[wordup] Bruce Sterling - State of the World 2007 (soundbites)

[Adam Shand]

This is just too much fun not to share. And I thought the man was
loosing his touch. It's interesting, poignant and hilarious which is
great, but the soundbites! How one man can be that glib and snarky off
the cuff is beyond me.  It's just not fair.  He has reclaimed hero
status in my eyes. :-)

It's *long* so I've just included some of my favorite bits ...

Source:
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/289/Bruce-Sterling-State-of-the-Worl-page01.html

Al Qaeda's strategy has been dominant since 9/11.
It's to crack nation-states apart by killing so many
innocents that daily life becomes unendurable.
They didn't launch any major action in 2006; with
Afghanistan and Iran ungovernable and Israel at
their wits' ends behind towering walls, they
probably figure they're winning. They probably
are, but whenever they do win, they're like
a gang of weasels who've caught a car.

...

I don't think today's rich and powerful "run the show" -- in the sense
that there used to be a coherent show and it used to be runnable.
Today's rich and powerful are meritocrats and plutocrats, rather than
some class-based old-school-tie phalanx Establishment. Any earlier
set of the rich-and-powerful would have regarded contemporary players
like Gates and Soros and Perot and Berlusconi and Murdoch and Bloomberg
and bin Laden to be strange, jumped-up, arriviste, nouveau-riche
types, crazily unstable pretenders who don't even bother to send their
daughters to the cotillion ball.

...

Most normal people never meet the modern ultrawealthy, because they
are shy gated-community creatures who are very scared of stalkers and
harassers. The ones I've met don't certainly come across like
silk-hatted Wall Street exploiters of the masses. They're blandly
indifferent to the masses; they don't have any practical need for the
masses. Basically, they're business geeks. They're workaholic and
slightly monomaniacal characters who spend most of their time reading
financial briefing papers and practicing "due diligence."

They're not a gilded elite splashing champagne around like Donald
Trump -- the Donald is a cornball blingbling TV showman, he's like a
poor guy's comic-book version of a rich guy. Everyday modern
super-rich guys tend to be glum and somewhat cheerless Type A
overachievers, very dedicated and focussed. They're kind of a drag to
be around, frankly.

...

I think there is one. It's doable. It would look more or less like a
Swedish economic model. The Swedes are well-informed citizens. They
vote. They spend reasonable amounts of money on political campaigns.
They have an overwhelmingly large middle class. They have a highly
confiscatory tax system that keeps the tall poppies from overshadowing
the field. The Swedes have high literacy rates, honest politics,
public transport, low infant mortality, relatively clean cities... The
Swedes oughta be the avant-garde of mankind, I guess. We should all
want to be Swedish.

But everybody else just kinda stares at them and shrugs.

...

We're past the point where reduction helps much; we will have to
invent and deploy active means of remediation of the damage. But from
another, deeper perspective: we shouldn't involve outselves in lines
of development where the ultimate victory condition is emulating dead
people. There's no appeal in that. It's bad for us. That kind of
inherent mournfulness is just not a good way to be human. We're not
footprint-generating organisms whose presence on the planet is
inherently toxic and hurtful. We need better handprints, not lighter
footprints. We need better stuff, not less stuff. We need to think it
through and take effective action, not curl up in a corner stricken
with guilt and breathe shallowly.

...

*You want to do good and also be sexy? Be 23 years old. Fifty years
from now, it's gonna take a lot of very dedicated social, political and
economic engineering to be a society with any decent number of 23 year
olds. But those are going to be the sex-appeal societies in 2057 AD.
The unsexy societies are gonna be the ones where people were too busy
clipping stock-option coupons to bother to have kids.

...

I don't think it was popular indignation at his policies that drove
Bush into this corner. If gas was a buck-fifty and there was a calm
puppet government in Baghdad, everyone would think W. was Teddy
Roosevelt. The guy is losing a war he didn't have to start and is
blowing out the bank. That's what really scares his former backers,
not the one-party state, the imperial signing statements, the loss of
civil liberties, spying, torture, and all the rest of it. People watch
the guy make power-grab after power-grab, then he either does nothing
or he blows it. The more you hand over to him, the more he screws up.
He's delusionary.

...

The Internet is really coming into its own now, and it's
scary how intrinsically different it is from previous forms of media.
The deeper you dig into what it's really good at, the more alien it
becomes.