Last week I spent a lot of time thinking about transgression, which means it was an ordinary week except for one thing. I got to consume one of those rare treats: A movie that actually shocked me. I’m speaking, of course, of the sadly overhyped new indie horror flick Paranormal Activity. I say “sadly overhyped” because the worst thing you can do to a genuinely terrifying movie (or book, or TV show) is to blast people with a zillion ads about how IT WILL REALLY SCARE YOU. Unfortunately the more you get amped up to be scared, the less scared you’ll be.

I had extremely low expectations about Paranormal Activity going in, and that probably helped me enjoy the movie so much. It was genuinely one of the most terrifying movies I’ve seen since 28 Days Later, and for many of the same reasons. Like 28 Days, Paranormal Activity is about how terrifying human relationships can be – the monsters are basically literalizations of the horrific ways people treat each other.

Check out my review of the movie on io9, where I go into more detail about how Paranormal Activity works as a horror movie about dysfunctional relationships. Also check the movie out – not just to be scared, but to watch a horror movie done right.

I also wrote a rather long essay about dragon sex in science fiction and fantasy. This is a topic I have thought way too much about, but not as much as legions of Pern fans who have endless debates over why Pern’s military is packed with gay guys having lots of psychic dragon sex. You think I’m kidding? Read my post.

This is the third year in a row that I’m participating in the sexual futurism conference called Arse Elektronika. You can come out to the Thursday night opening ceremonies at the Roxie Theater to see a lot of crazy, awesome entertainment, including me talking about gay porn mashups from Japan. And I’m also giving a paper on Saturday at 3 PM on the future of romantic love (yes, it has a future). Check out the full Saturday schedule (venue is PariSoMa), which includes appearances from luminaries like R.U. Sirius, Violet Blue, and Kyle Machulis, here. Hope to see you there!

Last week I published an article in the Washington Post about how artificial intelligence might emerge from an unexpected place. Here’s the way the article starts:

If machines ever become sentient, science fiction movies have conditioned us to expect one thing: Our new mechanical masters will try to take over the world and destroy us all. But the reality of artificial intelligence is a lot weirder than even the machines vs. humanity “Matrix” movies suggest. When AI finally emerges, it will be a lot more like an erudite video store clerk than a superpowered killer.

If you’ve ever bought something at Amazon.com or rented a movie from Netflix, you’ve interacted with a software program that owes its existence to over half a century of research into artificial intelligence. That program composes sentences such as: “Because you enjoyed the movie ‘Godzilla,’ we think you would enjoy ‘Ultraman.’ ” It’s called a “recommender system,” and it’s designed to learn about you and your fellow humans by gathering data about you and drawing conclusions from it; eventually, it will know more about what you like than you do.

Read the whole article at Washington Post.

I’m writing this from the dealer’s room (free wifi!) at WorldCon, an annual international science fiction convention devoted to books and art. This year it’s being held in Montreal, and it’s been a terrifically great Con – I’ve had lots of conversations with interesting writers and publishers which I’ll be posting on io9 in the coming week. io9 also co-sponsored a party last night with Circlet Press, which featured bright blue drinks and a giant pile of porno books. It was a perfect prelude to the Tor.com rock band party, where I played bass as John Scalzi sang a Journey favorite. I think the moral here is that everything goes better with Journey.

Next I’m heading to the Netherlands to give a talk at the Hacking At Random camp in the wilds of Vierhouten. I’ve always wanted to go to one of these semi-annual hacker camps and so I’m psyched to be part of the program. My talk is Thursday, Aug. 13, at 10 PM and it’s called “The Censoring Mob,”. It’s about the dark side of user-created content. You know, the part where mobs of people online censor other people’s work by flagging it for removal or by using griefing pile-ons.

Then I’m heading over to Paris, where I’ve never been before, to spend a week poking my head into museums, eating a lot of yummy food, and getting some work done on the final chapters of my novel.

I gave a talk earlier this year at Webstock, New Zealand’s premiere web conference, and now you can see a vid of it online. I talked about how science fiction influences tech product design, but also how developers and scientists can look to science fiction for clues about what people want out of their technologies. And let’s face it – it was an excuse for me to talk about Battlestar Galactica, Tron, and Dollhouse. See the video here.

In related news, today I published a post on io9.com that makes a nice companion piece for this presentation. It’s about two new augmented reality technologies which are just on the cusp of emerging from the science fiction world and into the consumer marketplace.

Last month, Wired published a short opinion piece I wrote about the future of cash. The article focuses on “complimentary currencies,” DiY money that people use instead of established national currencies – especially in times like these, when national currencies seem unstable at best in many parts of the world. Here’s an excerpt:

Futurist Douglas Rushkoff, famous for correctly predicting the rise of social media, is trying to convince Craigslist’s Craig Newmark to create “craigbucks.” He thinks it’s the obvious next step in the evolution of money. “People could buy and sell things exclusively on Craigslist using craigbucks,” Rushkoff enthuses. “Sure they’ll want to keep their Visas and their MasterCards, but they’ll want a specialized, alternative form of cash too.”

The idea is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Economists already have a term for this kind of community-specific money; they’re called “complimentary currencies” and they naturally take root when conditions are right.

Read the rest at Wired.

I spent the Memorial Day weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, at my favorite science fiction convention: Wiscon, which is devoted to feminism and all things progressive in scifi. I spoke on two panels, one about Dollhouse and the other about bisexuality in science fiction. The Dollhouse panel wound up being incredibly interesting, with other panelists and the audience riffing for an hour about what the Dollhouse might represent – prison, the military, a brothel, a chattel house? We also hashed out which characters really were the heroes of the show, determining that in fact nobody is really a hero and that’s probably why the show will ultimately fail to gain a broad audience. My favorite character has wound up being Adele DeWitt, the ambivalently amoral manager of the Los Angeles branch of the Dollhouse. There were a surprising number of people who agreed with me.

I also attended a ton of interesting panels, and wrote about one of them on io9: The “what gender is your Roomba” panel, which raised a lot of interesting questions about why we feel compelled to gender technology which is essentially genderless. Read about that here.

One of the issues I heard a lot about over the weekend was the increasing difficulty of getting published in the current market. As the publishing industry shrinks, there is less room for the kinds of social science fictional explorations that many Wiscon attendees write and read. It seems anecdotally that women are being hit harder by this downturn than men are – but then again, the women at Wiscon are ones who like to deal with unpleasant truths and difficult ideas in their fiction, and the publishing industry’s aversion to such stories has always crossed gender lines.

I attended several panels where people talked about how outrageous it is that science fiction remains such a white-dominated field, despite the huge numbers of people of color who read and write SF. This bias is reflected in which authors get contracts, but also in the subject matter of published novels. When was the last time you read an SF novel where all the main characters happened to be black or Asian or native? It seems bizarre that the future-looking genre of SF should remain so white in the US, especially at a time when our president and one of the wealthiest entertainment moguls in the country (Oprah Winfrey) are black. Some of our most popular literary authors are black, like Toni Morrison. And one of the biggest bestsellers in American history, the novel Roots, has a cast of characters which is entirely black. Another mainstream mega-bestseller, Joy Luck Club, has an entirely Asian-American group of characters. If the mainstream can do it, why can’t SF?

Obviously the answer is for publishers to reach out to authors who are people of color. But in addition readers who are concerned about this issue should consider donating money to groups like the Carl Brandon Society, which give out scholarships to people of color who write science fiction. If we want to support the careers of people of color in SF, one way to do it is quite frankly to give them money so they can write.

This Friday come out to celebrate May Day and revolution at the “Manifesto!” show at for SF in Exile at Modern Times Bookstore, 7 PM – 9 PM. I’ll be reading from Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” and possibly from some other manifesti as well. Joining me will be Naamen Tilahun, Danny O’Brien, Nick Mamatas, Zuleikha Mahmoud, Liz Henry, Steven Schwartz, and Daphne Gottlieb.

Once upon a time I helped write a manifesto, which is why I have such a love for them. The evening should be a wonderful and crazed celebration of declamation. So, come, listen, and get hit by shrapnel in the War of Ideas!

Tomorrow night I’ll be joining scifi superstars Cory Doctorow and Rudy Rucker, along with my fellow io9 editor Charlie Jane Anders, at a geek reading to benefit Electronic Frontier Foundation. I’ve always been a giant supporter of EFF – even worked there for a couple years – and I’m excited to help raise money to support their digital freedom-fighting ways.

Want to come out? Show is Monday, March 23, at 7 PM at 111 Minna, San Francisco. $25 at the door (this is a benefit after all!) but nobody will be turned away for lack of funds. Hope to see you there!

I’m heading down to New Zealand, where I’m going to Kiwi FOO Camp in Warkworth, then on to the alarmingly-cool Webstock Conference in Wellington. Still not sure if I’m going to present anything at FOO – I’ll have to see if I get any ideas on the plane.

I’m giving a talk at Webstock called “Your Business Plan Is Science Fiction – And That’s a Good Thing.” Which is sort of a lie, because sometimes it’s a bad thing. The talk is about the way inventors and developers have to grapple with what I’m calling the “science fiction baggage” that comes with any new tech creation. I talked to synthetic biologist Drew Endy about this quite a bit – he claims he hates science fiction because it’s made his work with cloning and inventing new life forms so difficult to do. He’s always having to say, “No I’m not doing a Frankenstein thing – no I’m not inventing a zombie virus.”

Futuristic stories helped prepare people for everything from smart phones to robot warfare, and even (back in the old days) the web itself. But scifi can also scare people off of good ideas like cloning because there is so much misinformation about the science in popular works of scifi. So inventors should try to be savvy about the cultural environment where they’re releasing their cool new ideas. Have they created something that will freak people out because it reminds them of the bad guy in Batman? Or have they created something people will misunderstand because it involves robots, and most people think of Battlestar Galactica when they think of robots? I’ll even have some pointers on how to get rid of cultural baggage – or at least make it weigh a little less.

Plus, this talk will give me a chance to talk about the not-so-secret connections between Battlestar Galactica and Google’s Android platform. And to show a special clip from the new Joss Whedon TV series Dollhouse when we talk about brain-computer interfaces.

Also I’m really, really hoping that I’ll get a chance to tour Weta – both the digital side and the real-life props side. I am a total prop geek. And needless to say, I was a fan of Peter Jackson back in the Bad Taste days, OK? I’m serious. I love alien barf.