Bruce Sterling Quotes & Sayings

Mankind had always been surrounded by the miraculous. Nothing much had ever come of it. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

The internet, although beloved by all including Al Qaeda, went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever encountering a civilisation. It was never utopian, although it was free. Its lawyers are patent trolls. Its political parties are flash mobs in the streets. Its wealthy are nouveau-rich cranks. Its poor are a tidal wave of Third World young people. The Twenty-Teens are quite an interesting cultural period. — Bruce Sterling

Death defeats us in the end. But our children are our revenge against it. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

Information wants to be free. Believe it. — Bruce Sterling

I am not ranting. I possess a perspective here that you people, who are locked in the ivory basements of your own sub-cultures, simply do not possess. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away ... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet. — Bruce Sterling

Getting what you want is a serious matter. It is far more transformative than frustration. — Bruce Sterling

You're too straight, you just don't understand these guys' priorities. They don't expect any law or justice from the U.S. government. They don't even expect the government to be sane. The whole federal system just detached itself from them and floated off into deep space. They think of the government as something like bad weather. It's something you just endure. — Bruce Sterling

There's no victory-condition for being human. — Bruce Sterling

Every passing year brings us more past futures. Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin. It's counterproductive to blither on about "the" future. It's always somebody's future, and we're not who we used to be. — Bruce Sterling

I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of privacy threat ... One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies ... that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire. — Bruce Sterling

They took my womb out, and they put in brain tissue. Grafts from the pleasure center, darling. I'm wired to the ass and the spine and the throat, and it's better than being God. When I'm hot, I sweat perfume. I'm cleaner than a fresh needle, and nothing leaves my body that you can't drink like wine or eat like candy. And they left me bright, so that I would know what submission was. Do you know what submission is, darling? — Bruce Sterling

Let's throw his ass out the airlock," suggested the Speaker of the House.
"We can't do that," said the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was a feeble old Mechanist who was subject to nosebleeds. "He is still Secretary of State and can't be sentenced without impeachment by the Senate."
The three Senators, two men and a woman, looked interested. The Senate didn't see much action in the government of the tiny Democracy. They were the least trusted members of the crew and were outnumbered by the House. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

You see, I'm from your government, and I'm here to help you. — Bruce Sterling

Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. — Bruce Sterling

(He) mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute — Bruce Sterling

Someday the Sun will explode, and what about our journalism and poetry then? Well, so what? To hell with our exploding Sun. We have to do what we can do in the time we can act. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

Science fiction is not about the freedom of imagination. It's about a free imagination pinched and howling in a vise that other people call real life. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

But the economy's out of control. Money just doesn't need human beings anymore. Most of us only get in the way. — Bruce Sterling

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

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

In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity? — Bruce Sterling

The Internet of Things is not a capitalist marketplace. It's a new platform for radically broadening digital activity. — Bruce Sterling

Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it's built on literal sand. — Bruce Sterling

Cloud computing seems to be following this evolutionary path: A - Internet backbone. B - Information Superhighway. C - The Net. D - The Web. E - The Cloud. F - "Ubiquity" G - ??? ... — Bruce Sterling

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless. — Bruce Sterling

My dream appliance circa 2050 has one big dial on it, and when I twist it to the right, my IQ goes up to 450. — Bruce Sterling

I know that the human condition will be radically changed through technical means. Much of this change will be painful, monstrous and horrible. Most mutations are disgusting failures, most experiments are failures. I accept this and I don't find it frightening. — Bruce Sterling

Google and Facebook don't have "users" or "customers". Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos. — Bruce Sterling

Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society. — Bruce Sterling

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.. It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. — Bruce Sterling

Stripping's bad form, these days," he said. "It's lost all meaning. People do it just to punctuate a conversation. — Bruce Sterling

People who might once have bought a newspaper to beguile themselves now look at their Android. Magzines readers look at their Android, too. Amazingly, even manufactures of chewing gum have taken a hit, because nervously chewing while staring out the window has become nervously tapping while staring into a handled screen. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

Everybody has a different Internet. — Bruce Sterling

A massive rate of change is normalcy for America. What we need is planned change - Progress. We need Progress! — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

You know what's truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they're all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it's shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place. — Bruce Sterling

The gifts we received from the dead: those were the world's only genuine gifts. All other things in the world were commodities. The dead were, by definition, those who gave to us without reward. And, especially: our dead gave to us, the living, within a dead context. Their gifts to us were not just abjectly generous, but archaic and profoundly confusing.
Whenever we disciplined ourselves, in some vague hope of benefiting posterity, in some ambition to create a better future beyond our own moment in time, then we were doing something beyond a rational analysis. Those in that future could never see us with our own eyes: they would see us only with the eyes that we ourselves gave to them. Never our own eyes: always with their own. And the future's eyes always saw the truths of the past as blinkered, backward, halting. Superstition. — Bruce Sterling

You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be the geek they will never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them, they put you here. You should realize what society has made of you and take full revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly thoroughly weird and don't do it half way, put every ounce of your horse power into it. Have the artistic courage to realize your significance in culture. — Bruce Sterling

It was a frightening thing, to see two mentally incompetent sidewalk buskers, with battered folk musicians, who might any moment burst into song. — Bruce Sterling

The digital revolution reduces everybody to the state of musicians. — Bruce Sterling

But even the Four Horsemen of Kidporn, Dope Dealers, Mafia and Terrorists don't worry me as much as totalitarian governments. It's been a long century, and we've had enough of them. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

In a start-up society, huge sums can fall on innocent parties, almost by accident . — Bruce Sterling

I do have two data identities. I have my name, Bruce Sterling, which is my public name under which I write novels. I also have my other name, which is my legal name under which I own property and vote. — Bruce Sterling

The past is a kind of future that has already happened. — Bruce Sterling

I'm Level Eighty on Warcraft."
The clerk was stunned. "You're Level Eighty?! Are you Horde, or Alliance?"
"What, are you kidding me? I'm Horde, of course! I'm a Level Eighty Undead Priestess. What Guild are you in?"
"I'm a Horde Blood Elf Paladin. Level 30. I'm in the Blood Roses Guild."
"Have you ever seen a 'Spectral Tiger' loot card? I bet you never have."
The museum clerk thought about her situation. The psychic pressure was mounting on her. She was in a state of moral anguish. "Look, Signora, I'd love to help your American clients there ... But if my director knew I was Warcrafting here at work, she'd kill me! Besides, you don't have any 'Spectral Tiger' in your purse, I bet. — Bruce Sterling

Every Concatenate world faced biological problems as the habitat aged. — Bruce Sterling

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship, and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

For a moment, sincere human fury had burned through the training, touched a hot core of genuine rage. He felt shaken, but more whole, more truly himself, then he'd been for years. — Bruce Sterling

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children. — Bruce Sterling

If you take a guy who loves the sound of his own voice and give him power, he becomes a demagogue. If you give him money, he becomes a show-off. Give him the internet, and he's a ceaselessly flaming activist; give him an Internet of Things, and he becomes a wrangler, a guy for whom every possible relationship to any possible object or service is some ever-ramifying, well-nigh metaphysical hacker session. — Bruce Sterling

The frontiers of the future will be the ruins of the unsustainable. — Bruce Sterling

My IQ? No. I can't read," she said proudly. "But I'm Rep One, the majority whip in the House. And I'm married to Senator One. — Bruce Sterling

I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it's pleasant to write some nonfiction about it. — Bruce Sterling

America hadn't really been suited for its long and tiresome role as the Last Superpower, the World's Policeman. As a patriotic American, Oscar was quite content to watch other people's military coming home in boxes for a while. The American national character wasn't suited for global police duties. It never had been. Tidy and meticulous people such as the Swiss and the Swedes were the types who made good cops. America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic, bipolar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions. — Bruce Sterling

Unfortunately, computers are?stupid.Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate. — Bruce Sterling

To run the world, you had to find it in yourself to grit your teeth and just fake it. Just stare them down, never back off. — Bruce Sterling

Las Vegas is a major family destination. Nevada casinos have become American family values now. It's considered just fine to go into one of these windowless scary gambling-malls, drink yourself silly, lose your ass at roulette, and then go ogle showgirls with breast implants. Republicans do this now. Working-class folks do it in polyester stretch pants. It's normal. — Bruce Sterling

"Story-tellers" should listen seriously to design and architecture without getting all literary and imperial about that. Hackers are arrogant geek romantics. They lack the attentive spirit of inquiry. — Bruce Sterling

Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "Woo the muse of the odd." You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some sort of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. Don't become a well-rounded person. Well-rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. — Bruce Sterling

I hate watching people blow all operational security, and spew their guts like a teenage burglar, drunk in a bar. We're professionals, for Christ's sake, and she's just a prole. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

I don't think there's much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere. — Bruce Sterling

The future is a process, not a destination. Richard Stallman is a guy my age. I sympathize with Richard rather more than I sympathize with Richard's open-source ideas, but the guy's a mortal human being and so is his social movement. Open-source is a means of production. — Bruce Sterling

Recently SCHISMATRIX became my first novel to come out in Finland. Perhaps there's a quality in a good translation that can't be captured with the original. — Bruce Sterling

It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud. — Bruce Sterling

They can't strike against smugglers! We're not the government. We are a criminal private-enterprise operation! — Bruce Sterling

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? — Bruce Sterling

We need common sense and political stability and sensible, workable policies. That's what government is for. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

Your audience are whores, oxygen farmers, two dozen pirate bands, and fifty runaway mathematicians. They would all love to see dancing and fighting. — Bruce Sterling

The future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

The Internet of Things is not about a talking refrigerator, because that is the old-fashioned consumer retail world of electrical white goods. It's an archaic concept, like software bought in a plastic-wrapped box from a shelf. The genuine Internet of Things wants to invade that refrigerator, measure it, instrument it, monitor any interactions with it; it would cheerfully give away a fridge at cost. — Bruce Sterling

It's going to be really interesting to see what the heroin market does in the next two years or so. One thing you can be pretty sure of. The Afghan peasants who grow poppies won't get rich. The money will end up in places like Dubai. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

We're so intelligent now that we're too smart to survive. We're so well informed that we lost all sense of meaning. We know the price of everything, but we've lost all sense of value. We have everyone under surveillance, but we've lost all sense of shame. — Bruce Sterling

University, as institutions, pre-date the information economy by many centuries and are not for-profit cultural entities, whose reason of existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization not just download data into student skulls. — Bruce Sterling

Posthumanism offers fluidity and freedom, and a metaphysic daring enough to think a whole world into life. — Bruce Sterling

Information wants you to give me a dollar. — Bruce Sterling

David Brin is a technological determinist. He thinks that we understand the trend and we need to hop on it. I don't have any such illusions. — Bruce Sterling

He was a thing of flesh and blood, of life and death, not an Immanent Will. A tree drew strength from light, but it was not light itself. And life was a process of changing, but it was not change itself. That was what death was for. — Bruce Sterling

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. — Bruce Sterling

SCHISMATRIX is a creeping sea-urchin of a book - spikey and odd. It isn't very elegant, and it lacks bilateral symmetry, but pieces of it break off inside people and stick with them for years. — Bruce Sterling

We'll exchange rings, we'll throw rice. We'll put down roots.'
We don't have roots. We're network people. We have aerials. — Bruce Sterling

From where I sit it today, pirate country starts about ten miles east of me. Foulness, Paglesham and the Blackwater. To this day, pubs out there go silent when a stranger walks in. You're standing on their dirt, after all. A life on the ocean waves is one thing, but blood and soil are entirely another. — Bruce Sterling

A dagger is the noble weapon of Brutus. Everyone understands that tyrants fall to daggers. A bomb is a sordid modern device with many complex working parts. Only engineers understand bombs — Bruce Sterling

And yet Jane still couldn't help feeling sorry for the anticyclonic. That mutant left-handed runt of the liter... the poor damned giant evil beautiful thing... — Bruce Sterling