Bruce Sterling on the Future We're Building
When I saw Bruce Sterling at SxSW two years ago, I thought he was a great speaker, even though I frequently have issues with his column in Wired magazine. Alex Steffen of WorldChanging has a post on Bruce's keynote address at SxSW earlier this month that's about the future we're building and our responsibility in shaping that future.
Alex Steffen quotes Bruce:
"When you actually ignore reality for years on end, the payback is a bitch brother! ... We're seeing just frantic collisions of fundamentalist delusion with objective reality... We're on a kind of slider bar between the unthinkable and the unimaginable now, bteween the grim meathook future and the bright green future. There are ways out of this situation; there are actual ways to move the slider bar from one side to the other, except that we haven't invented the words for them yet."
Alex goes on to say:
The challenge, Bruce says, is that the worst people in the world -- genocidal ethnic mafiosos, fundamentalist fanatics, Washington lobbyists -- are running the show, American government has become the new Soviet Union (ossified, corrupt and widely perceived as illigitimate by the rest of the planet) and things are not good in much of the world.