Wednesday, December 13th, 2006
Bruce Sterling on the death of futurism
by Warren
Bruce Sterling, noted author and big thinker, has a thoughtful piece about the end of futurism for his last column in Wired Magazine. He points out that the Internet isn’t the utopian panacea it’s made out to be, or the end of the world as we know it…it’s just a game changer.
I’d go further and say it’s an enabler. Because of the Internet, I can get a lot more done than I used to, in a lot less time. I can also keep in contact with a bunch of people that would have fallen by the wayside…my entire crew of university nerd buddies and I have kept in touch for almost 15 years thanks to a combination of mailing lists, IM, and video games. When one of them steps off a plane, it’s like we saw each other yesterday. And we’re a bunch of codgers; to today’s teen, the Internet is just another extension of their life, as normal as TV was for us (a point Sterling make much more eloquently in his column.)