171 Quotes by Bruce Sterling

"It wasn't until I assembled these texts that I realized that they fell naturally into thematic sections. They're concerned with different fields of study, but you no longer have to be a polymath to blur those. You can type in a keyword and gigantic, world-spanning machines will instantly blur them for you."

"In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It's brilliant and you don't realize the damage until its too late."

"I don’t think there’s much distinction between surveillance and media in general. Better media means better surveillance. Cams are everywhere."

"Don’t become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and ull. Become a thoroughly spiky person."

"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."

"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."

"Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it’s the truth. It won’t go away because we cover our eyes. THAT is cyberpunk."

"Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it’s built on literal sand."

"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."

"Stern social measures had to be adopted to keep entire populations from disintegrating in an orgy of plenty."