The WELL: inkwell.vue.171: Bruce Sterling: Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years

#111: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 17 Jan 03 16:03

Fri, 17 Jan 2003 16:03:00 PST

Heh. Pomo detritus. [Read entire topic]

#110: Grant Barnes (pyrus-malus) Fri 17 Jan 03 11:48

Fri, 17 Jan 2003 11:48:00 PST

re: 108: ?? [Read entire topic]

#109: Berliner (captward) Fri 17 Jan 03 11:01

Fri, 17 Jan 2003 11:01:00 PST

Elvis has left the building. [Read entire topic]

#108: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 17 Jan 03 10:48

Fri, 17 Jan 2003 10:48:00 PST

It's like Massumi says, "Yearning is a tendency without end; it is unexpiring, unself-consuming. It is a supplementarity of paradoxical movements, a kind of excess that is neither being nor surplus-value, an excess that can neither be identified or calculated, even fleetingly, let alone purchased or accumulated--that can be only embodied. Becoming is virtuality detached from the universality of capitalized specification and returned to the body as local site of global deviation. It is the exemplary incarnation of singularizing excess. Becoming is the temporality of the future-past woven into a de-ontology of the unworkable: the pragmatics of postcapitalist affectivity."

And Burroughs: "Cry of newborn baby gurgles into death rattle and the crystal skull. THAT IS WHAT YOU GET FOR FUCKING."

Adios! [Read entire topic]

#107: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 17 Jan 03 07:01

Fri, 17 Jan 2003 07:01:00 PST

Now back home. Whew.

After three days of ceaseless ranting and charisma hemorrhage, I am pitifully hoarse and afflicted with a bad cold. I probably got it off that cellphone I borrowed. They SPREAD GERMS you know. The microwaves COOK YOUR BRAIN AND YOUR EYEBALLS, too.

My, am I ever feeling my futurist 21st-century age today. I'm gray haired and middle-aged and feeble and so, so respectable. I'll just be tottering along now, tomorrow-now trending rapidly toward yesterday-then. Somewhere, a nice chrome and matte-black cyber-walker awaits me.

Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow are here. You must listen to these younger folk, ladies and gentlemen. They've got a lot on their minds.

Adios. [Read entire topic]

#106: Martha Soukup (soukup) Thu 16 Jan 03 20:59

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 20:59:00 PST

E-mail from Tom Georgoulias:

Or someone will just paypal their whole family's whuffie to buy it, then put copies of Cory's soul on a P2P net to try and get their whuffie back up.

I read that Bruce will be at BookPeople in Austin, TX on Tuesday, Jan 21st, at 7:00PM. Is that the end of the book tour? [Read entire topic]

#105: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 16 Jan 03 19:29

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 19:29:00 PST

Tomorrow is the last *official* day for this interview, but of course everybody's welcome to hang out here until 2012 or the end of history, whichever comes first. Meanwhile everybody should drop by here and jam tomorrow, we'll party like it's 1999. [Read entire topic]

#104: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 16 Jan 03 19:21

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 19:21:00 PST

It's the guy who SENDS the most email that gets fired! [Read entire topic]

#103: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 16 Jan 03 18:31

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 18:31:00 PST

<scribbled by jonl Thu 16 Jan 03 19:19> [Read entire topic]

#102: Martha Soukup (soukup) Thu 16 Jan 03 17:04

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 17:04:00 PST

E-mail from J. M. Brenner:

I caught your reading at Stacey's in SF yesterday, and I'm afraid that while the Q&A period struck me as vintage Sterling, I'm afraid that the paean to your cell phone didn't go over that well with me.

The dark side of cell phones is that they appear to be astoundingly addictive for some people, to the point that they regularly risk their lives to go driving around chatting on them, with that distinctive cell-phone user look: eyes glazed over, grinning to themselves, cruising on auto-pilot. I used to try and make "hang it up" gestures at these people, but it's no use: they can't see you.

What data there is on the subject shows that this behavior is "as dangerous as drunk driving", but these people either haven't gotten the word, or are engaging in some serious denial.

So for you, "cell phones" are symbols of being connected, but for me they're a sign of being dangerously disconnected.

And further, I think it's pretty demonstrable that increasing connectivity is not *always* a good idea. c.f. Kevin Kelley's reporting on "Kauffman's Law" in Chapter 20 of "Out of Control".

This is a point that seems intuitively obvious to me, because I've worked at jobs that were nearly impossible to do because of the extreme quantity of internal email you needed to read. (It isn't so much "the guy who reads the most email won't be fired" it's more like "the guy who reads the most email should really get the hell out of there.") [Read entire topic]