The Null Device
Bruce Sterling's
letter from the 2035 depression:
It's hard to feel all boisterous and ebullient about our national
prospects when topsoil from Omaha is airborne and sifting down on
Washington, D.C. California is full of migrating Okies again,
only this time the Okies have laptops, Web pages, and cell phones.
It's basically a Grapes of Wrath thing, only they're logging
frequent-flier miles.
By your standards, today's society is extremely businesslike. Basically,
there's no place to be but in business. Government is in the
"administration business." Artists are in the "culture industry." Doctors
and nurses are "biotech entrepreneurs." Cops are "private security
professionals." Scientists work for "industrial R&D." Academics are
"career-training professionals." Helpfully, we tend to shoot all our
lawyers, unless they are "intellectual-property lawyers," in which case
they basically behave like Mafia dons.
we never quite made it to Mars, because manned space flight has
no real commercial potential. But it turned out to be surprisingly
useful to plan how to settle on Mars. Because if you can settle Mars,
the Gobi desert is a suburb.
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