.It happens, but not to everybody who decides to do that. Whereas with a lawyer, you're usually bound to get some kind of a job.Yes, as my dad reminded me many times.It's very risky. It's gambling. There's a lot of luck involved, and also a lot of persistence because you have to keep doing it.There's only four ways of surviving as an artist: Have money or marry money. People have done that. Have a patron, and that includes the Pope, the Canada Council, and everything in between. Have a job that is not related to writing, a job in the other world. Like T.S. Eliot worked in a bank. Or go to the market. So that means selling your books and living off the proceeds. Very few writers can do that in North America.Did you ever seriously contemplate moving to the United States earlier in your career?When I was at Harvard, it was quite tempting. Not that I would get hired by Harvard because Harvard didn't hire women in the English department at that time, but I got a letter from the Canadian government and it said, “We certainly hope you'll come back to Canada because we really need you.”Oh wow. That's a nice letter to get.I think so. I wonder how many people get letters like that now.You're the first I've ever heard of.So situated generationally, born in 1939, wartime baby, low birth rate, following the Depression, low birth rate, followed by the post-war baby boom. People could see this wave of babies washing towards them and they knew they didn't have enough people to fill the jobs to service those babies. So people of my generation were in demand.It wasn't a question of whether we would have a job, it was a question of what kind of job we would have.So did the letter do it?Certainly inclined me in that direction, plus the fact that my student visa was gonna run out.I ask because for me growing up in Canada, the prevailing wisdom was, Well, if you wanna go big, you go to the United States.That was the prevailing opinion. And people did say that to me, but they said, “If you want to be a writer, you need to leave.”I want to ask you about The Handmaid's Tale. Your name at this point is practically synonymous with prescient, whether you like that or not. One aspect I'm curious about, though, is technology in the book. Technology was not a key part of it, right? The Eyes are actual human beings. People are punished in these antiquated ways. There is no mass surveillance apparatus the way there is in the United States today. Even in 1985 when you were writing it, certainly there was a degree of government surveillance …Yeah, but you'd have to get into somebody's apartment and rig them up, and bug it.Sure. You would've had to bug it.Yes, there were those things, but there were no cell phones. There was no internet. I think it segues OK today because those women would not be allowed access to those things anyway. As for a dark car driving by, you don't know what's in it. You know that you're being surveilled, but you don't know how.Was that a concerted decision in writing the book, or was it simply a matter of writing in a way that reflected your context?We had credit cards, and that certainly makes it into the book because what better way to make women go back into the home than cut off their jobs and credit cards? Which is what's happening now in the United States. There's actually a movement afoot to make it impossible for women to have credit cards in their own names. That law was not changed until 1974.Obviously the piece around reproductive rights and reproductive freedom is incredibly salient today and has been, unfortunately, for several years. When you were writing the book in the eighties, did you sense a backlash to a woman's right to choose? Was that a conversation that you were aware was happening?I think there is a backlash against women's rights in general, beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the so-called religious right as a political force in the United States. And I did keep a scrapbook of what people were saying. Newspaper clippings. Remember them? No, you don't.I was born in ‘86, so …Yeah, just at the edge of newspaper clippings. So they were saying that women belong in the home and they were certainly pushing back against a woman's right to choose. The ‘70s had been pretty game-changing for women in North America. So there was a reaction to that in the ‘80s. That's one of the reasons I wrote the book, because what people say they would like to do if they got power, because I think they will actually do it.Right.Some people say, “It's just words. They don't really mean it.” I always think they do mean it. Then I think, how would you go about it on a practical level? So here's all these women running around like gerbils having credit cards and jobs and money and apartments of their own. How would you get them back into a male-dominated, controlled space?Well, you wrote a bit of a playbook.But it’s not new. It's not my playbook. It's what people have done over time.Sure. What was so interesting to us, among other things that WIRED is covering in this most recent federal election, was that the playbook had been written.Oh yeah.It was out there. You could go see what they were going to do.Yep.He just says these crazy things. They would never actually … It's like, no, no. Take it literally, it's right here. You can read what they're gonna do.Yes. So the other thing was, I believe in the Bible, literally. I guess they've never read it.Right?Which part of it do you believe literally? Are we going to follow the lifestyles of some of the people in it, because they're pretty severe and weird. So, in The Handmaid's Tale, the Handmaids are in the Rachel and Leah story in the Bible. That's why I put that quote at the front.I'm curious about your take on the saga of the lonely young man. I ask because it feels like, at least to me, and I think to a lot of us sitting here, the con there is so much concern and conversation around young men online. It has, I think, eclipsed so many conversations around gender recently. It feels like women are increasingly excluded from those conversations. We're spending a lot of time wondering what to do about the plight of the man when there's a lot that we could be talking about on both sides. I'm wondering what you make of that, or where you think that comes from.It's real.Well, it is real. Sure.But you're wondering why people are talking about it. Well, they didn't for quite a long time. In fact, they pretty much ignored it. You could see where it was going because here came all of these young men who were told they were bad and nobody wanted to listen to them anymore. It was no longer the days of going steady in the ‘50s. That shows up in statistics, how many women are succeeding at university and how many men are dropping out. Because obviously they don't feel welcome. They feel directionless. They don't know why they're doing all of this. They don't get a lot of, “Hey, you're great.” They get a lot of “shut up” and “we don't wanna hear your opinions.”So, they congregate in bunches and worship Jordan Peterson because they feel, as young folks say now, they feel seen.It's a crisis. There used to be organizations that they joined. They joined ROTC; they joined the military in the summers. They joined the Boy Scouts before it got such a bad rep. There was some direction for that sort of energy. But what's filling that now? What can a male young person do to feel valued by society and not like a total failure?Well, yes, they can participate in Jordan Peterson discussion groups.But that's not a very stable platform.But if society is not taking the voices of young men seriously and we are increasingly suppressing the voices and the success of women, I would argue…Yes.Whose voices do you think are being taken seriously?Exactly. Well, I think you're probably better placed to answer that question than I am. But every time Elon Musk opens his mouth, people take that seriously. So I would say tech bro billionaires are taken seriously. Who else? I don't know. Are we gonna count, quote, “influencers”? I think a lot of podcasters have pretty devoted followings. But again, it's very fractured.I think you just nailed it, though, and I'm actually working through this while we talk. Everyone takes someone's voice seriously. But it is a fractured ecosystem. So we are all looking to a different source of truth.Yeah, that's true. And that happened at the end of the 19th century with the literary community, which had been pretty monolithic in the middle of that century. By the end of it, it was pretty divided up. So I think anytime you introduce a new communications technology, you're gonna get a lot of disruption. Let me just mention the Gutenberg press followed by 300 years of sectarian religious warfare.When WIRED’s Kate Knibbs interviewed you a few years ago, you said “I am not counting the United States out.”No, and I'm still not.You know, everybody wants a little bit of hope.Well, first of all, Canadians shouldn't be mad at Americans.Well, you tell that to my dad's wife.All Americans didn't do this.Well, she's not mad at me. There are just many people in my life in Canada who don't want to come to the United States anymore.They're scared.Yeah. It's hard.Yeah, especially with this new thing that you have to bring five years of social media information…Disqualifying for many, many people.So yeah, they're scared, they're apprehensive, and they don't want to take the chance. That's not the same as being mad at all American people, which is just stupid.Of course. I have actually been surprised in the last year at how little resistance, relatively speaking, we are seeing in the United States. You know, employees at the big tech companies that we cover at WIRED, they have essentially been silenced.They don't wanna be fired.They don't wanna be fired. The executives running those companies are having fancy palace dinners with the president of the United States. Everyday Americans are protesting here and there. We've seen some really substantial protests at times, but what would a revolutionary moment in this country look like?First of all, the resistance is visible in the polls, which I'm sure you're tracking.Yeah. Of course.They've been going down, down, down, down, down. So if you're afraid of getting fired and don't want the death threats and all the rest of it because you spoke out in public, you can express your opinion at the ballot box and in an anonymous poll. We are seeing that, we are seeing all those Democrats that got elected, and we're seeing the polls going down. So, it's there. But again, you have to understand that ordinary people are not billionaires and they have jobs.A truly revolutionary moment would be like the French Revolution over a span of two or three years, which started out, as all these things do, they all start out as utopian visions. Things are gonna be so much better if only we … fill in the blank. Then you end up with Stalin. So, I'm not sure you really want that kind of revolution, which usually says tear it all down. So I'm not sure that you really want the terror.No, I don't. For my family, for myself, what I want is for people to show up at the midterms and then show up in 2028 and for there to be a peaceful transition of power.Well, I think that's quite likely to happen right now, as to the midterms, because the economic policies that we have been seeing have not been successful.Surprise, surprise.That's where it hits people: in the pocket book. If you look at revolutions through the ages, they usually start by being about money.Yeah.And in unequal distributions of power and wealth. I've thought for a little while that things were getting way too top heavy in that country and dangerously close to 1792.Well, one challenge here is that the midterms don't solve for the grotesque wealth disparities that we now see in the United States.No, they don't, but they may at least not increase them.I want to ask you, speaking of power, and the consolidation of power in Big Tech, about artificial intelligence. That is a subject about which I know very little, except that it's a crap poet and a pretty bad imitator of me.You've written about this. You wrote for The Atlantic, “What concerns me is the idea that an author's voice and mind are replicable.” I mean, that is one of many concerns about artificial intelligence. When you read about this, when you read about AI art or AI in writing, where do you sit on the notion that AI can be a useful and productive tool in the creation of works of art?It's like absolutely every other human tool that we have ever come up with, including fire and language. So it has good news, it has bad news. It's got stupid consequences that nobody was thinking about and they're all like that. Name one, and that is what you will see.Do you use it?For what?Anything—brainstorming, managing your calendar?No, probably because I don't know how.Do you give a shit about learning at this point?I don't know. I mean, the thing is, anytime you sign on to any of those things, they're getting a lot of data on you.They sure are.They're gonna bombard you with crap. So my problem at the moment is not adding another one is getting rid of some of the ones that I have. You may have noticed that if you unsubscribe, it has no effect.How much time do you spend online? What is your relationship to the internet? People like me spend, you know, most of our waking hours online.Do you?I mean, yeah.What do you do for fun?What do I do?Yeah.I run, I hang out with my daughter. I read. I cook.OK. So you're not spending all of your life online?Well, my job exists on the internet. My phone, I'm holding it up right now, is tethered to my body.Well, I'm not different in that respect. I also use my phone to keep in touch with people, usually with text messages. I do a lot of doomscrolling.You're a doomscroller.I want to keep up with the latest doom.You gotta, if you wanna sleep at night, you better be doomscrolling. That's what I say.Do you?No, I mean, I'm kidding. It's awful. My husband will be up till two in the morning looking at horrible headlines.What you should tell him is “go to sleep, and when you wake up in the morning, it will be the same.” You don't have to do it at night.So when do you doomscroll?At night.When I was rereading this interview you did in 2023 with WIRED you talked about a technology that you actually invented yourself.I'm putting quote marks around “invented,” because it's quite a stupid story.I would love to hear the story.So the story is this: Back in the early 2000s, I was looking at the publishing sector and I was seeing a couple of things. One was that publishers only ever sent authors on tours to cities that reported to the New York Times lists. So that meant that a lot of cities were being excluded. They just never got any author visits, and a lot of authors were being excluded because their publishers were making the determination that it wasn't worth their investment to send them to these other cities.So a lot of people just weren't being given tools for promoting their own books. So what we invented at first was supposed to be a service to the book business. What it was, and here's when I put quotation marks around it, I thought that the FedEx person who was coming with the package that you signed for, I thought the signature was flying through the air and turning into ink somewhere else, but it wasn't. So I said “Oh goody, we can sign books with this.” Actually no, you can't. So I asked some of my more tech-savvy, and I have to say younger, friends. And they took a look and there wasn’t anything like that. The closest thing was long-distance surgery.So nobody had invented anything that could scribble and you wouldn't wanna scribble on a body with a knife anyway, I don't think.Most of us would not, no.Not in a positive way.No.So we set about inventing this thing. It was going to be a remote book-signing technology. This is before any of the stuff that we currently use for it existed. So we were putting together bits that did exist, like video cams, and there was only one signing tablet that you could get at that time. We were sticking them all together. Then we needed to make something that would accommodate a book on the other end.It had to have a lift, because books have a thickness; it had to be able to move up and down. The idea was that people could give interviews in remote places and then sign the person's book. We did invent it. It took some bizarre twists and turns along the way. I think one of our models involved something that looked like an LP disc with a little pen in the bottom. It was very accurate and it was very fast, but it was too fast. So it broke off and flew across the room.Oh no.Not cutting off anybody's head, but it might have. So with all of these things, you have to have something that's accurate that can be made inexpensive enough so people can actually use it. And is attractive enough some people will wish to use it and that they can see a use for it. Well, the book business didn't really grasp the beauty of the concept. But I said to one of my board members, “Frank, what else do you think this might be good for?” And he said, “Everything.”You can go onto the internet and look up Syngrafii, or you can look up iinked and you can see that we are now in the super secure absolutely accurate, long distance, digital and ink signature business.Are you still actively in that business?Yes.It's a great side hustle.It's what?It's a great side hustle.It's a very interesting side hustle because we've seen it evolve over the years. The interesting thing is, because book collectors when we were first doing it were so extremely picky about it being absolutely accurate, one of them said, “I want the skin flakes on the paper.”They weren't gonna accept signatures that weren't the real person's signature. So what we invented is something that will replicate any marks you make, and you can now do it on your phone. There weren't any phones when we started. You can do it on your computer screen. And our physical version that we started with, that we thought would become obsolete, it's now having an increased demand because people are becoming more distrustful of digital. It’s so hackable.The analog revolution.Well, there is that. Some of that is happening.Yeah, for sure.Talking to young people, they're into vinyl LPs and things like that. These new phones that you can't do anything smart on. It's just a phone.I am all for it.How revolutionary, “Hey, this is a phone that doesn't do anything. I'm getting one!”I know we only have a few minutes left, and I want to ask you about the book. I don’t want to give anything away, but I finished it, and—I'm gonna be very honest with you here—I left wondering whether you would ever publish anything again. I also ended the book feeling like you are, if I may say this, thinking about your own death.Oh, I think about my own death all the time, don't you?I do, but it reads as maybe more imminent than how I think about death.No. It's not imminent.Well, no, let's not plan on that.[But] not in the far distant future.Do you plan to keep writing?You don't plan to keep writing.You just do.You keep writing and then you can make plans about that. But you actually don't control whether any of your fantastically brilliant ideas is going to turn into a book. You have to discover that through the process of doing it.Do you think about your legacy, about how you're remembered and talked about? Do you care?I don't care.You don't care at all.No, because I'm not gonna be here. Also, looking at the lives of writers, usually they die, then there's a little flurry of interest in their work, then they go down, and then there might be a revival, but it usually follows the same trajectory. And it is generational, so you know “Oh, my mom read that. Ick.”So it usually does that thing of going down and then if you're lucky it comes up again. But it's not gonna be your luck, it's gonna be your estate's luck.To me, I think something I've always appreciated about writing and about books is there is a permanence to that. Maybe a more fleeting permanence than I'm willing to admit, or want to admit.More chancey, a chance-ier permanence.Yeah. By which you mean maybe it sticks …By which I mean there were a lot more Greek classical plays than we have, and we know about them, they existed, but we don't have any copies anymore.So ultimately it's too much to worry about, and what do we care when we're dead?What would I do about it? I can't control the future, contrary to popular opinion. So it's one of those things of why worry because you can't do anything about it anyway.This brings me to the perfect place to end, which is with this short game I'm gonna force you to play.You think you're gonna force me to do something?I'm gonna try. The short game I'm going to politely request you to play is called Control, Alt, Delete. So, what piece of technology would you love to control? What piece would you alt, so alter or change? And what would you delete? What would you vanquish from the earth if given the opportunity?Oh, that's interesting. So the first one is, what one would I like to be able to control?Yeah.Do I get atomic bombs?Yes.OK, I'll choose that. Well, I would do nothing with them, but I would be in control of that nothing. I would be in control of whether anything got done with them or not. So if they're all under my control, the world would be safe from them.OK. What would you alter? What would you wanna change?What would I want to change? OK. I think I would like to change the very nasty turn that social media took after that initial period when it was fun. Because it was fun at first.It was.And now it's not so much fun.Nope.So I think parts of it are still fun, but you have to really limit what you're accessing, because the rest of it is not fun at all.What was the third part?Delete.What would I delete? Do I get a large swath of it?Yes. Go big or go home.That's so tempting. It's so tempting and it's so beset with traps: There was a golden age and we could go back to that if only we got rid of name-your-thing-to-get-rid-of. So, I'd really probably have to think about that. But let's say we should start with the problems besetting humanity and dial back from there. How about that?A methodical strategic approach.So then it would be the automobile.Wow. OK.Because we have a problem with oil addiction, as you know.Yes.We also have a problem with urban expansion beyond the ability to make those bases interesting, vibrant, and safe. What allows those spaces to be so big is rapid transportation.Cars.So, I might do that. I might go back as far as choo-choo trains.I like this.But then we would be stuck with a lot of horses and then we have a horse poop problem. How would this work?Yeah. You don't get to choose.Well, it probably takes us into the age of steampunk to a certain extent. You know, dial it back and see if it turns out a bit differently.How to ListenYou can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.