Who Are We Now? died and came back to life several times. In its earliest incarnation, it was a side project based on one of the lectures I gave for a course at the University of Washington, Intelligent Machinery, Identity, and Ethics. My first thanks go to Adrienne Fairhall and Benjamin Bratton, for encouraging me to put that course together as a way to organize my thoughts into something that could turn into a book. Thanks also to my students, whose questions and after-class discussion often challenged and refined my thinking.

“Just record and transcribe the lectures, then edit them,” said Benjamin. I complained that there was too much material. “Then find a self-contained piece and start with that,” he advised. It worked, but it wasn’t as easy as he made it sound!

The (more or less) self-contained piece in question, focusing on the “identity” element of the course, originally consisted of a slideshow of plots based on my first Mechanical Turk surveys, each revealing something non-obvious and accompanied by a caption one or two sentences long. In my quest to contextualize these findings, stories about evolutionary biologists, sexologists, criminologists, witches and wizards, and eco-prophets began entering the mix. It seemed, for a while, that Who Are We Now? was destined to become a comic book, something like xkcd meets the OkCupid data blog. ¹ (That might still happen one day.) Lucy Bellwood drew some beautiful comix treatments, as well as providing helpful editorial input.

As more surveys and more background material accumulated, and as the stakes of evolving human identity came into focus and the text lengthened, it became clear that this needed to become a “real” book. Warm thanks to Lesley Hazleton for making that abundantly clear one overcast afternoon on the deck of her houseboat. I began another rewrite and shopped the manuscript around, but had trouble finding a traditional publisher who both believed in the idea and was willing to include all of the graphics, let alone invest in the design that would be needed to do justice to the visual material. Never mind putting it all on the web for free.

The solution turned out to be near at hand: the crew I had worked with to publish my novella, Ubi Sunt, were game to reunite. Profound thanks to JC Gabel of Hat & Beard Press, for his unhesitating boldness in taking this unconventional project on, and to multitalented design geniuses James Goggin, Marie Otsuka, and Minkyoung Kim, who dove into ambitious parallel treatments of Who Are We Now? as both an interactive web book and a print book. Johan Michalove, my polymathic Intelligent Machinery TA, undertook workflow engineering, fact checking, reference wrangling, captioning, editing, image rights securing, and when needed, eyebrow-raising, with timely assistance from David Michalove. The maps rock because we were fortunate to enlist cartographer extraordinaire Scott Reinhard to make them. Laurie Aguera-Arcas was an exacting copy editor, applying her red pen to the manuscript in a hundred or so places per chapter (thank you, Mom). Sybil Perez at Hat & Beard was our final proofreader. My deepest gratitude to this globe-spanning dream team, who dedicated a painstaking year to turning Who Are We Now? from an unruly collection of text, code, and pixels into a beautiful finished whole.

Some of the material in Chapters 3 and 14 first appeared in essays I co-authored with Margaret Mitchell and Alex Todorov; my warm thanks to them for that intellectual partnership.

Eleanor Drage, Geoff Keeling, Adrienne Fairhall, Justin Smith-Ruiu, Sonia Katyal, and Emily French provided close readings and major editorial input into large sections of the text. This would have been a different and lesser book without them. My heartfelt thanks also to: Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Dylan Baker, Genevieve Bell, Rebecca Brown, Kristen Carney, Ted Chiang, Patricia Churchland, Kate Devlin, Ellen Forney, Nancy Hartunian, Katie Herzog, Tim Keck, Rem Koolhaas, Danielle Krettek, Alison Lentz, Kerry Mackereth, Andrew McAfee, Phoenix Meadowlark, K Allado-McDowell, Audrey Muratet, Peter Norvig, Tim O’Reilly, Irene Pepperberg, Dan Savage, Oliver Siy, Troy Conrad Therrien, Chai Vasarhelyi, Judy Wajcman, Lawrence Weschler, and Oberon Zell-Ravenheart. As with any project of this size, the roster of friends and colleagues whose intellectual input and encouragement mattered over the years is long, and I’m sure my recollection is incomplete—so apologies to anyone I’ve missed. And of course, any errors and all opinions expressed are strictly my own.