Bruce Sterling
Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry.Collection: Inquiry
Find a client and get a job.Collection: Jobs
Every passing year brings us more past futures.Collection: Past
Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin.Collection: 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.Collection: Used
But 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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Dubai
There's no victory-condition for being human.Collection: Victory
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.Collection: Bollywood
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?!?Collection: Reign
The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.Collection: Ruins
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.Collection: Children
(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 AbsoluteCollection: Men
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Distance
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.Collection: Morning
Unfortunately, computers are?stupid.Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.Collection: Stupid
The future isn't just unwritten, it's unsearched.Collection: Unwritten
Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.Collection: Mirrors
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.Collection: Latin
"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.Collection: Design
It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.Collection: Clouds
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.Collection: Silly
Maybe 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.Collection: Civilization
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- ???Collection: Clouds
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.Collection: Dream
Your attitude determines your altitude. Your ambitions are bigger than life Of course. They must be. They encompass it.Collection: Attitude
A 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 bombsCollection: Fall
Everybody 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.Collection: Want
David 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.Collection: Thinking
I know that the human condition will be radically changed through technical means. Much of this change will be painful, monstrous and horrible. Most mutations are disgusting failures, most experiments are failures. I accept this and I don't find it frightening.Collection: Mean
War 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.Collection: Peace
In a start-up society, huge sums can fall on innocent parties, almost by accident .Collection: Party
I 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.Collection: Fun
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?Collection: Form
Information wants to be free. Believe it.Collection: Believe