milktree

I've been reading this book of Adams' writings from various places: interviews, newspaper articles, scraps of unfinished stuff. It's called The Salmon of Doubt.

Here's some good stuff from the bit I'm reading now:

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

What are the benefits of speaking to your fans via e-mail?

It's quicker, easier, and involves less licking.

On predicting the future, and how we all get it wrong, really wrong lots of examples of wrongness including trains, plains, radio, telephones, the stock market, Bill Clinton &c. :

One such that I spotted recently was a statement made in February by a Mr. Wayne Leuck, vice-president of engineering at USWest, the American phone company. Arguing against the deployment of high-speed wireless data connections, he said, "Granted, you could use it in your car going sixty miles an hour, but I don't think too many people are going to be doing that." Just watch. That's a statement that will come back to haunt him. Satellite navigation. Wireless Internet. As soon as we start mapping physical location back into shared informations space, we will trigger yet another exposive growth in internet applications.

That last quote was from The Independent on Sunday November, 1999.