Writer Annalee Newitz is a veteran of Other Magazine, the blogs Table of Malcontents and Underwire on wired.com, the co-editor of the anthology She’s Such a Geek, and the editor in chief of a new blog about science fiction and the future, io9.com. On Saturday, I sat down with her at Bean There Cafe on Waller and Steiner Streets to talk about the future and her projects.

When we think about the future, we imagine it’s the future because there are changes in certain realms. What are the realms you look for changes in so you can say “Wow, that’s gonna be the future”?

Of course, we’re limited by the fact that we are living in the present, so you have to look at stuff in the present that suggests an alternate path. It suggests a pathway forward — maybe it suggests a pathway backward — but hopefully if you’re looking toward a better future, you look to stuff that might improve the world, make things easier for more people. And when I say easier I don’t mean make it easier for you to file tax forms, or do ten hours of work in eight hours even if the work is boring; by easier I mean actually having a better quality of life, a life that is easier to endure.

A lot of science fiction writers and futurists talk about this idea of the singularity — this idea that there’s a moment at which the present becomes the future. This kind of event horizon, after which the future becomes incomprehensible to us. It’s a place that would look like the internet to somebody in the 18th century [whose method of distributing information means] publishing broadsides. And that 18th century chick publishing broadsides under a man’s name is like: “Whoa, dude, this is super-futuristic! Like, I get to publish stuff, and hand it out on the corner…”

And it would be almost inconceivable to somebody in the 16th century that you could actually print stuff at all and expect people to read it.

Yeah — or that printing would basically become a consumer technology. It would be like, “Wow, a printing press” — it would be like having access to the Google server farm — that only the richest and most powerful people can control this thing.

So when you think of the future in those terms — like, the things that will be unrecognizable to us — then you look around at the present and say: what are the trends or areas of science or art that look like they’re heading in a direction that’s promising but also confusing? So what is something that looks like it could become completely incomprehensible in ten years? I know that that sounds a little bit silly, but when you look at things like the promise behind genetic engineering or nanotechnology — those areas are so exciting to futurists because of (their potential). It sort of suggests a way of relating to our bodies and relating to ourselves as living beings that is radically different from how we do now. It suggests maybe we could live forever; maybe we could modify ourselves to be tree-like; maybe we could become implanted with cool techno-shit so we could fly or we could do high level math instantaneously in our minds — and actually remember everything we did yesterday, no problem.

(Using) genetic engineering and nanotechnology, we’re looking at ways in which our bodies will become hackable and moldable. That stuff is really exciting to me. If you look in the realm of art, we’re sort of at the beginning of understanding how art and cultural production will change through the power of social networks or blogging, or being able to create instantaneous temporary communities (in which you) all think about something really hard for a day. That’s gonna really change creativity, just getting responses from people. You post a question; three hours later, fifty people have said things about it, fifty percent of which are actually smart and interesting, and you’re like, holy shit, we thought through this problem in two hours on the interweb.

And of course the internet is a totally outdated technology, we’re going to have something much, much better. It’s definitely the dawning of a new system for creativity and for cultural collaboration.

Also, time travel would be cool. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

In your io9 manifesto, you wrote one of the main ideas behind your blog is to get away from a view of the future as something composed merely of shiny toys. Is part of your goal to imagine not just what will be new, but a new way of envisioning the new?

I think there’s this kind of lazy bellyflop futurism — where people say: “Dude, here’s the future, we’re gonna have, like, bigger iPods; ooo, we’re gonna have like implants in our heads. We’re gonna have a cellphone implanted in our heads.” And all they’re saying is that culture is going to continue exactly as today, and in fifty years people are still going to want to have cellphones and therefore will want them implanted in their heads. All they’re doing is predicting next year and projecting it into fifty years.

It’s perfectly reasonable to say that next year people will want bigger iPods. In fifty years, maybe people won’t need devices to carry their media around because there will be ways of sharing that data on a network that hasn’t been invented yet. We couldn’t have imagined the internet fifty years ago; maybe there will be a convergence of two technologies, the way the telephone converged with computers unexpectedly to create the internet. Maybe the internet will converge with the lived environment. It won’t be like, you’d go to a computer to get the internet, you’ll have ambient access to the internet everywhere, through objects on your body.

One of the people who’s really smart about this is Jamais Cascio, who lives in the East Bay. He does a lot of long range technological predictions, like: Don’t think of it as the internet on steroids; think of it as being a totally different animal. What if the internet becomes part of the environment? What if it turned out that nanotechnology enables us to make animals smart instantly? Not something that we predict necessarily, although there are plenty of movies that have, like, smart dolphins. What would it be like to be in a world where you could use nanotech, or some very targeted gene therapy, to give a cat human-like cognitive abilities?

They would take over.

I’m not saying that’s the future I imagine — though I have to admit that’s a pet fantasy of mine — but it’s that kind of shift that I’m talking about. Don’t think in linear terms, think about weird offshoots of technology, like unexpected ways that technology might interact with our environment. And remembering that people tend to innovate in the direction of their fantasies. What do we fantasize about? Things like superpowers like flying or being invisible or talking to animals. It won’t be surprising to me if you get weird bumps in innovations and strange tangents that lead us in the direction of kooky fantasies. But also fantasies that we can’t even imagine yet. We need to be open to looniness.

You’re also organizing a “Technology in Wartime” conference on January 26 at Stanford. How did you come to link the two subjects of technology and war?

I’m organizing it for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), which is a venerable and awesome organization that had its roots in the early 80s during the launch-on-demand and Star Wars craze. It was during the Reagan era, and there was this idea that we would have a computerized missile defense in the United States. So CPSR got together a bunch of computer scientists to point out, very rationally and logically, why you wouldn’t want computers to be in control of missiles: computers sometimes fail, and when they fail, you can’t reason with them in the same way, and you can’t shoot them in quite the same way that you can a person — as those poor soldiers found out last year in South Africa when a robotic anti-aircraft cannon went nuts and killed fourteen people, and they couldn’t stop it because it was designed to be unstoppable.

So we organized this conference because, as we move forward, war is going to be fought more and more with computers. Already there are over a thousand autonomous robots deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan — surveillance bots, but also bots that are armed. So the conference will look at things like how do war crime laws deal with autonomous robots; what to expect in terms of surveillance capabilities now that we have the ability to track all kinds of communications, as well as these amazing aerial vehicles.

We’re also talking about anti-war and humanitarian technologies. At least half the day will be devoted to how human rights organizationsare circumventing government surveillance using tech. Cindy Cohn from EFF will be talking about the NSA’s surveillance program — they’re suing AT&T for handing over everyone’s data to the NSA without asking any questions. If you’re looking at the future of war, you’re looking at the future of computing. That’s what we’re interested in doing — intervening in time to make sure those technologies are deployed in a safe way and, in some cases, making sure those technologies get into the hands of human rights workers before they get into the hands of closed and oppressive regimes.

Talk about your io9 co-editors, Charlie Anders and Kevin Kelly.

They are awesome! I’ve known Charlie for a really long time, we’ve worked together on a ton of projects. We did an indy magazine called Other. And we edited a book called She’s Such a Geek together. We spend all our time together when we hang out talking about science fiction. I have to admit (the blog) has spoiled things a bit — now whenever we watch a TV show or movie we’re like, “Oh, we gotta blog that.” That was a no-brainer, hiring her. She’s actually just finished a really fantastic science fiction novel that she’s shopping around right now. She’s a science fiction writer and science fiction thinker.

Kevin Kelly is somebody that I met while we were in the process of putting the blog together. He was a blogger for Joystick and Cinematical and TV Squad. He’s a huge media geek, and a Hollywood media geek. Also he’s a good old fashioned fan boy, he loves trivia. If you ask him, “Name 20 blue-skinned aliens,” he’ll name 25. He’s going to be down in Los Angeles covering Hollywood stuff for us. He already interviewed the creators of the “Heroes” TV show for us, which was awesome, because we love “Heroes.”

I wanted to ask about that. I’m sensing that we’re seeing a transition away from the concept of costumed superheroes to thinking of superheroes as more like ordinary people with some extraordinary ability. But it’s not like they have an alter ego and they fight crime.

You mean like the “Heroes” model where they’re basically regular people and they discover that they have super powers? It’s coming out of the sort of 1960s X-Men Spiderman era. Of course, the X-Men do develop personas… There was the great new novel by Austin Grossman that came out last year, called “Soon I Will Be Invincible.” Again, it was playing at taking the costumed characters and humanizing them, which is kind of interesting.

I’m thinking that your concept of technologies integrating with people’s desires will — well, you already used the phrase “It’ll be like having superpowers” before.

Yeah. I wonder if that’s becoming a more prominent fantasy. There’s a theme in current science fiction, a lot of which deals with pervasive nanotechnology and pervasive genetic engineering, where you can grow any body in a vat. People would like that to be the case: “Tomorrow I develop special powers — now I can blog in my sleep.” We live in SF so it’s a costume-y city. I think San Francisco superheroes are always going to have costumes, even if they don’t have a special identity.

Annalee Newitz (r.) with former SF Metblogger Liz Henry; Flickr photo by Matt.

That leads me to a question a friend asked me to ask you: How would you describe your look? In terms of your look, who are your models/inspiration? And where do you buy your ties?

I stole some of my ties from my dad, who is like the biggest hippie ever; at a certain point in the 80s he decided to get rid of his ties so I stole all of them. And I buy vintage ties all over town. In terms of “my look” — okay. I’m a child of the 80s and worshipped Annie Lennox and Laurie Anderson, who both had, in the 80s, the kind of spiky hair and androgynous weird techno-babe look. But at the same time I was also really into Def Leppard and Motley Crue. But definitely there was that look…

It’s a little bit New-Wave-y, but it’s also nattier.

It’s like New Wave crossed with gentlemanly… It’s true that, when I was in HS and I was conceiving my look, I kept thinking: I really want to be a gentleman. I think maybe it’s a bit of a reaction against always having lived in places that were hippyish. I went to college in Berkeley and I’ve lived in San Francisco most of my life and everybody’s so… It’s nice for people to dress like hippies, I think that’s great, but I think that part of me is like: I’d like to be natty. I really like Dr. Who’s new look, so maybe I was predicting the new Dr. Who look. [Pictured at right]

Does being committed to blogging all the time keep you from doing anything else?

Yes. It’s sorta hard to say yet, because we’ve just been in launch mode. We just launched on Wednesday. Getting more than six hours of sleep has been a rarity. Now that we’ve launched, that will get a little bit better, I hope. But I dream about blogging; I feel like going to the bathroom is a time-waster.

It’s very physically intense. I didn’t expect the physical aspect of it. When I first started, a couple of months ago — because we’ve been working on this behind the wall — for the first time in my life, I developed a repetitive stress injury. And I realized it’s physical labor that I’m doing. I had to get a trackball. Because after two weeks, my hand was like a paw.

Sometimes I think about the mini-eras that have happened in my lifetime by identifying bands with them. The era of Jefferson Airplane, the era of Talking Heads, the era of Nirvana. Can you think of a band that really embodies today’s era? Or is this, instead, the era of brands, not bands — will we think in the future of the Macintosh generation, the Starbucks generation, the iPod generation?

I think that bands have always been brands. One of the things that was so great about Tom Frank’s first book “The Conquest of Cool” was about how the 1960s was an advertising campaign and the whole idea of free love and the people’s Volkswagon and all that crap was invented by Madison Avenue. Everyone was going around like, “Dude, we invented ourselves, we’re so free and liberated,” and actually they were consuming what they were given.

I wonder if we’ve gone from an era of bands defining a generation to music storage devices defining a generation — or media storage devices, it doesn’t even have to be music storage, because YouTube is a form of media storage — it’s like your iPod online. So you could say this is the media storage generation, where it’s not so much that we’re defined by a particular type of music, but we’re defined by sharing music, or by an ability to have so much music that we identify more with the storage device than the bands themselves. It means that we’re storing stuff on those devices that never would have made it into mainstream culture in the 60s or 70s. I have bands on my iPod that are just tiny little bands, local small groups that are indy who release their stuff online.

But doesn’t that take away from the aspect of popular culture that’s a shared experience? You know, when everybody dug Nirvana, or when everybody dug the Talking Heads, they could say, I know something about you because you also dig that band. But now it’s like, if I say “I like this band” and you’ve never heard of them, then…

But see, that’s the beauty of the media storage generation. For Thanksgiving this year I had a warez party and we all brought our hard drives and terrabyte arrays and shared a bunch of music. Now I have all this music on my hard drive — it’s kind of like the remnants of a crazy night of love. I think that experience really defines this generation — we are sharing this plethora of stuff. And if you haven’t heard of something I like, well, go ahead and hear it for five minutes and then you can say, Wow that sucks, or Wow that’s awesome. And there’s always gonna be big bands like the Talking Heads.

After September 11, everybody was walking around saying, “Everything has changed now.” And it took me years to notice what has changed. Now we’re a country that tortures openly. Now oil’s a hundred dollars a barrel.

Now we’re a nation under surveillance all the time.

And I also felt like: Wow, all that shit that people were scared of happening on Jan. 1, 2000 actually happened, only a couple years later. This is the future we were afraid of.

That’s true. There’s this — I’m gonna have a Star Trek moment now — there’s this great (Star Trek: The Next Generation) episode where the Enterprise goes into an alternate future and becomes a warship and they’re in the midst of a terrible war that they had actually solved years before in the actual timeline. Whoopi Goldberg says to the captain, “Look, this isn’t right, we’re not in the right timeline, it doesn’t feel right.” I think a lot of us are saying that right now: this is not the timeline, this is not the right future. This is not where we wanted it to be.

Even though 9-11 was terrifying, and it was a reminder that, even though we’re a superpower, we are vulnerable — I don’t think anybody wanted the nation to become what it has become. I also think a lot of our anti-science policies and a lot of our anti-poor policies kind of derive from that. There are so many policies in place now that deprive people who are already deprived financially. And so many policies depriving scientists of money to continue fruitful areas in research — at least, if they want to get money from the government. I think a lot of those policies are anti-future policies. If you don’t take care of people, if you don’t make sure that every single member of your population has decent health care and decent education, you’re fucking yourself for the future. You’re making sure the future gets darker and darker.

In fact, we have an article about whether the United States has become “the least futuristic country” in the world because our government seems to be actively discouraging innovation and scientific discovery, refusing to allow foreign scientists to come in and speak at conferences. All kinds of bad craziness. It’s only making things worse in the end. But I do have hope that we can turn things around, that we can recover from the trauma and say, “Okay, maybe that wasn’t the right direction.”

Given all that, are you an optimist about the future?

I am, to my very core, a utopian and an optimist, although I have a crispy, cynical outside. I think that people are basically good and want to improve not just their own lives but the lives of their neighbors. And that we’re happier when our neighbors are happier. And given a chance, and given a political culture that encourages free scientific inquiry, people will actually take advantage of it and create a world that is brighter than this one. People continue to rebel against unfair government control of almost anything — control of speech, control of resources, control of ideas — and when they do rebel, they’re doing it in ways that are more creative and less violent, through art or through persuasion, and that is terrific to see.

I think that science and technological innovation outside the US continues rapidly in a direction that is ultimately going to be beneficial. In China — which US newspapers love to bash for being the most polluted place in the world — they also have a ton of money devoted to looking into green alternatives, into power and energy. And so, when I see things like that, I think yeah, we have fucked up, but as a species we seem to be pretty good at eventually figuring out that we fucked up and try to make things better for more people.