Bruce Sterling - What's a science fiction writer doing hanging out with designers anyway?

"...Perhaps you don’t believe that the quest for the transcendental will cause you to fall into the pit of human squalor, going down with all hands like a struggling mastodon. But it is the higher truth. Consider Wernher von Braun, the European interplanetary rocket visionary. He aimed at the stars and hit London. What are those big, shiny space rockets for? Ideally, for escaping the grip of gravity and touching the face of the cosmos. But they’re also for annihilating children as they sleep in their beds.The harder you aim for that first goal, the more likely it is that you’ll hit the second. You want something closer to home? How about cyberspace. The early rhetoric was all about the Internet’s weightless, idealist, transcendent, light-speed, anonymous, virtualizing qualities. But look at the Internet 15 years later: It’s a filthy, carnal place. Almost every form of rip-off, fraud and human chicanery imaginable plays some kind of role on the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is riddled with holes, infested with viruses and bugs. It’s a seething, septic mess. Don’t be disillusioned. We’re getting a valuable message here. We need to create the kind of society that understands this on a bone-deep level...."

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