171 Quotes by 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.

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.

The reader is not a “customer” of Facebook because he never paid for Facebook. Facebook’s genuine customers are the marketers – those who pay Facebook for the hard labour of surveilling the billion people on Facebook. Facebook is one of the “Big Five” of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.

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.

I think I could write another book as surprising as this one, or even as weird as this one; but it would no longer surprise people that I can be surprising. My audience would no longer find it weird to discover that I can be weird.

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

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.

It’s a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.

I like to get paid for doing basic research, so it’s pleasant to write some nonfiction about it.