Bruce Sterling is one of the people I follow. What I mean by that is this: Whatever he has to say, whatever he's up to, whatever he's into, I need to know about it because Bruce Sterling has a time-tested knack for understanding what will happen next and is able to articulate this point of view in a fascinating manner. I've been priviledged to hear him speak, in person and, at first, I was put off by the way he was reading his presentation but then I realized that no one could be that smart, that concise and that droll off-the-cuff or even working from an outline.
And so, in what has become an annual gift to the world, Mr. Sterling has published his annual report on the state of the world. His platform for the address is well.com, a venerable space on the internet. Here's a sample from this year's musings:
I'm a bohemian type, so I could scarcely be bothered to do anything
"financially sound" in my entire adult life. Last year was the first
year when I've felt genuinely sorry for responsible, well-to-do people.
Suddenly they've got the precariousness of creatives, of the
underclass, without that gleeful experience of decades spent
living-it-up.
These are people who obeyed the social contract and are *still*
getting it in the neck. The injustice of that upsets me. The
bourgeoisie who kept their noses clean and obeyed the rules, I never
had anything against them. I mean, of course I made big artsy fun of
them, one has to do that, but I never meant them any active harm. I
didn't scheme to raise a black flag and cut their throats because they
were consumers.
I even fret about the bankers. Seventeen percent of the US works in
financial services. That's a lot. I've got friends and relatives who
work in those industries. I frankly enjoy tossing myself into
turbulent parts of life, because I'm a dilettante who bores easily, but
jeez, bankers are supposed to be the ultimate humorless brown-shoe
crowd. They're not supposed to wake up on a sleeping roll and scrounge
breakfast.
If the straights were not "prone to hostility" before that experience,
they might well be so after it, because they've got a new host of
excellent reasons. The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom
Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata. It's
like somebody burned their church.
I keep remembering the half-stunned, half-irritated looks on the
faces of those car execs when they were chided for flying their company
jets to Washington to beg. I felt sorrow for them. Truly. These
guys are the captains of American industry at the top of the food
chain. Of course they fly corporate jets. Corporate jets were
*invented* for guys like the board of General Motors. And now they're
getting skewered for that by a bunch of punk-ass Congressmen they can
usually buy and sell?
*That's* the issue at stake, a few jets? General Motors built the
aviation industry in World War II. General Motors aircraft pounded
Nazi Germany into a flaming ruin. Here they get this off-the-wall,
total-hokum act of peanut-gallery gotcha humiliation about the
corporate airplanes they've used for fifty years. That must have felt
surreal, even nauseating.
There are going to be so many nettling, humiliating experiences for
similar people, people congenitally unable to laugh at themselves and
roll with the punches. Nowhere is safe any more, not even the
mirrorglass skyscraper, not even the boardroom.
I wish I could make them feel safe, but since I've lived in parts of
the planet with no-kidding, real-deal economic collapse... I dunno,
does reading Dmitri Orlov feel safe? I love that guy's writing, I
really get it about him, but the prophets of doom have so little
comfort to offer people. Last thing I heard about Orlov the guy had
chucked it and was living on a small boat.
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