Green one

"I think we made really serious missteps in 2000 and 2001, and we've really turned our backs on a world that could have been pleasant, delight-ful, peaceful, and technocratic. Now we face a world that is religious, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, and violent."

A long and pretty interesting
interview with the cyberpunk-theorist Bruce Sterling from Reason where he talks about everything from media to Twin Towers: of fiction and future of this green planet called Earth.

And as the great writer he is, his answers is filled with one-liners:
"Pop will eat itself. I predicted for a long time that the Internet would be a big, stinking deal when there was finally a pop song about it. Sure enough, Destiny's Child did a song that has a line about "some girl trashing me on the Internet." That's funny, but the thing that's peculiar about it is there was always a dark side. There was always the porn/mafia/drug dealer/pedophilia aspect -- the four horsemen of the apocalypse.".

He put up some sketches on the big things for the 21th century: "More like performance-enhancement devices. And I found it more interesting and more significant to talk about an intimate relationship with prosthetics and gizmos than an intimate relationship between one human being and another.".

And on the everchanging technology: "all forms of media, they are very dependent on their technological circumstances. The transformation comes when the people who understood what it was like die. I’m a transitional figure. I’m the very last generation that worked professionally on typewriters. William Gibson wrote his first book on a typewriter. I wrote two books on typewriters. I was taught to use slide rules in schools. Now it’s like having a pet trilobite."

Sterling have started an organization which is working in the environmental movement: "The central topic is the greenhouse effect as a post-industrial design problem. It’s not just about raising money for flood victims, which is one way to deal with the consequences. It’s about thinking about how we got into this mess, making people realize the mess, and exploring mechanisms -- technologies -- by which we might conceivably get out."