Lanier: A while back I was asked to help Steven Spielberg brainstorm a science fiction movie he intended to make based on the Philip K. Dick short story "Minority Report". A team of "futurists" would imagine what the world might be like in fifty years, and I would be one of the two scientist/technologists on the team.

DJ Spooky: Sonar is one of the largest festivals of electronic music in Europe. Aside from the U.S.'s "Burning Man" Festival that occurs in August, it's one of the main places that international DJ culture can explore the outter limits of mix culture. But that's an understatement. To put it bluntly: it's THE festival that determines the taste and style of the currents of electronic that flow through the world's underground and avant-garde music in the early 21st century.

Review of _Linked_: We all know our world is held together through a vast network of connections, and we're all coming to realize that it's becoming more connected and interdependent with every passing day. The question is how? In what ways are we altering our lives with this network, and how do we deal with the negative aspects of the overwhelming connectivity?

Enter Albert-László Barabási and his new book, Linked: The New Science of Networks. Underneath our online world of seemingly random connections, the cells of our bodies and our social ties lies a network of hubs and ever-growing links with surprisingly not-random patterns.

On a related note, DJ Spooky has an excellent new CD (released in late May) called "Modern Mantra" that fans of drum and bass, hip-hop, ambient, dub, jazz, and other good music will enjoy. (Spooky has a copy of Douglas Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher, Bach_ on his bookshelf!)

Jaron Lanier, DJ Spooky and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi in 21C Magazine