AZspot
Thursday 13 January 2011
I happen to be quite the Cibelle Cavalli devotee, and it’s not because of her music (although her music is pretty good, if you like exotic Brazilian electronica with diva vocals). Pop stars are always interesting to me, while musicians interest me only on occasion. Musicians create works of music. Popstars create wannabes. Musicians can be very private people, while popstars are public media figures who inspire some social emulation.
Bruce Sterling ☀
Wednesday 12 January 2011
Then there’s the free-software guys. They’ve got the political mindshare of anarchists or gypsies, but they’ve always been around. They’re not going away, and it may be that time is on their side.
Bruce Sterling ☀
Monday 10 January 2011
As blogging has grown older and the bandwidth has increased, more and more blogs are non-textual, ever less writerly. In theory, my blog could become a “vlog” where I don’t type one word, but just stare into the laptop camera and deliver the parenthetical wisecracks as literal offhand remarks. It could be a podcast, or a Tumblr. With some work I could probably shoehorn my blog into my FlickR set.
Bruce Sterling ☀
Tuesday 4 January 2011
There was a halcyon period there where people seemed lost in the info overload and the search machines were full of limpid lucidity. But we may be approaching a period where the machines will feed you an infinite amount of cunningly-engineered gibberish and you have to climb to the mountaintop and talk to some human greybeard in order to have any idea what’s going on.
Bruce Sterling ☀
Wednesday 8 September 2010
Years ago, I was at CNN in Atlanta with Bruce Sterling, and he bought a pair of souvenir shot glasses. He said he was going to put them on top of his television set in his living room, so he and his wife could have a drink the next time there was a “CNN moment.” And when I asked him what a CNN moment was, he said it’s one of those moments when something of enormity has occurred and suddenly the future is right up against your face. You don’t have the lag you usually get to enjoy between some sense of a knowable present and what’s coming in the very next minute. And it seems like 9/11 jammed us into a permanent CNN moment.
William Gibson ☀
Friday 5 February 2010
If we’re talking strictly imaginary technology, it’s hard to beat the Hindu pantheon churning the entire universe from a sea of milk by using a giant cobra.
Bruce Sterling ☀
Wednesday 13 January 2010
The moguls are not helping matters. They might as well be an alien species. The elite are supposed to pioneer trickle-down middle-class goods. That’s not working. Today’s ultra-wealthy are into oddities private space flight, private jets, superyachts, pet Senators, and collecting old media. How many middle-class people are going to ever own a pet Senator? The ultra-wealthy are into the immaterial: not gold ingots, not washing machines, but positions as board of directors, stock options, political sway.
Bruce Sterling ☀
Wednesday 6 January 2010
…a magazine on the web isn’t a magazine on the web. It’s a piece of the web that is shaped like a magazine, and tries to maintain magazine-like customs, functions and expectations. And, like, why. Why do that? It sort of worked when the Web was a series of static non-refreshing web pages, but now it’s about as likely as trying to cram a glossy mag onto the WELL. It’s not that print’s a medium, and the web’s a medium, and you get to migrate between media. The Web is a metamedium that turns everything it grips into network-culture.
Bruce Sterling ☀
Monday 4 January 2010
An Internet year is like seven Earth years, so the Internet looks 210 years old in 2010. It’s forgotten how to be a solution to analog problems, if it ever was any such thing. As it’s socializing, it’s becoming less a techie platform and more a human institution, and a particularly frail, senile, piratical, treacherous weird one.
Bruce Sterling ☀
Saturday 5 January 2008
Peak oil” societies do not collapse like houses of cards. Nazi Germany was a peak oil society — the Allies bombed the living daylights out of their pipelines and refineries and the Nazis went on fighting like furies. The Soviet Union was a peak-oil society: they were making ethanol out of wood while physically re-locating the entire industrial base east of the Urals. Plus the Soviets were being bombed, invaded, starved, massively drafted, while all their brightest lights were in gulags, and they came out of that condition as a superpower. Not in a “long emergency,” as a superpower. Actually Communism pretty much *was* a long emergency — when I read Kunstler’s predictions, and I do read them, I’m always amazed how accurately he describes daily life in the Warsaw Pact 30 years ago.
Bruce Sterling ☀
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