Episode 136
I spoke with Clive Thompson about:
How he writes
Writing about the climate and biking across the US
Technology culture and persistent debates in AI
Poetry
Enjoy—and let me know what you think!
Clive is a journalist who writes about science and technology. He is a contributing writer forWired magazine, and is currently writing his next book about micromobility and cycling across the US.
Find me on Twitter for updates on new episodes, and reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(01:07) Clive’s life as a Tarantino movie
(03:07) Boring life and interesting art, life as material for art
(10:25) Cycling across the US — Clive’s new book on mobility and decarbonization
(15:07) Turning inward in writing
(27:21) Including personal experience in writing
(31:53) Personal and less personal writing
(36:08) Conveying uncertainty and the “voice from nowhere” in traditional journalism
(41:10) Finding the natural end of a piece
(1:02:10) Writing routine
(1:05:08) Theories of change in Clive’s writing
(1:12:33) How Clive saw things before the rest of us
(1:27:00) Automation in software engineering
(1:31:40) The anthropology of coders, poetry as a framework
(1:43:50) Proust discourse
(1:45:00) Technology culture in NYC + interaction between the tech world and other worlds
(1:50:30) Technological developments Clive wants to see happen (free ideas)
(2:01:11) Clive’s argument for memorizing poetry
(2:09:24) How Clive finds poetry
(2:18:03) Clive’s pursuit of freelance writing and making compromises
(2:27:25) Outro
Links:
Selected writing
The Attack of the Incredible Grading Machine (Lingua Franca, 1999)
The Know-It-All Machine (Lingua Franca, 2001)
How to teach AI some common sense (Wired, 2018)
Blogs to Riches (NY Mag, 2006)
Clive vs. Jonathan Franzen on whether the internet is good for writing (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2013)
The Minecraft Generation (New York Times, 2016)
What AI College Exam Proctors are Really Teaching Our Kids (Wired, 2020)
Companies Don’t Need to Be Creepy to Make Money (Wired, 2021)
Is Sucking Carbon Out of the Air the Solution to Our Climate Crisis? (Mother Jones, 2021)
AI Shouldn’t Compete with Workers—It Should Supercharge Them (Wired, 2022)
Back to BASIC—the Most Consequential Programming Language in the History of Computing Wired, 2024)
Clive Thompson: Tales of Technology