Quotes from Bruce Sterling

Guys who were all Papa Docs and Step-pin' Razors and Whippin' Sticks.

To accept desire, to surrender yourself to desire … to explore desire, to seek out gratification. It was the polar opposite of wisdom and discretion.

They live in the gap between what's right and what's possible.

It's all right to be a happy amateur. And it's all right to be truly gifted. But to be competent and middling bad at an artifice that you care about—that's a nightmare.

Burn happiness, cousin. This is the Kosmos talking. Are you on the side of life, or aren't you?

Old preconceptions were in tatters, old loyalties were obsolete. Whole societies were paralyzed by the mind-blasting vistas of absolute possibility.

that I used to be truly loved someone you used to be once. Try not to forget me.

The world was kept intact by the fantastic predilection of the human mind for boredom.

People who waste time naming never have time for living.

There is a certain threshold, an intensity of sin and cynicism, beyond which no society can survive.…

Guys with imagination [...] visionaries [...] we need elbow room. Space to relax. An outfit like Biogen, it ends up with bureaucrats. Drones. That's why they are not getting anywhere.

That doesn't mean that the Internet of Things will triumph, because, in some ways, it can't win. It's too broad and vague to win; it's a huge, looming infrastructural phenomenon, much like "electrification" or "automation" once were. People never voted to become electrical or automated.

The Zaibatsu recognizes one civil right: the right to death.

There is no power-group of consequence in the world today that successfully renounces smartphones. No one who matters refuses what they offer.

But to measure myself against life and death, as if I could go on forever.… There's no dignity in that. What are we to life? We're only sparks.

I see life for what it is now. That's why I know I must do this." He put the poison to his lips, and drank it down.

The Internet of Things has a slight utopian tinge, but mostly it has a certain melancholy, even grim air. It's not some psychedelic exploration of the cyberspace of the digital. It's material labour, it's hardware, it's a hard slog.

There was something inhuman about being dutiful workaholics, something that wrecked marriages, shattered families, and made a man and woman shrivel up inside. It was going to kill them both someday. Without his wife and his child, hinges had popped loose in Van's soul. He could feel that something quiet but vital to his humanity was slowly going down the shredder.

The politicians chose enemies so that they could bind their followers with hate and terror.

The point is to cut the feedback relationship between terrorism and the global media.

If you take a guy who loves the sound of his own voice and give him power, he becomes a demagogue. If you give him money, he becomes a show-off. Give him the internet, and he's a ceaselessly flaming activist; give him an Internet of Things, and he becomes a wrangler, a guy for whom every possible relationship to any possible object or service is some ever-ramifying, well-nigh metaphysical hacker session.

It is an objet gratuit. A work of artifice that demonstrates the bankruptcy of the quotidian.

in the bowels of this nameless little world, is a genetic technology that feeds itself, maintains itself, runs itself, efficiently, endlessly, mindlessly. It's the perfect organic tool. The faction that could use these tireless workers could make itself an industrial titan.

Posthumanism offers fluidity and freedom, and a metaphysic daring enough to think a whole world into life.