Quotes from Bruce Sterling

If you don't have a sense of wonder it's like you're dead inside. But your sense of wonder can be used to trick you. You can have a sense of wonder over a thing that's basically a conjurer's trick, or a con job, or a rip-off.

BRUCE STERLING Homo sapiens declared extinct , Nature, November 11, 1999: Since I've been asked to offer an epitaph," the highly distributed poetware continued, "I believe that we should rearrange the Great Wall of China to spell out (in Chinese of course, since most of them were always Chinese) -- 'THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS, BUT NOT AT ALL FAR-SIGHTED.

She had Google, and she had Wikipedia. She could look up anything obscure, any words or phrases that she didn't understand. A romance novel was just a book, while the Internet was the Internet. The Internet would crack these nuts for sure.»

Do you remember, Abelard... Once I told you that ecstasy was better than being God." "I remember." "I was wrong, darling. Being God is better.

Life, and intelligence, do not mix very well.

politically, economically and socially, the Twenty-Teens are a Depression. The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.

Google sells network surveillance and collective intelligence. This is Google's actual, profitable, monetisable product. "Search" is merely Google's front end, a brilliant facade to encourage free interaction by the public. People are not Google's "customers" or even Google's "users", but its feudal livestock.

Stern social measures had to be adopted to keep entire populations from disintegrating in an orgy of plenty.

Take away America's money, and you've got a country of tribes.

Information wants you to give me a dollar.

Information wants to be free. Believe it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I was once a student in a punk T-Shirt hooked on screwed-up scenarios. That's how I became the esteemed cultural figure that I am today.

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?!?

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.

The future is a process, not a destination.