Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes

by Roy Christopher, Paul Miller, John Brockman

Follow for Interviews with Friends and Heroes is an anthology of forty-three interviews with minds of all kinds. Disinformation named it "among the most important books published in 2007," and Erik Davis called it "a crisp and substantial remix of the major memes of the last decade or so."

Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Shepard Fairey, Steven Johnson, Geert Lovink, Brenda Laurel, and many, many more -- and interviews by John Brockman, Erik Davis, DJ Spooky, and Mark Dery, among others.

Genres: Nonfiction

392 pages, Nook

First published February 1, 2007

About the author

I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan. I’m an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. I have since written about music, media, and culture for everything from magazines to blogs and journals to books. I hold a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. As a child, I solved the Rubik’s Cube competitively.

[from http://roychristopher.com]

Reviews

[Ken Southerland · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic aggregate of interviews collected from Roy Christopher's own web site frontwheeldrive.com (now simply roychristopher.com). We don't just hear from scientists, writers, musicians, artists, technologists, and culture watchdogs, but rather people who span multiple classifications. That's what makes these interviewees really fascinating.

If you don't walk away from this book with the desire to check out the work of at least a dozen people represented in this compilation, you simply have no pulse. The interviews are designed to give you a brief overview of the person's persona, body of work, and desires and therefore they let you decide if you want more or not. As such, they are typically 3 to 4 pages in length and thus never get bogged down in detail. You want detail, go check out their work!

[Bunny & Mr. K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a mind expanding book and a well structured path through all the pieces that make our world as a whole. I’ll never be finished with this. Every interview leads to something else. Being a song to be heard. A book to be read. A video to watch. I enjoyed the ride and I’m glad that it will never be over.

[Elevate Difference · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot to love about Follow for Now, a collection of forty-three selected Q & A’s from the archives of frontwheeldrive.com. Here’s one: Most of the interviews are well under 2000 words, which keeps the pages turning at a quick clip. And here’s another: In the first half of the book, the well-known and obscure interviewees deliver lucid, fascinating answers (and pose further questions) about the state of technology, biology, consumer psychology, and all the intersections among them.

The title comes from the lyrics of a Public Enemy song, which is the equivalent of a Jesus fish drawn in the sand for white guys raised in the 1980s. So all of you Wired subscribers who jam Handsome Boy Modeling School and know what “Obey Giant” means, you are among friends.

However, as much as I like guys who like old school hip-hop, Follow for Now has some issues. First of all, the terribly pretentious and off-putting front matter ought to be addressed, lest an unsuspecting reader open up the book and get so icked out by the preface that they toss it aside in horror—which would be a shame.

Lest you think I exaggerate, behold the opening line of the preface: “This book is decidedly eclectic.” I know. It might as well read: “Pretentious self-important douchiness abounds in many forms.”

The collection is edited, and most of the interviews are conducted, by frontwheeldrive’s Roy Christopher. I am going to harp on Christopher briefly now, for his James Lipton-esque interview style, and his relentless coffee house pickup line parlance. The latter is well illustrated with this line, from an introductory chapter: “To truly understand a concept or argument, one must view the idea from all angles and superimpose the images to construct a complete understanding.” I know. But it does get good, I promise.

Highlights of the collection include writers Douglas Rushkoff and Steven Johnson, and an extended chat with famed “psychonaut” Terrence McKenna. Talking with McKenna, the interviewer cannot accept that he is without ego, as he claims to be since a particularly drawn out psychedelic experience. Of course, there is so much fevered ego on display up to this point that a reader will see much clearer than the interviewer can, that McKenna is of an altogether different species. To his credit, McKenna's interviewer takes him to task for pandering to his new age devotees, and demands an explanation for McKenna's apocalyptic theory, Timewave Zero, which has the end of the world scheduled for December 21, 2012.

The back half of the Follow for Now, with chapters on literature, music, and culture (covering science fiction, obscure hip-hop, and skateboarding respectively) is not particularly accessible to those who don't share the taste. They're probably interesting to one already engaged with the work under consideration, but they lack the broad appeal of the earlier chapters.

At times, Follow for Now is also a pointed historical document. It’s a snapshot from a strange and forgotten (for now) era, when there was no OMG or LOL, wireless was new, and Americans couldn't text out of network.

Review by Ann Raber

[Ninakix · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is mostly a collection of interviews with various people the author finds inspiring. I thought it was mostly a mixed bag. Particularly compared with other similar books, these interviews weren't as adept at allowing one to understand the interviewees' work without prior knowledge, nor were they as pointed towards finding out why the interviewees were so fascinated by what they worked on. While I skipped over large portions of the book, there was a diverse range of topics and some of the interviews were truly fascinating.

[Ben]

lots of fascinating (and bite-sized) interviews with the technorati class. since many of these come from the turn of the century, the collection is becoming more and more a part of the historical record rather than prognostications about the future.