inkwell.vue.430 : Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2012
permalink #5 of 33: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Wed 4 Jan 12 18:02
FUTURE CHANGE AS SEEN BY CYBERCULTURE
1. Smartphones! They make the Silicon Valley of the 1980s look like
the railroads of the 1880s!
2. The almighty Moore's Law commands acceleration -- not just in
processors, but also in storage and bandwidth, hurrah! If anything
alse can possibly be made to act in accordance with Moore's Law, go for
it! Brains, genes, teledildonics, anthrax, kidporn, we don't care,
double it in 18 months!
3. SOPA / PIPA / War on General Computation! No compromise with the
enemy even if they're us!
4. Tactical Media / Occupy / Arab Spring /Facebook-Twitter Revolution!
Any revolution's great as long as our gadgets are construed to cause
it!
Quietly ditch all former enthusiastic changes once so similar to 1,
2, 3, 4... These former digital megatrends are to be tossed flaming
into the memory hole: any "personal" computing that isn't "social';
anything "Web 2.0;" any low-bandwidth remnants of Web 1.0; information
superhighways, software that came in boxes; Blackberries, Nokias, IE6,
etc etc etc.
That stuff's all "Obsolete Before Plateau," as the Gartner Hype Cycle
decrees.