[3] Cascio was Technology Manager at Global Business Network[4] and Director of Impacts Analysis for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

[7] He has written articles for various publications on a variety of subjects, including the future of human evolution,[8][9] education in the information age,[9] and emergent technologies.

[17] The second volume, Toxic Memes, concentrates on the battle for public opinion, and the issues that might arise from a hypothetical new science of memetics: the analysis, engineering, and manipulation of ideas.

[19] In 2006, when the concept of a carbon footprint was only just becoming an environmental talking point, Cascio decided to provide an illustrative example using a popular everyday item: the cheeseburger.

Interpreting the result another way, Cascio estimated the annual emissions from cheeseburger production and distribution in the United States was comparable to that of all SUVs being driven on American roads at the time.

[22] In 2008 Cascio collaborated with Jane McGonigal as scenario designer and administrator for Superstruct; a large scale forecasting game at the Institute for the Future that invited players to use social media to describe how they would respond to five hypothetical but plausible threats to Humanity in the year 2019.

In 2008–09, Cascio collaborated with the Australian Broadcasting Commission as a writer and consultant to produce Bluebird AR,[27] an interactive multimedia drama that encouraged viewers to participate, and think about issues in geoengineering.

Carr suggested that the ready access to knowledge provided by internet search engines was affecting people's cognition skills; encouraging them to 'skim' information at the expense of critical thinking and focused research.

[29] Responding in the same publication a year later, Cascio argued that human cognition has always evolved to meet environmental challenges, and that those posed by the internet are no different: the 'skimming' referred to by Carr was a form of attention deficit caused by the immaturity of filter algorithms.

[8] John Naughton noted, in From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, that many agreed Carr had hit on an important subject, but that his conclusions were not widely supported.