In your novel "Distraction," you wrote about a maliciously programmed spam bot driving unstable people to commit crimes. Is that a prediction? That's just a cool notion. That's just science fiction. It's a cool thing. It's interesting to think about. I never saw it actually done. It actually would be pretty destabilizing. But one of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing. My hero keeps coming up with these elaborately justified schemes. He's delusional. He does redouble his efforts when he loses sight of his aims.

But he never really solves the problems. Political people don't solve stuff--not really. Political people are like guys in pop music. Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.