First there was cyberpunk in the 1980s, when William Gibson asked "What happens if technology takes over the world for bad?" Back then, in the cold dark days of the ZX Spectrum and clunky IBM PCs it seemed inconceivable that computers would ever become as ubiqutious as TVs or cars. Then in the 90s, people like Neal Stephenson said "What if technology took over the world and made it awesome?" It became more obvious with the advent of the internet that computers would spill over from our education and work lives into affecting the way we actually live, but no one knew exactly how. Would we have computers in our heads? Would you use the internet for video calling your friends? Would people pay for access to websites? And now we're at ... post-post-cyberpunk(?). Where computers have taken over our lives, and social networking is pretty much a given. (Who's not on Facebook these days? Weird people, that's who.) You have cool little programs like f.lux which tie in directly with the natural world outside, millions of people who update every second of their waking lives on Twitter and Facebook, stuff like last.fm which connects people by shared musical taste, and Google can automatically show you the top news stories and trends of the day without any human input. It's rather a fascinating time to be alive, and that's basically what my book is about.

Available in stores like whenever.

Had my South Korea meeting today. There are actually eight of us going, and everyone seems pretty cool from the minute or two of chat we got. As we were going, I said "Should we swap details or something? Facebook?" and everyone said "yeah, sure." Think back to, ooh, January 2007 even. A scant two years ago, and we'd have been swapping email addresses. How the world changeth.