Tag Archives: Bruce Sterling

Distraction

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I’m re-reading Distraction by Bruce Sterling. Published in 1998, it is/was frighteningly prescient.  Here are a few of my favorite excerpts (does that first one remind you of anyone?).

“He’s like a not very bright child who can be deceived and managed, but not reasoned with.”

“The American national character realty wasn’t suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World’s Movie Star. The world’s tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world’s acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions.”

“It always offended him to hear his fellow Americans discussing the vagaries of “white people.” There was simply no such thing as “white people. That stereotype was an artificial construct, like the ridiculous term “Hispanic.” In all the rest of the world, a Peruvian was a Peruvian and a Brazilian was a Brazilian— it was only in America that people somehow became this multilingual, multinational entity called a “Hispanic.”

“Political reality in modern America was the stark fact that electronic networks had eaten the guts out of the old order, while never finding any native order of their own. The horrific speed of digital communication, the consonant flattening of hierarchies, the rise of net-based civil society, and the decline of the industrial base had simply been too much for the American government to cope with and successfully legitimize.”

“Knowledge is inherently precious even if you can’t sell it. Even if you can’t use it. Knowledge is an absolute good. The search for truth is vital. It’s central to civilization. You need knowledge even when your economy and government are absolutely shot to hell.”

Something new is happening

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As it becomes increasingly difficult to know what’s ‘true’ and ‘accurate,’ I find myself depending (not he right word but close enough) on how something is said. Am I just talking about style or tone here? Perhaps. Anyway, Bruce Sterling (On Social Media Jihads) never disappoints.

“People are gonna kill ISIS because they want those oil wells back, not because ISIS is sort-of okay at social media and pushing viral atrocity videos. […] When you’re a top terrorist, you don’t really want to “wreak havoc” anyway. Mostly, you want to create a failed state, a place like Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, where you can take over at gunpoint and live it up in the narcotics, weapons, and oil biz.”

And this gem on U.S. foreign policy:

“It doesn’t matter how much data the U.S. military or U.S. intelligence has: They attack the wrong people for made-up reasons and they’re also [a] terribly ineffective occupation power.”

As for the Internet as a global brain uniting all of mankind…

“People don’t realize that the old-fashioned global Internet of the 90s is segregating into radicalized filter-bubbles, but it is, and fast. People are used to the Free World idea, they think the huddled masses behind the Chinese Firewall and the new Russian firewalls want to get out and be rich and happy at the West’s shopping mall. But the Chinese, Russians, and even the Greeks tried that, they don’t like it, and that’s not what is happening any more. Something new is happening.”

The Blast Shack: Part 2

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Bruce Sterling has written a follow-up to his 2010 essay on Wikileaks. Here are a few of my favorite snippets:

The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed.

Even US Senators are decorative objects for the NSA. An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion.

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks.

Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2012

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“The mid-century will be about “old people in big cities who are afraid of the sky.” Futurity means metropolitan people with small families in a weather crisis.”

Future Change as Seen by American Right-wing Talk Radio (2011-12)

  1. Existential threats to the American Constitution. Mostly from “Sharia Law,” which is sort of like the American Constitution for Moslem Islamofascists.
  2. Imminent collapse of all fiat currencies, somehow leading to everyday use of fungible gold bars.
  3. Sudden, frightening rise of violent, unemployable, disease-carrying “Occupy Wall Street” anarchists who are bent on intimidation and repressing free speech.
  4. Hordes of immigrants being illegally encouraged to flood the polls.
  5. Lethal and immoral US government health-care.
  6. Radical Gay Agenda / Litigious Feminazis (tie).
  7. God’s Will. Surprisingly low-key, considering what an all-purpose justification this is.

“I’ve got a soft spot for chemtrail people, they’re really just sort of cool, and much more interesting than UFO cultists, who are all basically Christians. Jesus is always the number one Saucer Brother in UFO contactee cults. It’s incredible how little imagination the saucer people have.”

“Space Travel people. There’s no popular understanding of why space cities don’t work, though if you told them they’d have to spend the rest of their lives in the fuselage of a 747 at 30,000 feet, they’d be like “Gosh that’s terrible.”

“Transcendant spiritual drug enthusiasts. You go into one of those medical marijuana dispensaries nowadays, they’re like huckster chiropractors, basically. The whole ethical-free-spirit surround of the psychedelic dreamtime is gone. It’s like the tie-dyed guys toking up in the ashram have been replaced by the carcasses of 12,000 slaughtered Mexicans.”

Original discussion on the Well.