Bruce Sterling Quotes
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Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization.
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If bin Laden is in fact publicly killed, then the US military will find itself standing around with its hands in its pockets, wondering what's supposed to come next.
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I haven't had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.
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Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry.
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My idea of an amusement park story is getting adventurers to go tour environmental disaster areas. After all, if the entire Great Barrier Reef gets killed, which seems like an extremely lively possibility, what are you going to do with all that rotting limestone?
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Architects thrive after massive urban disasters. The abject collapse of East Berlin gave us the only city in Europe with a mighty host of Postmodern skyscrapers.
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War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.
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I think our grandparents were Victor Frankenstein. I basically am the kind of deeply unnatural creature that Mrs Shelley instinctively dreaded. I not only eat her sacred cows but I eat them with ketchup. While I take her point, I think that transgressive monstrosity and tampering with the life force are both a lot more fun than she suspected.
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Okay, are you really 'experimenting'? How do you know if you're really experimenting? You're working on it methodically and you're publishing the results! It's not an experiment if you don't publish the results in some verifiable and falsifiable form, okay?
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Privacy under what circumstance? Privacy at home under what circumstances? You have more privacy if everyone's illiterate, but you wouldn't really call that privacy. That's ignorance.
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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.
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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.
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Political people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.
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If politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military.
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Everybody wants to disown neocon strategy, including the neocons, because that strategy never worked. Still, it was, in point of fact, a strategy. Nobody else has one.
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Well, they didn't lack for topics after Hiroshima. Why should 9/11 slow them down? I know it got a lot of press, but it's just a few large buildings and aircraft, it's not like D-Day and the Seige of Berlin.
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I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere.
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A set of Bollywood actresses are coming through Dallas soon in a live tour; I'd pay a lot to see them, but alas, I'm fully booked elsewhere.
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Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person.
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I'm an entertainer in the military-entertainment complex.
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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?!?
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We may yet work up to some serious shooting war, or maybe some acts of urban genocide committed with rogue nuclear weapons. But if that were the case, why would we call that '9/11'? If Washington disappeared in a mushroom cloud, we'd give that huge event a different name.
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I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.
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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.