Bruce Sterling - Quotes

The 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.
Sterling, Bruce.

TOMORROW NOW is a long meditation of physically living through the coming years. It's all about human flesh, instead of cyber-centric.
Sterling, Bruce.

Once I got my head around this idea that 'the future' was bogus, I was able to mess around with a lot of invisible assumptions.
Sterling, Bruce.

My ideal Internet 25 years from now is one where some godforsaken little kid in Left Elbow, Kurdistan, can get a full-scale summa cum laude college-education just by pointing and clicking at stuff he is interested in.
Sterling, Bruce.

People are going to combine the computation thing and the genetic biological thing and going to start actually tinkering with people's thought processes in an industrial way. And if you thought LSD was a lot of fun, wait until this really works.
Sterling, Bruce.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.
Sterling, Bruce.

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

I 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.
Sterling, Bruce.

Political people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.
Sterling, Bruce.

The 20th century media scene is just in a gothic collapse, it’s what I call gothic high-tech, the stuff that was working its reason for being has been eaten out from under it.
Sterling, Bruce.

The analogue world of our parents is just shot full of holes, there is a lot of important stuff they were doing that's been dismediated, disrupted and subverted that we can't go back to.
Sterling, Bruce.

My question is, why the hell would anyone carry Sony cameras around the world? This thing is in a kind of archaic space.
Sterling, Bruce.

I really make an effort to get away from that type of binary thinking. It doesn't help you to understand what's going on. The best way to approach these phenomena is to ask how long they will live and how long they've been attached to the past.
Sterling, Bruce.

In order to understand what's happening and why it's happening you need to divorce yourself from that field and rather engage yourself.
Sterling, Bruce.

The real hay day of predictability is talking about something something obscure that becomes commonplace.
Sterling, Bruce.

It's just a weird level of abundant connectivity that we have ... digital was sort of the horseless carriage version of technological transition and now we are getting a lot of the traffic jams that could just not have existed under that previous regime.
Sterling, Bruce.

Writing non-fiction is about meeting the deadline, what's the word length where's the medium ... there's a certain romance I guess but it's just workday labor. Whereas, writing fiction has an element of possession. My work tends to be very chatty-driven, I am super interested in semantics, I try to keep up with how people describe things or how the web is shaping language, my book is very language-centric, I try to capture the way people talk in fiction.
Sterling, Bruce

Request to the media ! Pls verify news before printing that Arrest warrents issued for me in court ! This is absolutely false & malicious!
Sterling, Bruce. "Preity Zinta once again on the warpath for truth and justice." in: Wired. July 24, 2010.

I’m trying to imagine the political triangulation that’s got Katherine Albrecht angling Rupert Murdoch’s WALL STREET JOURNAL to harass Wal-Mart. There must be somebody who takes a struggle like that at face value, but I can’t imagine that it’s Katherine, Rupert or Wal-Mart.
Sterling, Bruce. "Spime Watch: CASPIAN versus Wal-Mart, again." in: Wired. July 24, 2010.

The vitality of Southern California arises from the resilient intuition that there is always a next time, the next re-boot, the next re-framing. In this smoldering, quakeracked landscape are sturdy elements of deep cultural continuity, dating to the first backlot shacks flung up for the hasty production of silent film. A place that bred and exported the shatteringly powerful institutions of talkies and television can always lose money, yet it rarely loses its allure and its ability to dazzle.
Sterling, Bruce. "SoCal DigiCult." in: Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Vol. 15, No. 1, p. 9-11, 2009.

It’s a world of meta-design, of design for design for design. Social software sites are built to balloon to the booming proportions of their millions of inhabitants. A massively multiplayer site such as Second Life is designed as a platform for design by other parties;so where is the auteur? Value is created by destabilizing previous ideas about what mattered. Because it’s about the chips; no, it’s about the software; no, content is king;no, it’s the search; no, it’s web; no, it’s the cloud. Among this gloomy host of nos there must be some who willingly say ‘yes’ and pushes that next paradigm to the point of crack-up, and beyond.
Sterling, Bruce. "SoCal DigiCult." in: Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Vol. 15, No. 1, p. 9-11, 2009.

You know what would be ideal? A science fiction novel that people literally had to read. Otherwise they’d die horribly. Maybe through being publicly torn to shreds by vast, invisible forces beyond their understanding.
Sterling, Bruce and Paul Raven. "Interview: Bruce Sterling on Caryatids, Viridian and the death of print." in: Futurismic. November 2, 2009.

The Internet of Things used to be pretty inconceivable. It’s also got a lot of the down-and-dirty stuff that we’ve learned lately about climate collapse.
Sterling, Bruce and Paul Raven. "Interview: Bruce Sterling on Caryatids, Viridian and the death of print." in: Futurismic. November 2, 2009.

Well, I’m not a designer. When I write fiction, I feel at least sort of okay about the result, or else I wouldn’t offer it for publication.
Sterling, Bruce and Paul Raven. "Interview: Bruce Sterling on Caryatids, Viridian and the death of print." in: Futurismic. November 2, 2009.

Well, I’m not a designer. When I write fiction, I feel at least sort of okay about the result, or else I wouldn’t offer it for publication.
Sterling, Bruce and Paul Raven. "Interview: Bruce Sterling on Caryatids, Viridian and the death of print." in: Futurismic. November 2, 2009.

Okay, there are two parts to this problem — the part about “genuine relevance,” and the stuff about print, cinema and other media issues. Never mind the science fiction — just imagine yourself writing for the New York Times, and realizing your publishing platform is hanging by a thread because it barely got bailed out by a Mexican billionaire. The media are in dire turmoil.
Sterling, Bruce and Paul Raven. "Interview: Bruce Sterling on Caryatids, Viridian and the death of print." in: Futurismic. November 2, 2009.

What worries me is other stuff, like the visible decline of weblogs as a medium. I’ve been tiresome about dead media, I obsess at much length about the isue of media and its fragility. but I’m wondering now if I ever guessed the half of it.
Sterling, Bruce and Paul Raven. "Interview: Bruce Sterling on Caryatids, Viridian and the death of print." in: Futurismic. November 2, 2009.

But if there’s no commercial science fiction, no bestsellers, no chainstores, no media tie-ins — no more place to throw my glowing pearls before those capitalist swine — well then, clearly the model for action is something like Arkham House. Yes, Arkham House, or maybe some Czech hippie ’89er samizdat underground scene. Counterculture goes to the trenches. Cold canned spaghetti with the Lovecraft cult. It’s what one does.
Sterling, Bruce and Paul Raven. "Interview: Bruce Sterling on Caryatids, Viridian and the death of print." in: Futurismic. November 2, 2009.

Because science means human progress! Yet fame and influence in science have always depended on “publication.” That means lots of “papers.” Also citation (writing “papers” that other scientists have to talk about in their “papers”). Well, “science papers” are dying in the exact same way that “newspapers” are dying. Furthermore, hardly any of this paper ritual helps the true core of science, which is “really good ideas.”
Sterling, Bruce. "Fiction: In the Future, Doing Science Is Like Blogging." in: Discover. July/August 2009.

However, when science fiction thinking opens itself to design thinking, larger problems appear. These have to do with speculative culture generally, the way that our society imagines itself through its forward-looking disciplines.
Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction." in: Interactions. Vol. 16, No. 3, May/June 2009.

What the user base genuinely wanted was immersive fantasies. They wanted warmly supportive subcultures in which they could safely abandon their cruelly limiting real-life roles, and play semi-permanent dress-up. Science fiction movies helped; science fiction television helped. Once massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) were invented, the harsh limits of the print infrastructure were demolished. Then the user-base exploded.
Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction." in: Interactions. Vol. 16, No. 3, May/June 2009.

Why is that? What happened? Why are we like this now? What next, for heaven’s sake? Can’t we do better?
Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction."in: Interactions. Vol. 16, No. 3, May/June 2009.

Even money, the almighty bottom line, the ultimate reality check for American society, has tripped over its own infrastructural blinders, and lost its ability to map value. The visionaries no longer know what to think-and, by no coincidence, the financiers can no longer place their bets.
Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction." in: Interactions. Vol. 16, No. 3, May/June 2009.

On occasion, sci-fi prognostications do become actual objects and services.
Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction." in: Interactions. Vol. 16, No. 3, May/June 2009.

What truly interests me here is the limits of the imaginable. Clearly, the pulp infrastructure limited what its artists were able to think about. They wore blinders that they could not see and therefore could not transcend.
Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction." in: Interactions. Vol. 16, No. 3, May/June 2009.

I scarcely know what to do about this. As Charles Eames said, design is a method of action. Literature is a method of meaning and feeling. Hearteningly, I do know how I feel about this situation. I even have some inkling of what it means.
Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction." in: Interactions. Vol. 16, No. 3, May/June 2009.

Rather than thinking outside the box-which was almost always a money box, quite frankly-we surely need a better understanding of boxes. Maybe some new, more general, creative project could map the limits of the imaginable within the contemporary technosocial milieu. Plug that imagination gap.
Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction." in: Interactions. Vol. 16, No. 3, May/June 2009.

I question whether the Net will change anyone's theological convictions, but it does empower diasporas rather drastically. Presumably this means that we will end up with a “flat world” with big fruitcake lumps of zealots in it. Mosques in the Arctic, Christian fundamentalists in western China, Omaha Buddhists, that sort of thing.
Sterling, Bruce. "Life, The Internet, and Everything." in: KEStudies. Vol. 2, 2008.

I think if these two supposedly potent groups sat down at a conference table and worked these IP issues out in all good will, they'd have a very steep climb just rebuilding the IP structures that have been methodically wrecked since the '80s.
Sterling, Bruce. "Life, The Internet, and Everything." in: KEStudies. Vol. 2, 2008.

This proposal is rather familiar to me from literary work in languages other than English. They don't have much market-clout, since the audience is small, so the culture-minister invents a coterie of nationalist literateurs and rewards them with prizes and tenure.
Sterling, Bruce. "Life, The Internet, and Everything." in: KEStudies. Vol. 2, 2008. The Emersonian Strain in American thought makes the individual the microcosm of society. Full of hackerly vim, our sturdy lad is all things to everyone, a tinkering geek as agile as a falling cat. But where will he keep all his hardware?
Sterling, Bruce. "Self-Reliance 2008 - Like your Leatherman? Love your iPhone? Still to come: The ultimate open-source ultragadget." in: The Atlantic monthly. November 2008.

The postmillennial version of a Leather man is the Apple iPhone. Like all digital technologies, the iPhone has yet to achieve the hard-grained, Spartan elegancies of the steely Leatherman.
Sterling, Bruce. "Self-Reliance 2008 - Like your Leatherman? Love your iPhone? Still to come: The ultimate open-source ultragadget." in: The Atlantic monthly. November 2008.

Here, the entire technological surround of Emerson vanishes into an inchoate cornu copia, an open-source ultra gadget that Thoreau might tote to his pond and promptly use to build a private civilization. From the meanest knickknacks in the Yankee peddler’s pack to, yes, an entire township.
Sterling, Bruce. "Self-Reliance 2008 - Like your Leatherman? Love your iPhone? Still to come: The ultimate open-source ultragadget." in: The Atlantic monthly. November 2008.

Still, there's something comical about my being the only geek in the Torino Cyberculture Zone whose deck is that flimsy and teensy.
Sterling, Bruce. "Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future - That's hyperas in linked and local as in location. It's a new kind of city in which you're never out of touch and never out of options." in: Wired. Vol. 15, No. 7, 2007.

Years before corporations used their skills and capital to weld the virtual world firmly to the actual world, "locative art" installations were already there. These were the first frontier portals between the Net and the planet's surface. Blogjects, mixed-reality games, mapping cities with teensy videocams strapped to pigeons, mobile haiku poetry for Japanese keitai... I don't claim to be an art critic, but you can click right over there for an extensive list of these fine efforts. There were zillions of them. Our rich digital-art heritage is of common benefit to all mankind!
Sterling, Bruce. "Dispatches from the Hyperlocal Future - That's hyperas in linked and local as in location. It's a new kind of city in which you're never out of touch and never out of options." in: Wired. Vol. 15, No. 7, 2007.

We're empowering people we're afraid of, and we cannot handle the consequences of the social change, some of which are always dark. There is no silver lining without its cloud. It's a Woodstock-Altamont transformation. It's like, hey, we're going to play free music for everybody, including these PCP-demented Hell's Angels with pool cues.
Sterling, Bruce and Mike Godwin (Interviewer). "Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future." in: Reason. January 2004.

What is different about the 21st century is the increasing intimacy of people with objects -- not in a sexual way, but in a bodily way. People have implants, they have gizmos, all these little barnacles in their pockets that are attached to themselves. To which they are completely emotionally dependent.
Sterling, Bruce and Mike Godwin (Interviewer). "Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future." in: Reason. January 2004.

There are offhand comments one makes, or little things that you do, that become catch phrases or stuff that people will stick as signature lines on the Internet. It's rarely the polished aphorism that you're sweating over.
Sterling, Bruce and Mike Godwin (Interviewer). "Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future." in: Reason. January 2004.

In the early days of cyberspace, we were going to escape the meat. Well, there is more meat on the Internet than you can imagine. There are acres and acres of people just pointing cameras at their bodies.
Sterling, Bruce and Mike Godwin (Interviewer). "Cybergreen: Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future." in: Reason. January 2004.

These are classic hard times. Orders down, investment down, construction down, and the market flat on its back. Money is tight. Unemployment, sky-high. Nothing that would be a big surprise to the Old Economy when it got in a pinch. The novelty is that our pundits have brand-new 21st-century explanations for how bad off we are.
Sterling, Bruce. "Hard Times: A Letter from 2035 You had the Depression, irrational exuberance, and Okies. It's just the same in 2035, except now the Okies have cell phones." in: Fortune. 141, No. 5, 2000.

Funny thing about economic collapse: Nobody ever predicts one quite properly, but the instant the crash stops echoing, there are hundreds of guys explaining to us why it was inevitable.
Sterling, Bruce. "Hard Times: A Letter from 2035 You had the Depression, irrational exuberance, and Okies. It's just the same in 2035, except now the Okies have cell phones." in: Fortune. 141, No. 5, 2000.

As soon as I finish this little essay for you, I'm gonna climb out of my ergonomic workstation, with its carpal-tunnel-proof everything, and I'll go out and buy something I don't really need. (That's how we celebrate.)
Sterling, Bruce. "Hard Times: A Letter from 2035 You had the Depression, irrational exuberance, and Okies. It's just the same in 2035, except now the Okies have cell phones." in: Fortune. 141, No. 5, 2000.

For insiders, the world of computer hacking is a lot like Mexico. There's no middle class. There's a million little kids screwing around with their modems, trying to snitch long-distance phone-codes, trying to swipe pirated software -- the "kodez kidz" and "warez doodz." They're peons, "rodents." Then there's a few earnest wannabes, up-and-comers, pupils. Not many.
Sterling, Bruce. "Conference Report." in: CyberView (SummerCon). 1991 hacker convention.

Why do I say blow a seam? Because at this very moment, ladies and gentlemen, today, there is a grand jury meeting in Silicon Valley, under the auspices of two US federal attorneys and the US Customs Service. That grand jury is mulling over possible illegality, possible indictments, possible heaven-knows-what, relating to supposed export-law violations concerning this powerful cryptography technology.
Sterling, Bruce. "Conference Report." in: CyberView (SummerCon). 1991 hacker convention.