Seed: 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/2009_will_be_a_year_of_panic.php

ChairmanBruce:

2009 Will Be a Year of Panic

Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when conditions of production favored it. Now they don't. If it's simple to copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this kind of "property" becomes absurd.

Very long transcript of Bruce Sterling's talk at Webstock but well worth the effort.

We've got a web built on top of a collapsed economy. THAT's the black hole at the center of the solar system now. There's gonna be a Transition Web. Your economic system collapses: Eastern Europe, Russia, the Transition Economy, that bracing experience is for everybody now. Except it's not Communism transitioning toward capitalism. It's the whole world into transition toward something we don't even have proper words for.

I’m a science fiction writer, and as I became more familiar with design, it struck me that the futuristic objects and services within science fiction are quite badly designed.

Design Fiction

Bruce Sterling

Many science fiction writers, believe it or not, were capable of understanding Wittgenstein. User experience design, however, was far beyond them. It was also beyond Wittgenstein, because there are things we might imagine and speak about that we do pass over in silence because we are writing in books.

well, this got me worked up, didn't it now?

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

Thoughtful listing of key issues affecting the production and consumption of 'literature'

terrifying and exciting and wow

In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Bruce Sterling text on design, futurism and stuff.

funny, brilliant man

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"Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return." bruce sterling's optimistic piece on what we're collectively in for next.

Bruce Sterling's Manifesto for a new Millennium

Bruce Sterling lecture & interview from 2008. At the beginning of part 3 of the interview he shows (but apparently doesn't attribute) my "grown" letter D (the MDD logotype).

interesting, and dry witted discussion from bruce sterling on generative art and physical forms created using these methods that look and work in ways never seen before. processing and sturgeon's law get a particular mention. via danpaluska.