Bruce Sterling Quotations

I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote.

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.

The Bollywood distribution system is so corrupt that they have trouble making money off movies. So they sell shoes that an actress stepped in. If they turned up the amps some, maybe they could sell the actresses.

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.

One of the points about distractions is that everything that they do is destabilizing.

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

I was once a student in a punk T-Shirt hooked on screwed-up scenarios. Thats how I became the esteemed cultural figure that I am today.

We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys.

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

Privacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone's illiterate, but you wouldn't really call that privacy. That's ignorance.

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

If bin Laden is in fact publicly killed, then the US military will find itself standing around with its hands in its pockets, wondering what's supposed to come next.

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 haven't had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.

If politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

They used to be seen as insane or unthinkable acts of madmen. But if they take place they'll be called 'war' too. And there will still be no conventional 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.

People in the Pentagon had colleagues killed and maimed by bin Laden. They're trying to find bin Laden and kill him and his cult. Naturally they consider that a legitimate thing to do, but they're having mixed success at the job.

Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. THAT is cyberpunk.

I'm an entertainer in the military-entertainment complex.

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

The future isn't just unwritten, it's unsearched.

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.

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.

In a start-up society, huge sums can fall on innocent parties, almost by accident .

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 - ???...

Unfortunately, computers are?stupid.Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.

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

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Information wants you to give me a dollar.

The past is a kind of future that has already happened.

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.

Competence doesn't seem like a big deal until you are forced to realize that your own government has none.

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?

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.

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.

Everybody has a different Internet.

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.

It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.

Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society.

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.

Tomorrow composts today.

There's no victory-condition for being human.

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.

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.

Information wants to be free. Believe it.

But even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century, and we've had enough of them.

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

Worrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it's on fire.

(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

Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life.

Your attitude determines your altitude. Your ambitions are bigger than life Of course. They must be. They encompass it.

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 bombs

In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity?

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.

Architects thrive after massive urban disasters. The abject collapse of East Berlin gave us the only city in Europe with a mighty host of Postmodern skyscrapers.

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.

Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.

The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier.

Find a client and get a job.

Every passing year brings us more past futures.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?!?

Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.

Open-source is a means of production.

When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.

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.

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.

Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.

They stole our revolution and now we're stealing it back and selling it to Yahoo.

It wasn't until I assembled these texts that I realized that they fell naturally into thematic sections. They're concerned with different fields of study, but you no longer have to be a polymath to blur those. You can type in a keyword and gigantic, world-spanning machines will instantly blur them for you.

In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until its too late.