The Lonely Shores of Binary Obsolescence
From a Bruce Sterling speech -- he's one of my favorite thinkers about the present and future of technology
"We imagined that our bed was a clean, abstract, mathematical, Euclidean , platonic, computer science, rational, electronic kind of bed. But we were deceiving ourselves. The bed of digital culture is a very rumpled, dirty, makeshift, anarchic kind of bed. It smells of viruses and worms. And it is surrounded by vast, ever growing heaps of our discarded trash. The sheets are owned by other people, and they want us to rent that mattress by the hour. The digital media industry - the computer industry - looks and acts a whole lot like other forms of highly polluting, poorly regulated industries. It's got robber barons, and corruption and pollution, and rampant speculation, and, well, many other classical technical phenomena that one can easily recognize from the wildcat boom days of aviation, or automobiles, or railroads, or nuclear power"
The whole speech
"We imagined that our bed was a clean, abstract, mathematical, Euclidean , platonic, computer science, rational, electronic kind of bed. But we were deceiving ourselves. The bed of digital culture is a very rumpled, dirty, makeshift, anarchic kind of bed. It smells of viruses and worms. And it is surrounded by vast, ever growing heaps of our discarded trash. The sheets are owned by other people, and they want us to rent that mattress by the hour. The digital media industry - the computer industry - looks and acts a whole lot like other forms of highly polluting, poorly regulated industries. It's got robber barons, and corruption and pollution, and rampant speculation, and, well, many other classical technical phenomena that one can easily recognize from the wildcat boom days of aviation, or automobiles, or railroads, or nuclear power"
The whole speech
