Bruce Sterling is the Nostradamus of the tech world. As a noted science fiction writer, Wired blogger, design instructor and Futurist, Sterling is often called upon to glance into his crystal ball and offer up prophecies at technology, science, and design conferences the world over. So was the case at the recent Vimeo Festival held in NYC where Sterling opined on the ultimate existential quandary of our time: Why is Andrea Allen funny? (We still don’t really know why, but the explanation had something to do with The Dick Van Dyke Show and being ultra meta—i.e. we like Andrea because she reminds us of ourselves, and more than anything, we’re all total narcissists and love ourselves…we think that was the general thrust of it, if not exactly verbatim.)When he did get around to some future forecasting, Sterling’s view was just about as depressing as Douglas Coupland’s, if considerably more shrouded in philosophy and, on the whole, vaguer. It went something a little like this:"What is our world going to look like in 10 years? It’ll be as different as 2001. What can you say about it that’s an absolute given? Some things, but people don’t pay attention to it:1. The population is going to be older. I can just absolutely tell you that. Lot’s more gray-haired people. That doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? But it’s the truth.
2. The climate will be more fucked up. Just worse, like 10 years’ worse.
3. The odds are pretty good that cities will be somewhat bigger.So, you’re going to be living in a bigger town, you’re gonna be 10 years older, and things are going to be dirtier, and you’re going to be worried about the sky. And you’re probably going to have more bandwidth, more storage and more processing power, but you’re not going to be like Jane Jetson. You can just write that off. Don’t even go there."As for the next 10 years? What will they look like?Sterling describes the following 10 years as a period of uncertainty and “Atemporality,” characterized by a feeling of being outside the normal timestream, no longer rooted firmly in the past, present or future. Sterling waxed philosophic on this topic once before, at the Transmediale conference in Berlin where he was also invited to forecast the future earlier this year. When we caught up with Sterling at the Vimeo Festival, we had a few questions about this period of atemporality and what this moment of “old-fashioned futurity” means for artists and creative individuals.
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2. The climate will be more fucked up. Just worse, like 10 years’ worse.
3. The odds are pretty good that cities will be somewhat bigger.So, you’re going to be living in a bigger town, you’re gonna be 10 years older, and things are going to be dirtier, and you’re going to be worried about the sky. And you’re probably going to have more bandwidth, more storage and more processing power, but you’re not going to be like Jane Jetson. You can just write that off. Don’t even go there."As for the next 10 years? What will they look like?Sterling describes the following 10 years as a period of uncertainty and “Atemporality,” characterized by a feeling of being outside the normal timestream, no longer rooted firmly in the past, present or future. Sterling waxed philosophic on this topic once before, at the Transmediale conference in Berlin where he was also invited to forecast the future earlier this year. When we caught up with Sterling at the Vimeo Festival, we had a few questions about this period of atemporality and what this moment of “old-fashioned futurity” means for artists and creative individuals.