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."

Comments

Bruse

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite his extensive work on behalf of the Open Source community I still hold a strong distrust of Bruce.

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!

Re:IMHO

[pubjames]

Wired is an overrated collection of BS.

Wired was great once. It went down hill when the internet bubble started to grow and money went to their heads, and then went downhill as it became a catalogue of the latest gadgets to buy and puff-pieces about Hollywood movies. Until about 1996 or 7, it rocked.

Re:IMHO

[esconsult1]

Wired still rocks. Sometimes.

I find myself traveling around once per month, and its the one zine that you can totally engross yourself if you have no interruptions for an hour or so. Science. Technology. Culture. Totally directed to the geek technorati, and one of the last bastions of the long-form tech article that you'll find anywhere.

The writing is a little less cocky and in-your-face since the last few months, and that's a good thing. They've started to report more on the subject of the articles instead of telling us readers what's good for us. A subtle shift, but well overdue.

Overall I'll keep my subscription going.

translation

[bomb_number_20]

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.

Re:IMHO

[Dun Malg]

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. Same here. I read it Way Back When, and now (unfortunately) we ended up with a subscription when my wife was forced to chose something as part of subscribing to Salon.com. I tried to read the first issue last night. You can't tell where the ads start and the over-graphic-ized articles begin. There's still too few words, too much "artsy" blank space. The only difference is that now there they have more ads than they used to. It's pretty much all crap. Plus the stink of the ink fumes gave me a headache after 20-odd pages.