EVERDAY

Everday, a book from the future, is an encyclopedia of an imagined world — with entries on places and times, ideas and visions, discoveries and confusions, inventions and conventions, senses and sensations... tersely written, full of weird notions, idiosyncratic vocabulary, and cross-links. A “science nonfiction” tract that reads like fiction, it dances from sublime to bizarre to seemingly irrelevant, painting a picture of an enchanted world that may be our future.

A blend of futurology, philosophy, technological insights, and poetic asides, Everday offers its own unique take on artificial intelligence, Singularity, interstellar travel, post-scarcity social structures, transhumanism, Earth biology, and the future of our civilization. Everday refuses to play to the standard futurological precepts: it’s a future of strange dangers and strange joys, an uncommon look into what we humans may truly care about — and where that can lead us.

The world of Everday is populated by humans (among others) who are very much like us in some aspects — but completely alien in others, and it's not so much about technology: most of the differences are psychological, even spiritual. What matters to them is not what (currently) matters to us. This book is an attempt to imagine that all the solvable problems we face today (poverty, climate, war) have long been solved — and to look at the really hard problems that remain.

Here are some highlights from the alphabetized entries that make up Everday:

• Arf is the universal metamaterial: you grow it, you compute in it, you live in it.


• Change is what humans found necessary and sufficient to do with their bodies, given complete knowledge and control thereof.


• City: a utopia within a utopia, the story of its quick rise and slow descent.


• Deep sleep is how Everday deals with death.


• Family: it still exists, and may matter more than ever before.


• Flight: what's the use of a utopia where you can't fly?


• Leaving: and yet death somehow refuses to be completely dealt with.


• Minds are the AIs of the Everday world — perhaps surprising in their unsurprisingness.


• Nature Minds are the more interesting kind, even if purely hypothetical.


• Nomogenesis is a look at what we can, and should, do to Earth's biology other than compensate for the harm we've done to it.


• Panpraxis is an even more outlandish vision — but why have a world that can't dream?


• Roads are just that: roads. Simple things matter, too.


• Scares were never fully conquered but changed almost unrecognizably.


• Sparsening was the Big Bang that created Everday — or was it a Big Whimper?


• String is a typical something bigger that every utopia needs.


• Understanding is the Holy Grail of a world that's always on the run from self-complacency.


• Will is the ultimate money — the latest, and final, universal equivalent for a world without coercion or deceit.


• Wizards roam the roads of Everday. They can change your life — if you're ready for it. They can make you one of them.


• World Sleep is rightfully the last chapter of the book of Everday: not just alphabetically but eschatologically.

Everday is a difficult book. Dense, convoluted, almost impenetrable. That’s to be expected if you consider how this text came to be and what it needed to overcome to reach your eyes. It had to be tough to survive. It had to be poetic because of all types of text, poetry is the sturdiest.

Everday is a book that truly rewards those who come to it with open eyes and open minds.