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The last academic year began early, with the organizing of the British Human-Computer Interaction conference<\/a> at the University of Lincoln in July. 250 people from 20 different counties and a live discussion between attendees and Julian Assange chaired by Chris Csikszentmihalyi. The aim was to investigate how interactive technologies fundamentally affect our privacy, rights, and relationships with authority, government and commerce. There wasn’t much public desire to have conversations about these topics at the time, and indeed there was hostility towards such discussion. That these topics are now on the public agenda is no small testament to the patient determination of the principal chairs, Shaun Lawson<\/a> and Patrick Dickinson<\/a>.<\/p>\n September and October involved a flurry of public talks, on VR at Dialogue<\/a> in London; on biology as technology at the University of Arts London<\/a>; and on the future human at Warwick University’s festival to celebrate its 50th Anniversary.<\/a><\/p>\n In early November I spoke about libidinal parasites<\/a>, the role of art, and broken machines at a special Virtual Futures salon<\/a> in Soho, London, on ‘Fucking Machines’ – a panel about sex and robots.<\/p>\n Then back to Warwick University for an astonishing conference on Cormac McCarthy organized by Katja Laug<\/a>, focusing on very close reading of one of the truly great American novels of the 20th century, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.<\/em> The whole event was filmed: my talk principally about the character of Judge Holden is here<\/a>; the long and hugely productive roundtable discussion is here<\/a>.<\/p>\nshare this:<\/h3>