In a long, half-crazy book called "Valis," he proposed that the world we live in is a weird scramble of information, that a wicked empire has produced thousands of years of fake history, and that the fabric of reality is being ripped by a battle between good and evil.
"I used to love to plant one really weird bit of random information (sometimes even false) into stories to catch the rewrites," MG wrote in response to developer Marco Arment's concise analysis of the insatiable tech news beast.
As we sat shoulder-to-shoulder, sifting through his browser history and going through files, I asked him questions about the little bits of idiosyncratic, weird, and often trivial information that surfaced, seeing just how much computers have become an extension of our selves.
"But you present that same information through this weird, almost roller-coaster-y looking organic form, it lures them in".
Psychologists call this Confirmation Bias – our weird tendency to only notice information that confirms our existing beliefs.
Digitized information has some weird and wonderful properties: it can be transmitted almost instantaneously and copied at virtually zero cost, and copies are identical to the original.
But weird things happen when we share information, and particularly when we have to change formats, converting from visual to written communication and back again.
The only sectors that shed jobs were finance and information, which is a bit weird.
To them, Facebook and the like occupy some weird twilight zone between public and private information, rather like a diary left on the kitchen table.
"We're in such a weird moment where people are desperate for more information but inured to so much".
