Bruce Sterling Quotes

Las Vegas is a major family destination. Nevada casinos have become American family values now. It's considered just fine to go into one of these windowless scary gambling-malls, drink yourself silly, lose your ass at roulette, and then go ogle showgirls with breast implants. Republicans do this now. Working-class folks do it in polyester stretch pants. It's normal.

Cloud computing seems to be following this evolutionary path: A - Internet backbone. B - Information Superhighway. C - The Net. D - The Web. E - The Cloud. F - "Ubiquity" G- ???

The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.

(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.

My idea of an amusement park story is getting adventurers to go tour environmental disaster areas. After all, if the entire Great Barrier Reef gets killed, which seems like an extremely lively possibility, what are you going to do with all that rotting limestone?

The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable.

Okay, are you really 'experimenting'? How do you know if you're really experimenting? You're working on it methodically and you're publishing the results! It's not an experiment if you don't publish the results in some verifiable and falsifiable form, okay?

A set of Bollywood actresses are coming through Dallas soon in a live tour; I'd pay a lot to see them, but alas, I'm fully booked elsewhere.

You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be the geek they will never forget. Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them, they put you here. You should realize what society has made of you and take full revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly thoroughly weird and don’t do it half way, put every ounce of your horse power into it. Have the artistic courage to realize your significance in culture.

Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin.

My dream appliance circa 2050 has one big dial on it, and when I twist it to the right, my IQ goes up to 450.

Find a client and get a job.

Everybody has a different Internet.

Every passing year brings us more past futures.

The level of ignorance is declining, and the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.

Humans are very aggressive and scrappy, and go to war at the drop of a hat. However, a standard land war is no longer going to work as it is no longer technically possible.

I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.

University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls.

Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that's going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don't have many illusions about this, but I'm not cynical about it.

Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?

A security cam is one small part of a much larger universe of cams. The much larger effect, socially, politically and economically, is going to come from a much larger trend.

We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that "9/11"? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we'd give that huge event a different name.

You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.

You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.

Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry.

I wouldn't describe that "position" as "parasitic." I'd describe that experience as "edifying." I don't merely write from a critical intellectual distance. I actually live around here.