On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/289/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html >> >> Here's this year's version, hot off the keyboards. Jon Lebkowsky lurks >> on silk, so you could add your questions to the mix, if you like. >> >> >> http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/343/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html > > A slightly more cooked version: > > http://seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/2009_will_be_a_year_of_panic.php This year's version. I'm posting the first rantlet from Bruce, nominally directed at Cory (while shooting from his shoulder) http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/373/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html <q> inkwell.vue.373 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010 permalink #1 of 23: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 30 Dec 09 15:54 I think you're right - the polarity of the world is changing, literally and figuratively; the climate's wonky, the economy's tumbling like a house of cards in a demented wind, political will is weak and the body politic is disfigured in ways that are gross and fascinating. It's a circus, and the tent's on fire. I asked around for thoughts about what we should discuss, and got this from science-fiction author, Internet maven, and new Dad, Cory Doctorow: "Bruce, you're godfather to my daughter Poesy. As I type this, I am sitting in the driveway with her while she finishes her nap in the back of the rental car we picked up on our Xmas holiday with the rest of our family. I listen to her snoring away back there, and I think about the enormity of fatherhood, and I realize that I've never been confident enough in the future to make any kind of long-time plans... Instead, I've always treated the future as a kind of unpredictable lurching thing, and tried to keep my stance loose and wide so that I could adjust my center of gravity from moment to moment as it shifted beneath me. As a father, that strategy seems somehow irresponsible. Now I'm thinking about college funds, about my will, about where I'll end up living, all this stuff, and I realize that in order to do any of this I have to have some coherent picture of where the future is heading. If you were in my shoes, what concrete, discrete, individual steps would you take on behalf of your snoring little toddler? " I think that's a great first question. inkwell.vue.373 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010 permalink #2 of 23: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 31 Dec 09 02:03 *Great to see that the burdens of fatherhood have succeeded in rendering even Cory Doctorow all bourgeois. A decade will do that to a guy. *Godfathers should be giving great advice, right? No. Actually, what godfathers should be giving is MONEY. If you're a comely young goddaughter, your godfather should knock it off with his sermonizing and give you, like, a car. *Well, I don't have any money now. Neither does anybody else. Even the smart operators with truckloads of money, like Gates, have lost more money than the GDP of Nicaragua. So it'll have to be the advice. Brace yourself. *Okay, first, the college funds. Cory, you're a guy who rather famously dropped out of college. I completed college with a lucrative degree in (wait for it) JOURNALISM. There are people coming out of colleges now with humanities degrees and debtloads of $100K. What precise benefit are you trying to confer here? You want your kid to go to some college? Move to a country like Italy where they've got FREE college, and people don't leave school till they're 28 years old. *Okay, you've treated your future as an "unpredictable lurching thing..." and now you're all morose about that... You and your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of "disruptive innovation," "disintermediation," "offshoring," "small pieces loosely joined," "de-monetization," "plug and play," "the network as a platform"? Of course you've heard of all that crap, because you've been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold bars and working oil wells don't have any stability now! Much less guys like you, who move their fingers up and down on keyboards for a living. *You want some security? Demand government housing subsidies and a guaranteed minimum income! They bailed out every broke mogul on the planet, they might as well bail out the civil population. *Your will. Great. I think it's a good idea to write one of these. It's clarifying to contemplate mortality. Try not to get all hackerly about it and make it all super-complicated so that your heirs are "protected forever." Dead guys don't protect anybody, and the survivors don't care. When you're dead, mostly the survivors want to grieve, sweep up after you, and stay out of endless court proceedings. A guy like you, you're gonna be too clever by half with the damn will, lots of spreadsheets, flowcharts.... Basically, you want to save people trouble sweating over your obscure 12-dollar Latvian royalties getting probated in Canada. *"Where I'll end up living." You're a Canadian always in California who's married to a Briton who's always in Japan. Obviously you're not gonna "end up" anywhere. Forget about that. What are you worried about, your IKEA furniture? There is no "end up." Someday they're gonna bury you someplace -- that's likely relatively permanent -- or they might lock you in a prison or a clinic where they won't let you out. Other than that, you have made your mobile bed and you oughta lie in it. *You're thinking: "got some money here, might as well settle down in suburban Shepperton where the kid has a stable neighborhood with those delightful Ballard children." That's a joke. They're ALL FOREIGNERS in Shepperton now, just like you. They're living in DISINTEGRATED, ROOTLESS, MULTI-ETHNIC HOUSEHOLDS where people relate through SMS messages. Go outside, walk around in extremely globalized London, count the number of exiles in the streets. Is that Christopher Robin and Pooh at the gates of Buckingham Palace? The Buckingham Palace charades are wall to wall Brazilians, Indians and Chinese. That's why they put up with YOU. And the genuine kids there are even weirder than their parents, because they're multi-ethnic Brazilo-Indian-Chinese kids. *"A coherent picture of where your future is heading." Okay, fine. Let's imagine you're three years old again. You want to give your Dad, back in 1974, a coherent picture of what 2010 looks like. You know, something very actionable, lucid and practical, where he can just slap the cash on the counter and everything works out great for the family. Okay: given what you know now about the present, tell me what you oughta tell him about 2010, back in 1974. Use words of one syllable, so he doesn't have a stroke. *Then, I'll give it a shot. </q> -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
