Nicky Shields
Nicky Shields asked Charlie Jane Anders:

When did you write All the Birds in the Sky? The parts where you predict this near future seems like it may have been written a long time ago. It seemed like The Caddy would just be a phone app, and the projects Laurence was working on (like an Open Source Operating System) are dated. Or what happened to Linux in the future? And who's impressed by a 19" monitor? Was it written a long time ago? Asking for a friend!

Charlie Jane Anders I started writing All the Birds in 2011, but even in 2016 when it was published I felt like it was pretty accurate to the tech nerds I knew. I apologize if I got the size of an impressive monitor wrong, that's my bad. I'm kind of spatially challenged. I still know nerds who are excited about Linux though, and the new TV show Upload has a whole open-source storyline. I don't think the Caddy could just be a phone app, and I get people all the time saying to me that they wish the Caddies existed in real life. Our phones mostly do the opposite of what the Caddy does: they make it harder for us to connect with each other in the flesh-and-blood world.

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