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A review by mburnamfink
Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years by Bruce Sterling
5.0
This is the Real Deal. Pure uncut Bruce Sterling without any of those messy complications of plot or character or setting. The Chairman just sits down and tells you what he thinks The Future is going to look like. If you don't have the right constitution for it, you might OD and throw the book across the room with a cry of "What pretentious shit!" But if your mind is open and flexible (and you've already drunk the kool-aid), this book will rock your socks.
Sterling structures this book around the soliloquy of the Melancholy Jacques from As You Like It, the one that begins "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." And goes on to discuss the seven stages of life. He covers topics from basic human biology, to education, to gadgets, war, government, business, and finally the fate of the planet, all with the Sterling-esque eyeballs kicks. This is a great book for polemical passages, curt sentences, looping elliptical paragraphs which describe our Present Reality so well that you know instantly that there is no other way to see it.
Now, as a genre futurism tends not to age well. Tomorrow Now is the exception. The book was published in 2002, and while the "predictions" are for 50 years out, we're far enough along to do some preliminary analysis, and despite the hyperactive paranoia of the early millenium Sterling gets it right. The War on Terror was a bust, because fanatical cultists/drug dealing mobs are lousy at governing. Speaking of governing, the contemporary political conflict is between people who want to keep the networks open and flowing and people who want to grandstand, which is a more apt description of the 2012 Presidential Election than anything else I've seen. Technology is not about solving your problems, but about locking you into a relationship with a company, frequently an abusive relationship (hello Facebook!). Sterling's insights are based around a depiction of human nature as messy, complicated, uncertain, torn between transcendence and banality. Everything shiny inevitably is covered in smudges and dust.
This isn't a description of The Future As a Place to Go To, or a blueprint for how to build A Future to Live In. This book is a raft for sailing the vast and chaotic sea of the present. I'm proud to call Bruce Sterling my captain, even if he would deny any such role.
Sterling structures this book around the soliloquy of the Melancholy Jacques from As You Like It, the one that begins "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." And goes on to discuss the seven stages of life. He covers topics from basic human biology, to education, to gadgets, war, government, business, and finally the fate of the planet, all with the Sterling-esque eyeballs kicks. This is a great book for polemical passages, curt sentences, looping elliptical paragraphs which describe our Present Reality so well that you know instantly that there is no other way to see it.
Now, as a genre futurism tends not to age well. Tomorrow Now is the exception. The book was published in 2002, and while the "predictions" are for 50 years out, we're far enough along to do some preliminary analysis, and despite the hyperactive paranoia of the early millenium Sterling gets it right. The War on Terror was a bust, because fanatical cultists/drug dealing mobs are lousy at governing. Speaking of governing, the contemporary political conflict is between people who want to keep the networks open and flowing and people who want to grandstand, which is a more apt description of the 2012 Presidential Election than anything else I've seen. Technology is not about solving your problems, but about locking you into a relationship with a company, frequently an abusive relationship (hello Facebook!). Sterling's insights are based around a depiction of human nature as messy, complicated, uncertain, torn between transcendence and banality. Everything shiny inevitably is covered in smudges and dust.
This isn't a description of The Future As a Place to Go To, or a blueprint for how to build A Future to Live In. This book is a raft for sailing the vast and chaotic sea of the present. I'm proud to call Bruce Sterling my captain, even if he would deny any such role.