Bruce Sterling
American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his seminal work on the Mirrorshades anthology.
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"Mashups [...] nobody's going to listen to mashups in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They're like "The Monster Mash." They have no musical staying power. You're pursuing a phantom there. It's bad music, I mean, it's not bad— it's a pastiche, it's like magazine collage— which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that that's like tremendous creative work— No! It's a tremendous creative power— and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously good. And we need a little bit of aesthetic honesty in confronting things like this. Just because it's new, and people with laptops can do it, and get away with it, and find an audience for it, does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon."
As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute.
The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up.
These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.
Obsolescence and death, the reign of the archaic, the abandoned, and the corny: Really, if you saw Windows 3.0 on the sidewalk outside the building, would you bend over and pick it up?!?
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