Slashdot Mirror
Bruce Sterling's Final Prediction
In Bruce Sterling's final column for Wired, he summarizes the output of a survey of Net prognosticators conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The piece is peppered with Sterling's trademarked stop-you-in-your-tracks imagery. An example: "The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders."
"The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders."
This metaphor is a can of Pringles, and its vigor is enhanced by venomous ducks that flip it daily with a caterpillar that just won't shut up.
Seriously... what?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
"The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders."
Yeah, this stops me on the tracks alright - I'd rather the train run me over than read a book full of this lousy attempt at metaphor.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders.
... So I'm well aware that, like a lot of hardworking techies, they tend to be wacky geeks with unfettered imaginations. Throw 'em together in one survey, though, and they bell-curve right out.
I ruined the internet while driving a chevy, thanks very much.
To gauge the Net's trajectory, the Pew Internet & American Life Project polled 742 experts for its Future of the Internet II study.
Proof that 742 wrongs make a right!
Latewire
Who is your meth dealer, and does he make house calls?
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
Consider the possibility that rather than being a true advocate of Open Source ideals he has simply latched on to the movement to make a name for himself and put some cash into his pocket. He primarily writes very generic books praising OSS, he does not code and he does not maintain and projects. Even worse, the book themselves aren't licensed through Creative Commons, LGPL, or any other Free method. He publishes them in dead tree format through Prentice Hall, ensuring that both he and his publisher get rich by leveraging copyright.
Further, the man has had to stop down from his position at Open Source Risk Management due to conflicts over software patents. If the man were truly about OSS he would not have anything to do with Freedom stealing software patents. He also holds considerable stock in a Linux company, which is fine except that is a major conflict of risk for a person who is in a strong authority position in the community and can throw their weight behind a particular distro, getting it preferential treatment in large corporate deployments. All distros should be equal.
So think a little before you get into the typical OSS hero worship mode. Look what happened with ESR!
Wired is an overrated collection of BS. I read it for a while during the bubble extasia, found it was crap, stopped reading it. I picked up an issue (that one with the atheists) a few weeks ago to see if it had matured : in my opinion it has not. People who write for Wired should get out and do something useful.
Thomas Friedman used this visualization in a book I read about 4 years ago on Globalization. Wikipedia it.
Most people do stop in their tracks when they suffer an unstoppable urge to vomit.
"Futurists" are full of crap. The Internet is neither a technological panacea nor the beginnings of Skynet; it's just another conduit for human communication. Wired still takes themselves too seriously.
*yawn*
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders.
I think he's using that new-fangled English 2.0 thingy.
If more people wrote like this, more stuff would be worth reading. In the dismal cavern of the internet, vivid style is the only glimmer of hope remaining.
This refers to toms friedmans book ' Lexus vs the Olive Tree ' or close, look it up - its a good book.
Here is the summary:
The Lexus represents modern life, aka - globalization, the internet, computers etc etc, and our love for these things and conveinces which make our lives better.
The Olive Tree is our long standing traditions, communities, churches, families, the ties that bind us to each other and to the places we live.
I have not RTFA, but from the summary, I can see this guy is a good writer... although he does lean somewhat heavily on an informed audience.
This metaphor is actually pretty good - Our modern culture is clashing with our values, and its not pretty. Video game violence legislation, computure monotiring etc etc, all of the things we rail about on slashdot... the majority of them are a direct result of this clash.
Read the book, and understand your world better.
Don't read the book, trash authors because you don't get it, and look like an idiot.
HOUSE!
"The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders..."
William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk are saying to themselves: "Oh god, *I* don't sound like that, do I?"
Give the guy a break, and look a little deeper into whats
been said. The jabs at drug use and batshit insane are
unwarranted..
I dont know, but i kinda understand what he had to say
it doesnt make me insane or a drug user..
All he did was invent the stirling engine... and even then he wasn't smart enough to spell his own name correctly when he named it after himself!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
In the future, "Wired" will not suck.
I think I still have some early vintage copies from when it first got published in the UK (~1995?). Any takers?
No, thought not.
That isn't a good thing...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
So he predicts the internet is basically unpredictable. Not exactly earth shattering news, is it. That's something most normal people have known for quite some time.
The only thing that's remained constant for the past 10 years of the Net, is the ubiquity of pr0n. Homepages have become blogs, search engines have become advertising media. Not much else has stayed the same, although there is prolly plenty of amateur crap still kicking about.
Still at least he didn't mention Web 2.0 or heaven forbid Web 3.0.
I got it! I got it! Here's my interpretation of his little... interpretation...
The internet is the olive tree. In the bubble, people thought the internet was going to solve everything- probably even cure cancer. Overall, techies saw it as a great equalizer, bringing 'peace' and 'equality' to the world. Still with me?
The Lexus is big business, big money and big investments, turning the internet into tv and basically ruining it while squabbling with one another over who gets to 'own' whatever part of things.
The Lexus colliding with the olive tree is the clash of ideals between how corporations think the internet should be run and, you know, the rest of us.
He sounds pretty pissed off and worn out to me. I can't say I blame him, though.
Of course, I didn't even read TFA.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
I like the over-wrought imagry Sterling produces. Schismatrix is still my favorite work.collection of his.
Blar.
Isn't a very good metaphor really, most cars do not spontaneously explode on impact so it's not very realistic to suppose the Orchard would set on fire following a near by car accident.
So technology changes stuff.
Yeah, thats deep.
And more people will write blogs no one will read.
Thanks for using all those words to say pretty much nothing.
And that "Lexus/Tree" metaphor is horrible, like it's Maya Angelou bad.
In Bruce Sterling's final column for Wired...
YES! If Bruce with his strained hybole and just absolutely horrific writing are gone maybe I can read Wired again! Seriously - Bruce writes like the tech version of the trash my 13 year old wanna-be-goth niece reads. Bad. Much bad.
The secret to creativity is to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
A bad metaphor is like a leaky screwdriver.
/. sig)
(shamelessly stolen from someone's
This just in: there are >1 persons named Bruce.
This is Bruce Sterling, the sci-fi author, not Bruce Perens, the OSS advocate.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
are slashdotters really this lazy?....wait dont answer that.
Let me introduce you all to a site you may have heard of in passing. Wikipedia, you should check it out sometime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lexus_and_the_Oli ve_Tree
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization was a book by Thomas Freidman.
Reminds me why I don't read Sterling. Just because you can string a lot of images together doesn't mean you should string a lot of images together.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
(no, this isn't off-topic; Bruce Sterling's married to Jasmina Tesanovic, an outstanding "citizen of the ghost republic", aka Serbia, and I believe has spent a fair bit of time over there recently.)
(Hey, doesn't Slashcode cope with Unicode or non-ASCII charsets? shame!!)
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
I never make predictions, and I never will.
Whatever.
http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/lexusolivetree.htm
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
His metaphor is clearly a prediction of war. Olive trees are native to the Mediterranean region, and Lexus is of course Japanese. So it is obvious he believes there will be a war between Japan and various Mediterranean countries, resulting in widespread destruction.
I'm just not quite sure what that has to do with the internet.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Down this AC poster, he's not even talking about the right person.
How it got +2 interesting I'll never understand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Sterling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_PerensWired is an overrated collection of BS.
If there was a single adjective I'd use to describe Wired, it would be "inconsistent". Because some works of pure genius came out of Wired, too.
For example, The Transparent Society is perhaps the best, clear, concise description of the privacy issues we face, and has the sharpest resolution picture of the best way to approach it.
Seriously - this article was prescient when it came out (now almost exactly 10 years ago!) and has altered my opinions about freedom and privacy forever.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It could just be a mishmash written by an overrated writer who is trying too hard.
Or maybe I should start hoarding extra virgin olive oil.
And extra virgins.
I predict that the internet means the death of the copyright system. It also means the death of the US dollar and the financial system - the games that they play with lying to people about the value of their money are about to come to an ugly end thanks to the information age. The internet also means terrorisim all over the world as cultures everywhere continue to come into unrestricted, unmonitored, and uninhibited information many will lash out at the US and US culture as they experience a culture shock of their own. It is even a culture shock in the US, which for the most part was allready adapted to unrestricted information in the press. I also predict the eventual death of google, ebay, youtube, and more as these services will eventually be all pure p2p software. I predict that it also means a massive migration around the world of talent and culture, as western engineers find out that they live like a king making 30K in Chile rather than 130K in the US. Also, future workers at McDonnalds may be robots remotely controlled from India. This will break down all immigration controls and tend to even out all pay globally.
it is not his final prediction. Just the last regular article for Wired. He will still write, blog and otherwise contiue prognostication in print. It should have said final Wired article.
Sterling is not quite the shilling today ;).
As a number of people have pointed out, The Lexus and the Olive Tree refers to a book on globalization by Thomas Friedman. While I actually like your interpretation of Sterling's metaphor, perhaps more than what he actually seemed to mean, it's still wrong.....
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
The thing is basically free, ad-supported. (and more than 1/2 ads more than likely. When I rip those that can be out of mine it suffers serious shrinkage). So saying you'll keep your subscription going doesn't mean much.
Someday we'll all be negroes
it's at least 50% ads, and full of movie-of-the-moment promotion as you say, now; they've 'monetized it' fully. This latest issue I found barely anything worth reading.
They're kind of on the edge of being not worth reading anymore, for me.
Someday we'll all be negroes
Sterling seems to be in a place where I bet many modern authors are: information overload. In past, researching a topic used to take a good deal of time wherein the author doing the research had plenty of time to formulate their own opinion and mull over possibilities. Now, the information that most "futurists" would need to produce their works are no longer difficult to reach.
In fact there are so many self proclaimed futurists, and geek "cutting edge" sites that the opposite seems to be the case. You can find data backing nearly any argument or future view because of the sheer quantity of research material available at your fingertips.
When are you people going to learn! It's not a Lexus, it's a series of tubes.
...it's just another conduit for human communication.
Just like spoken language or the printed word. Don't underestimate the influence of a (IMO) sizable improvement in humanity's ability to communication.
"It is better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees." - Albert Camus
Requirements to wikipedia reference = Failure of reference.
From the little I read of his article it's not "stop you in the tracks" visualization, it's "I know what I'm talking about, figure it out, you uneducated peon" type of bullcrap that the "elite" use all the time. Of course ask them about it and you can usually expect more belittling. (not saying he'd do it, but most of the people who try this imagery do).
On the other hand it's indicitive of a problem so many people have (and likely why he might be "leaving", personally just from one article I'd like to think he's being fired, but then again I am not a huge wired fan in the first place so I don't know) If you only use imagery of books you'd agree or disagree with, the only person who gets the imagery is people who hold similar ideas as you (or the exact opposite). So it's basically like preaching to the quoir. Except this is preaching to the preachers. \
I skimmed many a screenful of incoherent ranting before it even dawned on me that the people here might not have heard of Thomas Friedman... don't you guys ever read anything but slashdot discussions? Everyone loves to complain about Thomas Friedman (his latest work pro-globalization cheer-leading being "The World is Flat"). In the circles I hand out in, the fact that he regularly has op-ed articles in the New York Times is one of the things people point to show the paper's pro-corporate bias (if Paul Krugman hadn't waited until after he was hired before he veered left, there's no way they would've ever published him...).
Any way, Sterling's a great writer, but this is a fairly lame article, as is typical for slashdot (no wonder I, etc.): they front page pointers to some of his worst work. I must admit that I don't know that Sterling has been in very good form of late... you might take a look at some of his Viridian Notes, though the last one is a pretty crazed, over the top rant about the board of Exxon being put on trial when people realize how much bullshit they've been spewing.
I gather that he wants out of the column business to get back to fiction writing. And the latest issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction has a pretty decent story from him: "Kiosk".
You are in a very dark room. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
My Slashdot Journal! YAY!
Can BadAnalogyGuy save us?
He's too much of a writer. Instead of making a point, he makes phrases and allegories.
I appreciate his sci-fi enormously, but his other writings get old fast.
Make your point, then shut up.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
His ability to whip out long chains of association shows up in his books as an ability to sling possibilities out into a coherent, believable, near-to-mid-term future world. You're missing out if you haven't read him. IMO he's the best writer for that kind of SF.
Someday we'll all be negroes
Okay. Might as well repost this little thingy...
_A parable of Thomas Friedman_
Day 1: "Holding this lit firecracker in my hands is going to be awesome."
Day 2: "Harry says I shouldn't do it, but he's just a dumb crybaby who doesn't want me to have any fun, so his opinion can be ignored."
Day 3: "Now it's true that this could be a bad idea that will blow off my fingers, but as long as I have a magical gauntlet on my hand, it'll be cool! Right now we just need to give it time."
Day 4: "It's come to my attention that my friend George hasn't gotten me that magical gauntlet I was talking about, but on the other hand, it's important to note that Harry is a big doodyhead. This firecracker-in-the-hand thing is still a great idea, and everyone who's smart like me agrees."
Day 5: *BANG!* "AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGH! My FINGERS!"
Day 6: "See, I told you guys back on Day 3 that this wasn't going to work. I'm so smart and visionary! Unlike that dumb hippie Harry."
The Moral of the Story: Once you get into the elite pundit class, no amount of intellectually dishonest, self-obsessed douchebaggery will ever get you kicked out.
- mantar
It's always good to find proof that, whatever dumb things you've done in your life, there's someone else out there who is probably surprised to see the sun rise each morning. Thankyou, AC, I now feel like a fucking genius in comparison with you.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Bullshit. Friedman's book made the NYT best sellers list in '99. The hermetic "elite" you invoke is a more substantial population than you presume.