The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.
Bruce SterlingIf politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military.
Bruce SterlingIt's going to be really interesting to see what the heroin market does in the next two years or so. One thing you can be pretty sure of. The Afghan peasants who grow poppies won't get rich. The money will end up in places like Dubai.
Bruce SterlingAnything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. THAT is cyberpunk.
Bruce SterlingPolitical people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.
Bruce SterlingMaybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization.
Bruce SterlingPrivacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone's illiterate, but you wouldn't really call that privacy. That's ignorance.
Bruce SterlingA dagger is the noble weapon of Brutus. Everyone understands that tyrants fall to daggers. A bomb is a sordid modern device with many complex working parts. Only engineers understand bombs
Bruce SterlingBut even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century, and we've had enough of them.
Bruce SterlingIf poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
Bruce SterlingScience fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.
Bruce SterlingWhen you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.
Bruce SterlingYour attitude determines your altitude. Your ambitions are bigger than life Of course. They must be. They encompass it.
Bruce SterlingI used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.
Bruce SterlingCompetence doesn't seem like a big deal until you are forced to realize that your own government has none.
Bruce SterlingWar as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize "world peace" even when we get it.
Bruce Sterling"Story-tellers" should listen seriously to design and architecture without getting all literary and imperial about that. Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry.
Bruce SterlingThe future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror.
Bruce SterlingEverybody wants to disown neocon strategy, including the neocons, because that strategy never worked. Still, it was, in point of fact, a strategy. Nobody else has one.
Bruce SterlingIn a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity?
Bruce SterlingBut from another, deeper perspective: we shouldn't involve outselves in lines of development where the ultimate victory condition is emulating dead people. There's no appeal in that. It's bad for us. That kind of inherent mournfulness is just not a good way to be human.
Bruce SterlingI do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.
Bruce SterlingWorrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it's on fire.
Bruce SterlingEvery passing year brings us more past futures. Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin. It's counterproductive to blither on about "the" future. It's always somebody's future, and we're not who we used to be.
Bruce SterlingI think our grandparents were Victor Frankenstein. I basically am the kind of deeply unnatural creature that Mrs Shelley instinctively dreaded. I not only eat her sacred cows but I eat them with ketchup. While I take her point, I think that transgressive monstrosity and tampering with the life force are both a lot more fun than she suspected.
Bruce SterlingPeople in the Pentagon had colleagues killed and maimed by bin Laden. They're trying to find bin Laden and kill him and his cult. Naturally they consider that a legitimate thing to do, but they're having mixed success at the job.
Bruce SterlingThe Bollywood distribution system is so corrupt that they have trouble making money off movies. So they sell shoes that an actress stepped in. If they turned up the amps some, maybe they could sell the actresses.
Bruce SterlingArchitects thrive after massive urban disasters. The abject collapse of East Berlin gave us the only city in Europe with a mighty host of Postmodern skyscrapers.
Bruce SterlingIt's counterproductive to blither on about "the" future. It's always somebody's future, and we're not who we used to be.
Bruce SterlingI haven't had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.
Bruce SterlingOne of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing.
Bruce SterlingIf bin Laden is in fact publicly killed, then the US military will find itself standing around with its hands in its pockets, wondering what's supposed to come next.
Bruce SterlingWe might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys.
Bruce SterlingDon't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.
Bruce SterlingWell, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.
Bruce SterlingDavid Brin is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions.
Bruce SterlingI've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of privacy threat...One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies...that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire.
Bruce SterlingThe future is a process, not a destination. Richard Stallman is a guy my age. I sympathize with Richard rather more than I sympathize with Richard's open-source ideas, but the guy's a mortal human being and so is his social movement. Open-source is a means of production.
Bruce Sterling