Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterlingis an American science fiction author known for his novels and work on the Mirrorshades anthology. This work helped to define the cyberpunk genre...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth14 April 1954
CountryUnited States of America
latin dark past
Every 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.
cutting data starting-over
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.
data civilization skulls
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.
different internet free-speech
Everybody has a different Internet.
mean ideas guy
The 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.
technological-development clouds silver
It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.
mirrors cyberspace
Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.
morning philosophical loss
As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute.The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up.These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.
The future is a process, not a destination.
today tomorrow compost
Tomorrow composts today.
victory being-human humans
There's no victory-condition for being human.
dubai years two
It'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.
It's counterproductive to blither on about "the" future. It's always somebody's future, and we're not who we used to be.
organization fire worry
I'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.