YouSaid · the spoken record

Annalee Newitz

lines on the record: 84
first: 2020-01-27
most recent: 2020-01-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I know why, though. Why would you not exist? Because you can't exist. I didn't even understand. We'll go get into that paradoxes. So you can, I got that, but I think it's just a word they made up to fuck with me. Anyway, so you can only go back in time.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know another classic film. We're going to discuss that in a minute, but go ahead. Yes. Yeah, it is. There's so many good things in that film. It's so bad.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They can only go into the past. And so when you go into the past, you can, of course, return to the exact time that you left, or you can return to another point in the past. But you can't go into the future. As far as they know, and this is, again, this is a discovery science. So they're slowly learning about these machines and kind of all lost Stargate or something where they don't understand all the buttons. And so maybe they could go to the future.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not back to the future ish. We're not like the original HG Wells Time Machine novel. Basically geologists discover that there are time machines that are embedded in ancient rock formations on the Earth's surface. And there's just a few of them. There's five that they know of. And ancient cultures knew about them. you know, always been around, but they've just been interpreted differently. So 5,000 years ago, the ancient people using one of these portals thought of it as magic and didn't realize that they were traveling in time and sort of over the centuries humans have gradually figured out, oh, these are time travel machines. And in fact, one of the characters who's a scientist says, you know, we don't even really know if these are time machines. They might be machines for something else, but it just so happens that they also can send people through time.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, she's especially happy now. Nobody watched that, but Kara Swisher and you. No, a lot of us, we were there. There were a lot of fans. IO9 was a big fan. So the plot is divided between two points of view. One of the characters is an academic time traveler. And this is a world where time travel has existed forever. So it's not discovered. It's not some guy in his basement building a machine.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really complicated plot, which is exactly what happened. Time travel is what to be. Whenever you get into time travel, and I knew that was going to be a big issue, so I plotted it out very carefully. And then, of course, screwed everything up.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because if that's your model of time traveling again, I like the whole concept of whatever that movie with Gwyneth Paltra that was actually good, closing doors, opening doors or whatever you call it. No, I'm obsessed with that. And we're going to talk about it when we get back. We're here with Annaline Neweitz. They're the author of The Future of Another Timeline. We're going to take a quick break now, but we'll be back after this. We're here with Annalie Neuitz, the author of The Future of another timeline. We're gonna talk about this book and about time travel, which Oda just noted was a huge obsession of Karis Wishers. Talk about the plot of this, because it's a great plot. It's a really fantastic plot.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, it would allow for a good way to talk about historical change. How do you change history? In a sense, we're always doing that and we're always time traveling.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was another accident. I had been wanting to write for a long time an alternate history that was going to be kind of set where I grew up in Southern California about an alternate timeline where abortion never became legal in the United States. And I kind of assumed that if that were the case, there would just be gangs of teenage girls running around murdering men because, you know, that just sort of made sense to me somehow. So I love this book. Like I said, it's somehow in my brain that made sense because it would have created much more extreme circumstances. And so, and these characters are already very radicalized and punk. And so, but as I was sort of tackling the book and thinking about how to do it, I kept asking myself, well, what created this alternate timeline? And that was when I realized I had to do time travel because that would make it much more interesting for me to write. And I thought,”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is the rules. Like, you patent this shit. Right. So that I had, again, that was all stuff that I had been kind of hearing on background from people. And so I was able to make it into the foreground of my fiction.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had covered it a little bit. It was actually kind of a departure for me to do it in fiction. I had been covering some stuff around patents. I'd covered a lot of biotech innovation, but I hadn't, you know, unlike a lot of reporters who really dedicate themselves to looking at the policy side, I was really covering the innovation side. And then I would hear little bits. Like I would interview people and they would talk about their frustrations, about how if you're trying to develop a new technology, how difficult it can be if you don't have enough money to kind of license stuff or how if you develop something, you risk being sued by someone. Or also from the other side, how a lot of people who wanted to develop essentially open source technologies or open source therapies would get pushback from their institutions saying, no, you need to patent this. And they would be saying, well, but this is for the good of humanity. And their bosses would be like,”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of, yeah, yeah. And so that became, yeah, my first novel was this kind of techno-thriller set in the future. And, you know, we follow both the robot and the pirate and kind of get both of their perspectives as they're trying to navigate this relationship. And yeah, it really, it scratched a lot of itches that I couldn't in journalism because in journalism, unless you're writing an oped piece, you really have to report the facts and not sort of inject your opinion about like, I think all this is garbage bullshit that's going to lead to dystopia. Not really fair to do that in an actual piece of journalism. So I could, in fiction, do all that kind of stuff that I'd been storing up. And you were covering.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A patent pirate who is ripping off big pharmaceutical companies and finally rips one off that's so pissed that they send a robot assassin after her, which as you do, you know, it's the future. So it's a female name.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything, I was like, actually, I do. And so that was kind of how it started. I mean, it obviously the book was garbage. It needed to be rewritten and kind of smacked around. But I was interested in the topics of AI and the pharmaceutical industry and medical patenting, which is a big part of the book's plot for a long time. I'd been covering it as a journalist. When I worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a policy analyst briefly, we were dealing a lot with patents and sort of software patents and the unfairness around software patents. And that was what kind of introduced me to the fact that intellectual property law can really be used to screw the little guy and all the different kind of nefarious ways that big companies can kind of expand their patent libraries without really doing any work just by suing people. And so that kind of became the seeds of this book that's about”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gizmoto media. Now it's like G media. Anyway, it's owned by some kind of investment firm. But anyway, IO9 is still around and we founded it back in like 2008 to cover science and science fiction. So we were covering both the nonfiction side and the fiction side of the scientific project. And I was working on the science side. I was running the whole site, but I was really focused on the science. But in the process, I kind of rediscovered my love of writing fiction, which I'd really left behind in high school. I hadn't really written fiction since then. And so at a certain point, I accidentally started writing a novel. I mean, it sounds kind of silly to put it that way, but I started putting ideas down and I was like, oh, this is fiction. Maybe I'll try doing this. And so it was a classic thing of I wrote it and I put it in a drawer for several years. And then when Tor books, my current publisher contacted me and asked me if I had.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorry, back in the day of blogs are changing. Yeah, they are. So IO9 was owned by what was then called Gawker Media, which is now, I can't even keep up with what it's called, but it...”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so I think what happened was while I was working at IO9 and I was doing science reporting and editing and these were”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or op-ed, depending on what it is. So one of the things your book Autonomous was about AI biotech and drug hacking. So you started, what was of interest to you here? This was early on you were starting to talk about these issues.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They just got put into the borg, essentially. They're still around. But they just don't call it that. Now we just call it journalism or op-ed, depending on what it is.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's all very familiar. Add support. Add supported. Classified. So, yeah, classifieds, but also just regular advertisers, display ads and things like that. So I kind of moved from ad supported media on paper to ad supported media online and worked for blogs after that, which now sounds really old-fashioned too. I know. I read a piece the other day that was nostalgia for blogs. Can we bring them back, please? They are”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, and there's also, of course, the mad scientist also is often trying to destroy the world or kind of remake humanity. And so I went from thinking about stuff like that in academia, which may sound pretty far removed from reality, to thinking about how I could, as a journalist, create new images of tech and science in the media, truthful images, not necessarily fictional. And so I started my career writing for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which was a free weekly paper paper. It actually, people always say it was such an old-fashioned idea to have a paper paper, but the business model of the San Francisco Bay Guardian was the exact same business model as blogs and digital media. Yep, I went for CityPaper.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Futures, essentially. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because if you look at the figure of the cyborg and the robot, they also change a lot and there's very utopian images of robots. There's lots of robot romance movies, even going back to like the 80s, there was a really weird movie called Making Mr. Wright about how the only good boyfriend can be is a robot boyfriend, obviously. Fair. That's a fair assessment. And it probably is. And I think, you know, you start seeing things like the second Terminator film, which is also about how the only good dad.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People talk about horror movies, they think about fear of sex or fear of women. People talk about the alien movies being like, oh my gosh, it's about scary childbirth stuff. And I was like, yeah, that's fine, but I'm really interested in how people are worried about. And then one's about tech.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Night of the living dead, where again, it's kind of scary white people who become zombies, but it's framed really differently. You also in that film have a heroic black character who's eventually spoilers for an ancient movie murdered. And it becomes these different ways that audiences, I think, imaginatively thought about the legacy of slavery in the US and the legacy of race relations, but projected into this sort of fantasy realm. Anyway, so lots of stuff happens like that with monsters where you see these sort of changing images. And so the conclusion I reached was simply that a lot of horror movies deal with Fears around economics and fears around class. And usually”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I looked at how movies and TV and popular books kind of treated those characters over time. And you see these really dramatic changes and the monsters come to embody different kinds of anxieties. And so you see, for example, early zombie movies like the classic, which everyone really should see the film I Walked with a Zombie, which is, it has a terrible name, but it's actually a really nuanced, interesting film about post-colonialism in the Caribbean and the zombies are basically created by people who are the descendants of freed slaves on a plantation, and they turn the white daughter of the plantation owner into a zombie. And it's this kind of clear story, sympathetic story of revenge against these plantation owners or the children of these plantation owners. And then later in the US, you start seeing films like in the 1960s.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, no, it was actually Frankenstein definitely fits in, but I was looking just at the United States. And so I was looking at the undead. So lots of zombies and vampires. I was looking at cyborgs and robots, serial killers, a very popular monster and mad scientists”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, basically, the conclusion was that you can absolutely see a shift in how people tell certain kinds of stories. And so what I did in my dissertation, which later became a book from Duke University Press, which is called Pretend We're Dead, if you feel like finding a really deep cut from my past. I took five different kinds of monster stories and I traced them from their earliest incarnations in the late 19th century up through the present. So you did Franken.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of destruction of San Francisco. Tokyo, of course. Tech production. All right. So you're writing about this idea of our images of robots and things like that. Did you come up with any conclusion that just changes over time?”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Recently I was talking a lot about my A lot of destruction of San Francisco. Yeah, well, the American movies destroy San Francisco, but of course, the Japanese movies all destroy Tokyo. Tokyo, of course. So, you know, it's basically just destroy the city that's closest to the Pacific that, you know, maybe is associated with tech production. Tech production.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which has a long history. It's such a different, you know, it's shipped so clearly. Although recently I was talking a lot about my kids of how many Godzilla movies destroying San Francisco. And I want to understand what that meant.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was really interested in how popular culture can help to shape people's opinions about the world, but also how it reflects our opinions. And I was specifically really interested in how economic trends were kind of working their way into popular movies and how people expressed their fears and anxieties. And I don't mean like that there was a direct link that somebody was saying, gosh, I'm feeling really scared about becoming poor. I think I'll make a movie. These kinds of connections are obviously really tenuous. But there is undeniably you see these trends in film production where during economic downturns, you see certain kinds of film. So I was really interested in basically just how people are terrified of economic change and how that shows up in stories about monsters and science and stories about robots. Which isn't a long time.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I did take a pretty winding path to get here. I actually started in academia, so I was like a professor back in another century. And I had been studying representations of science and technology in the media as an academic. And then I was like, you know, this was where. This was it. This was at Berkeley. And why were you interested?”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I want to talk about a lot of things. Obviously, this book and everything else, but why don't we give people your background? Because you have a really fascinating way that you've come up to write about this stuff. So why don't you talk about your history a little bit and how you got to sort of becoming both a novelist and you also write for the New York Times, your contributing opinion writer along I am too, you're smarter than I am.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who thinks once time travel is invented Silicon Valley will find a way to screw it up within three months tops. But in my spare time, I'm just a reporter and you're listening to recode decode a podcast about power change and the people you need to know around tech and beyond. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Annalie Neuitz, a celebrated science journalist and novelist whose first book, Autonomous, was about AI tech, biotech, and drug hacking. Their most recent book is called The Future of Another Timeline and it's about why traveling through time to undo a murder isn't as easy as it sounds. Previously, Annalie also was a founding editor of iO9 and editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Annalie, welcome to Rico Dico.”
2020-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Annalee Newitz · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT