Quotes from Bruce Sterling

Maybe people don't prize possessions now like they did in the premillenium. How could they? All their money goes into the Net. For games, or business, or television—things that come over the wires.

Your audience are whores, oxygen farmers, two dozen pirate bands, and fifty runaway mathematicians. They would all love to see dancing and fighting.

The reader is not a "customer" of Facebook because he never paid for Facebook. Facebook's genuine customers are the marketers – those who pay Facebook for the hard labour of surveilling the billion people on Facebook. Facebook is one of the "Big Five" of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.

What we need is a somber, thoughtful, thorough, hype-free, even lugubrious book that honors the dead and resuscitates the spiritual ancestors of today's mediated frenzy.

An Internet of Things is not a consumer society. It's a materialised network society. It's like a Google or Facebook writ large on the landscape.  Google and Facebook don't have "users" or "customers". Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos.

Science tore the human race to bits. When anarchy hit, people struggled for community. The politicians chose enemies so that they could bind their followers with hate and terror. Community isn't enough when a thousand new ways of life beckon from every circuit and test tube.

Reality's a horde of mice, nibbling away in the basement of your dreams.…

Google created Google+ as its effort to steal Facebook's oxygen, but it turns out that social networks aren't commodities.

The internet, although beloved by all including Al Qaeda, went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever encountering a civilisation. It was never utopian, although it was free. Its lawyers are patent trolls. Its political parties are flash mobs in the streets. Its wealthy are nouveau-rich cranks. Its poor are a tidal wave of Third World young people. The Twenty-Teens are quite an interesting cultural period.

Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous. Nothing much had ever come of it.

The Internet of Things is not about a talking refrigerator, because that is the old-fashioned consumer retail world of electrical white goods. It's an archaic concept, like software bought in a plastic-wrapped box from a shelf. The genuine Internet of Things wants to invade that refrigerator, measure it, instrument it, monitor any interactions with it; it would cheerfully give away a fridge at cost.

Mankind's a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind.

You're too straight, you just don't understand these guys' priorities. They don't expect any law or justice from the U.S. government. They don't even expect the government to be sane. The whole federal system just detached itself from them and floated off into deep space. They think of the government as something like bad weather . It's something you just endure.

We'll never truly be happy or safe, never. Never, ever.

Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it's built on literal sand.

It was a frightening thing, to see two mentally incompetent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk musicians, who might any moment burst into song.

We all have some emptiness in our lives, an emptiness that some fill with art, some with God, some with learning. I have always filled the emptiness with drugs. Because

Now, for the first time, the President began to look genuinely powerful, even dangerous. This was a classic political coalition: it had worked in Medieval France. It was the long-forgotten bottom of the heap, allied with the formerly feeble top, to scare the hell out of the arrogant and divisive middle.

Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it.

Gavin did not enjoy his hard work. The optimistic startup guys sending in these crazy proposals were guys who enjoyed their work. Gavin had the solid, old-fashioned idea that work should be painful, so that people would pay you for doing it. If the "work" was fulfilling, then work was a form of entertainment. The workers should be paying people for being entertained.»

Brixie wasn't talking to him, or listening to him. Nothing like that at all. Brixie was off in her own world, flaming away like a blowtorch. She was such an Internet fiend that she had never learned any other way to behave.»

Brixie's blog was huge. That had to be it. Brixie had a monster fashion blog. All those Los Angeles girls with their feet on the pedals of daddy's sports car... Speedometers twitched in Milan whenever those girls changed their shoes... And Brixie knew how to make the girls in L.A. change their shoes. Dr. Gustav Y. Svante had warned him about this. This was an Internet thing: "disintermediation."»

Stripping's bad form, these days," he said. "It's lost all meaning. People do it just to punctuate a conversation.

He was a thing of flesh and blood, of life and death, not an Immanent Will. A tree drew strength from light, but it was not light itself. And life was a process of changing, but it was not change itself. That was what death was for.