171 Quotes by 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.

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.

The Zaibatsu recognizes one civil right: the right to death.

Worrying about a large institution, especially when it has computers, is like worrying about a large gorilla, especially when it’s on fire.

I’m an entertainer in the military-entertainment complex.

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.

A set of Bollywood actresses are coming through Dallas soon in a live tour; I’d pay a lot to see them, but alas, I’m fully booked elsewhere.

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.

The Internet of Things makes no attempt to redress, or even address, the many real problems that the internet brought to the world. On the contrary, it’s an international effort to bring everything that wasn’t internet within the purview of the techno-elite that currently dominates the internet.