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 ☀
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 ☀
Brockman’s cadre are a pretty select group — scientists, hippie visionaries and culture gurus — but that’s an interesting set of testaments. None of them say that the Internet made them more prosperous, that it helped them to settle down, that they feel better about their future thanks to the Internet. Nobody says that the Internet gave them a sense of safe, fatherly, middle-class things to do with a three year old. It’s great for thinking about tons of weird crap, and it’s rather bad for business and governance, the Internet. And for consumerism? Nobody pays on the Internet. They hate paying. They might mess with e-commerce for convenience sake, but give them their head and they undercut, they conspire, they disintermediate, they eBay and they Craigslist, they copy, they pirate, they cut and paste. Those are not consumer values. Real consumers have brand loyalty. They’re proud to pay because it shows how far they’ve come from poverty, from precarity. They want the car with fins. They specifically want the fins. Internet people want to swap the behind-the-scenes story about the fins, which is by no means the same impulse. Bruce Sterling ☀
So, let’s say you fully mimic your testicle. Scan it with the same techniques as the brain scan. There it is: testicle on a chip, with an operating system, thank you Microsoft Windows XXXVII. Are you gonna have children with that scan? Is that, in any formal or pragmatic sense, really a testicle? It’s your model of a testicle, made through a certain device and encoded in certain ways. Would you expect it to behave exactly like a testicle? If you kick it does it howl, if you cut it does it bleed? Is it going to go through puberty and viropause, developing in the way that testicles actually develop? No. It’s a medical model of a testicle, so to claim that it’s actually “your testicle” is a category error. Bruce Sterling ☀
…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 ☀
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 ☀
Okay, you’ve treated your future as an “unpredictable lurching thing…” and now you’re all morose about that… You and your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of “disruptive innovation,” “disintermediation,” “offshoring,” “small pieces loosely joined,” “de-monetization,” “plug and play,” “the network as a platform”? Of course you’ve heard of all that crap, because you’ve been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold bars and working oil wells don’t have any stability now! Much less guys like you, who move their fingers up and down on keyboards for a living. Bruce Sterling (via feastingonroadkill, vruz) ☀
The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier. Bruce Sterling ☀
I’ve never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I’m bored with the deceit. I’m tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I’m disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I’m up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch. Bruce Sterling ☀
So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly blows one’s brains out for no sane reason. Bruce Sterling ☀
I find myself impressed that young people, my students, the Internet natives, they don’t seem aware how different the digital commons is from previous ways of organization. Google, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Facebook even, they simply think that’s how the real world works. It’s like a HERE COMES EVERYBODY where they’re already here. The commons offers ways out of the glum solipsist autarchy of hippie homesteads and survivalist city-states. If you’re gonna “do it yourself” with a wireless Linux netbook, you’re not doing it Robinson Crusoe style. You’ve got the collective labor of a couple million guys there under your arm. This is not a “virtual community” WELL-style. It’s more like a huge, anonymous public infrastructure of aqueducts. But if you’re getting clean free water, why buy that bottled stuff they marketeers flew in Fiji? This peer-production stuff used to look very hobbyist and geekish and rickety. It was hotglue and strapping-tape. It’s still not “mainstreaming,” it will likely never have commercial gloss. Still, it’s acquiring some kind of commons-gloss. It looks better, it works better, it performs with more functionality in wider areas of life. It has escaped its geek ghetto. Normal people no longer apologize to their bosses for using open-source components, or for finding things out on the “unreliable” Internet. Bruce Sterling ☀
Living on the entire planet at once is no longer a major challenge. It’s got its practical drawbacks, but I’m much more perturbed about contemporary indignities such as airport terrorspaces, ATM surchanges and the open banditry of cellphone roaming. This is what’s troublesome. The rest of it, I’m rather at ease about. Unless I’m physically restrained by some bureaucracy, I don’t think I’m going to stop this glocally nomadic life. I live on the Earth. The Earth is a planet. This fact is okay. I am living in truth. Bruce Sterling ☀
The best way to understand the future is to study the past because the future is history that hasn’t happened yet. Your past involved a dark and painful prophecy from 35 years ago: towel designers. And it started 35 years go. Atari was the fastest growing company in American history so Warner bought them. And the geeks there went to confront their new boss after Nolan Bushnell got kicked out and went to sell pizza with robots. Bruce Sterling ☀
A GNT creation ©2007–2010
