(((You know what the *worst* part is? This huge heap of handwaving blue-sky prophecy isn't the half of it. This is just prophecy of mine from speeches and articles that somehow got uploaded into their entirety onto the
Internet, and attracted enough attention for Google to notice.
And look how it just goes on and on and ON.)))
(((And was I *accurate* in all these prognostications? Well, sure, especially in the whizbang rhetorical stuff which sounds too vague to be wrong!)))
http://www.elon.edu/predictions/PredictionsSearch.aspx?q=Bruce+Sterling&SearchButton=Search
Results 1 - 10 of 71: (((Seventy-one! Oh lordy....)))
Good Cop, Bad Hacker: Bruce Sterling has a 'Frank Chat' with Some Cops (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
Computers will probably help people manage better in those countries where people can manage. In countries that are falling apart, overcrowded countries with degraded environments and deep social problems, computers might well make things fall apart even faster.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
Military virtual reality is not a toy or a joke. There is a lot of vaporware in "virtual reality," but this technology definitely will help people kill each other. Virtual reality happens to be very fashionable at the moment, with some ritzy pop-cultural overtones, but that is accidental.
Welcome to Cyberspace (1995)
Sterling, Bruce
When I look at the Internet, I see something astounding and delightful. It's as if some grim fallout shelter had burst open and a full-scale Mardi Gras parade had come out. I take such enormous pleasure in this that it's hard to remain properly skeptical.
Hack to the Future (1991)
Sterling, Bruce
They are very afraid of computer hackers, but I think mostly they are afraid of computers ... Computers are a challenge and a threat, and they're changing our society in ways that we can't control and don't understand. They're not to be trusted.
Good Cop, Bad Hacker: Bruce Sterling has a 'Frank Chat' with Some Cops (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
There are some people who don't want our culture to change, or they want to change it even faster in a direction that they've got their own ideas about. When police get involved in a cultural struggle, it's always highly politicized. The chances of it ending well are not good.
Good Cop, Bad Hacker: Bruce Sterling has a 'Frank Chat' with Some Cops (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
Countries that have offshore money laundries are gonna have offshore data laundries. Countries that now have lousy oppressive governments and smart, determined terrorist revolutionaries are gonna have lousy oppressive governments and smart determined terrorist revolutionaries with computers. Not too long after that, they're going to have tyrannical revolutionary governments run by zealots with computers; then we're likely to see just how close to Big Brother a government can really get. Dealing with these people is going to be a big problem for us.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
Can governments really exercise national military power - kick ass, kill people - merely by using some big amps and some color monitors and some keyboards, and a bunch of other namby-pamby sci-fi "holodeck" stuff? The answer is yes. Yes, this technology is lethal. Yes, it is a real strategic asset.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
Whether or not VR becomes a major new medium of commercial entertainment, or some vital new mode of artistic expression, it still will be of enormous use to the military. Thriving civilian VR will probably make military VR expand even faster; giving the virtual battlefield better and glossier set designs.
Cyberpunk: Terminal Chic - Technology is Moving Out of Computers and into the Culture (1992)
Sterling, Bruce
"Cyberpunk" will be written somewhere on my tombstone. There's nothing I can do about it. But I can't wait for the day it goes from being popular culture to being high culture. Because I've got my tux ready for my Nobel Prize ceremony. (((Hey, come on, Orhan Pamuk writes slipstream fantasy novels... Really!)))
High Anxiety for Hitchhikers on the Infobahn: Just as Millions Outside the Groves of Academe Discover the Joys of Essentially Free Global Communications on the Internet, it's All Changing (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
You want an example of a communication system that doesn't charge for transport? The English language. Think of the Internet as a language rather than a machine, and most of your questions [about charging people to use it] become irrelevant. I think the Internet is tougher than you give it credit for. From now on, the struggle will not be over mechanical control of the means of information, but over spin-control of the zeitgeist.
Results 11 - 20 of 71:
Dropping Anchor in Cyberspace (1995)
Sterling, Bruce
I think the best paradigm for the Internet is to forget that its a technology and pretend that it's a language ... [The] Internet behaves more like the English language than like a technology ... I can scarcely believe what I'm seeing nowadays. There's something primally exhilarating about being in a bus without brakes.
Dropping Anchor in Cyberspace (1995)
Sterling, Bruce
There are massive have/have not discrepancies in the use of language per se. I believe that a similar dynamic applies to so-called computer literacy. Giving everbody a free computer and modem wouldn't change this basal reality very much.
Dropping Anchor in Cyberspace (1995)
Sterling, Bruce
Current trends in communications are leading toward a head-on collision between global networking and national governmental authority. At the moment a "twilight of sovereignty" scenario looks plausible and the situation definitely does not favor governments. Given current political instability worldwide, it's going to be a lot easier to make governments look like computer networks than it is to make the computer revolution the handmaiden of traditional governments. I make no judgment as to whether this is good or bad. After the revolution things will be different - not better, just different.
Good Cop, Bad Hacker: Bruce Sterling has a 'Frank Chat' with Some Cops (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
Computers don't make any ... old free-expression problems go away; on the contrary, they intensify them, and they introduce a bunch of new problems ... They're out there. They're out there now. In the future, they're only going to get worse. And there's going to be a bunch of new problems that nobody's even imagined.
Good Cop, Bad Hacker: Bruce Sterling has a 'Frank Chat' with Some Cops (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
Bad things are naturally going to happen here first, because we're the people who are inventing almost all the possibilities. But I also feel that it's not very likely that bad things will reach that extremity of awfulness here. It's quite possible that American computer police will make some awful mistakes, but I can almost guarantee that other people's police will make worse mistakes by an order of magnitude.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
A wired Armed Forces will be composed entirely of veterans - highly trained veterans of military cyberspace. An army of high-tech masters who may never have fired a real shot in real anger, but have nevertheless rampaged across entire virtual continents, crushing all resistance with fluid teamwork and utterly focused, karate-like strikes. This is the concept of virtual reality as a strategic asset. It's the reasoning behind SIMNET, the "Mother of All Computer Games." It's modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
In the future - soon, very soon - the United States military will know the entire planet just like the back of its hand. It will know other countries better than those countries know themselves.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
"Simulate before you build." They want to make that a basic military principle. Not just simulated weapons. Entire simulated defense plants. Factories that exist only in digital form, designed and prepared to build weapons that don't even exist yet either, and have never existed, and may become obsolete and be replaced by better ones, before a nail is ever hammered. Nevertheless, these nonexistent weapons will have entire battalions of real people who are expert in their use, people who helped design them and improve them hands-on, in the fields of virtual war.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
The simulation cybercolonels will own everything, the whole untidy, hopelessly bureaucratic, crying-for-improvement mess. No military object will see physical existence until it is proven, under their own institutional aegis, on the battlefields of cyberspace. They'll be able to shove the ungainly Cold War camel through the cold glass eye of the cyberspace needle. And God only knows what kind of sleek, morphing beast will emerge from the other side.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
The whole massive, lethal superpower infrastructure comes unfolding out of 21st-century cyberspace like some impossible fluid origami trick. The Reserve guys from the bowling leagues suddenly reveal themselves to be digitally assisted Top Gun veterans from a hundred weekend cyberspace campaigns. And they go to some godforsaken place that doesn't possess Virtual Reality As A Strategic Asset, and they bracket that army in their rangefinder screens, and then they cut it off, and then they kill it. Blood and burning flesh splashes the far side of the glass. But it can't get through the screen.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
If military virtuality really works, everyone's gonna want it. Now imagine two armies, two strategically assisted, cyberspace-trained, post-industrial, panoptic ninja armies, going head-to-head. What on earth would that look like? A "conventional" war, a "non-nuclear" war, but a true War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, analyzed by nanoseconds to the last square micron. Who would survive? And what would be left of them?
Dropping Anchor in Cyberspace (1995)
Sterling, Bruce
Physically, you are very much here today and gone tomorrow, while cyberspace has become the anchor of your career and the linchpin of your reality. In 15 years, that will be a very common sentiment, so common that it will no longer seem odd or even remarkable.
Short History of the Internet (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
As the '90s proceed, finding a link to the Internet will become much cheaper and easier. Its ease of use will also improve, which is fine news, for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for advancements in user-friendliness. Learning the Internet now, or at least learning about it, is wise. By the turn of the century, "network literacy," like "computer literacy" before it, will be forcing itself into the very texture of your life.
Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
There's a revolution in global telephony coming that will have such brutal, industry-crushing speed and power that it will make even the computer industry blanch. Analog is dying everywhere. Everyone with wire and antenna is going into the business of moving bits.
Good Cop, Bad Hacker: Bruce Sterling has a 'Frank Chat' with Some Cops (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
Why aren't computer cops in much, much better rapport with the computer community through computer networks? ... Computer cops ought to publicly walk the beat in cyberspace a lot more. Stop hiding your light under a bushel. What is your problem, exactly? Are you afraid somebody might find out that you exist? This is an amazing oversight and a total no-brainer on your part, to be the cops in an information society and not be willing to get online big time and really push your information.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
The Distributed Simulation Internet, projected for the turn of the century, is to be a creature of another order entirely from SIMNET. Ten thousand linked simulators! Entire literal armies online. Global, real-time, broadband, fiber-optic, satellite-assisted, military simulation networking. Complete coordination, using one common network protocol, across all the armed services. Tank crews will see virtual air support flitting by. Jet jockeys will watch Marines defend perimeters on the pixelated landscape far below. Navy destroyers will steam offshore readying virtual cruise missiles... and the omniscient eye of trainers will watch it all. And not just connected, not just simulated. Seamless.
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
They want professional Simulation Battle Masters. Simulation system operators. Simulation site managers. Logisticians. Software maintenance people. Digital cartographers. CAD-CAM designers. Graphic designers. And it wouldn't break their hearts if the American entertainment industry picked up on their interactive simulation network technology, or if some smart civilian started adapting these open-architecture, virtual-reality network protocols that the military just developed ... Distributed Simulation technology doesn't have to stop at tanks and aircraft, you see. Why not simulate something swell and nifty for civilian Joe and Jane Sixpack and the kids?
War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
Maybe what we're presented here, under the slick rhetoric of the Paperless Office, is yet another staggering stack of old-fashioned Pentagon paperwork - a brand new way to make megabuck hammers and toilet seats to an entire new set of ridiculous, endless bureaucratic specs ... Maybe the whole scheme is just updated hype - for that same old fat-cat, imperialistic, hypertrophied, overfed, gold-plated military bureaucracy... Could be. It could go either way, maybe both ways at once.
So, People, We Have a Fight on Our Hands (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
Are American citizens really so neurotically uptight about deviant sexual behavior that we will allow our entire information infrastructure to be dictated by the existence of pedophiles? Are pedophiles that precious and important to us? Do the NSA and the FBI really believe that they can hide the structure of a telephone switch under a layer of camouflage called "child pornography"? Are we supposed to flinch so violently at the specter of child abuse that we somehow miss the fact that they're installing a Sony Walkman jack in our phones?
So, People, We Have a Fight on Our Hands (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
Encrypted networks worry the hell out of me ... The effects are scary and unpredictable and could be very destabilizing. But even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia, and Terrorists don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments ... Our battle this century against totalitarianism has left terrible scars all over our body politic, and the threat these people pose to us is entirely and utterly predictable. You can say that the devil we know is better than the devil we don't, but the devils we knew were ready to commit genocide, litter the earth with dead, and blow up the world. How much worse can that get? Let's not build chips and wiring for our police and spies when only the...
Dropping Anchor in Cyberspace (1995)
Sterling, Bruce
The phone companies that survive will become cellular phone companies. "Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime" is a good motto for a 21st century phone company. There will be flat rates for so-called "long-distance." Any nation or PTT which tries to cling to current long-distance telephony billing practices will see their economy destroyed by others with more enlightened policies.
Dropping Anchor in Cyberspace (1995)
Sterling, Bruce
Basically computers are going to become our televisions. They will be really big, cheap screens as flat as pancakes, and they're going to [have] fun digital imagery, plus interlaced NTSC, plus PAL, plus SECAM, Cinerama, Super Panavision, Cinemascope plus video record and playback, all at the same time, probably in a series of windows. It won't be fancy interactive television with a lot of button-pushing. It's gonna be the "I Love Lucy Show" and "Dallas" but grabbed faster, and if you pay enough you'll be allowed to fast-forward through the really unbearably stupid parts.
Short History of the Internet (1993)
Sterling, Bruce
Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high-definition television. A multimedia global circus! Or so it's hoped - and planned. The real Internet of the future may bear very little resemblance to today's plans. Planning has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of the Internet. After all, today's Internet bears little resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND's post-holocaust command grid. It's a fine and happy irony.
A Statement of Principle (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
People living in the midst of technological revolution are living outside the law: not necessarily because they mean to break laws, but because the laws are vague, obsolete, overbroad, draconian, or unenforceable.
A Statement of Principle (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
There's something direly mean spirited and ungenerous about inventing a language and then renting it out to other people to speak. There's something unprecedented and sinister in this process of creeping commodification of data and knowledge. A computer is something too close to the human brain for me to rest entirely content with someone patenting or copyrighting the process of its thought ... I don't think democracy will thrive in a milieu where vast empires of data are encrypted, restricted, proprietary, confidential, top-secret, and sensitive. I fear for the stability of a society that builds sand castles out of databits and tries to stop a real-world tide with royal commands.
A Statement of Principle (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
I wish there were people in the Electronic Frontier whose moral integrity unquestionably matched the unleashed power of those digital machines ... The future is a dark road and our speed is headlong.
So, People, We Have a Fight on Our Hands (1994)
Sterling, Bruce
FBI people ... your idea of Digital Telephony is a scarcely mitigated disaster ... you're going to be filling out your paperwork in quintuplicate to get a tap, just like you always do ... In the meantime, you will have armed the enemies of the United States around the world with a terrible weapon ... raw and tyrannical Digital Telephony. You're gonna be using it to round up wise guys in street gangs, and people like Saddam Hussein are gonna be using it to round up democratic activists ...You're going to strengthen the hand of despotism around the world, and then you're going to have to deal with the hordes of state-supported truck bombers these rogue governments are sending our way after an...
Free As Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge (1992)
Sterling, Bruce
Too much access. By all means let's not provide our electronic networks with too much access. That might get dangerous. The networks might rot people's minds and corrupt their family values ... It's cultural struggle, political struggle, legal struggle. Extending the public right-to-know into cyberspace will be a mighty battle. It's an old war, a war librarians are used to, and I honor you for the free-expression battles you have won in the past. But the terrain of cyberspace is new terrain. I think that ground will have to be won all over again, megabyte by megabyte.
