At a recent closing keynote for a Vimeo conference Bruce Sterling delivers another wonderful ramble of subtle coherency. I love to listen to this man talk. He does at a world-class level what I am often doing in my head at an utter hobbyist level. If you ever wonder what I'm thinking, staring off into space, watch this talk and you'll probably get a good idea. I don't expect many people will watch it though as it is nearly an hour long, and for that matter it starts deceivingly slow and unfocused so I imagine most people in this hyper-distracted age will not make it past the first 10 minutes if they try. It starts to get good around the halfway mark, however you actually do need to watch the first half to get the delivery in the second half. Sterling ties it all together in the end into a futurist vision that is grounded in an application of one of Saffo's Laws: if you want to more reliably see into the future, you need to look twice as far into the past (one of the reasons I like to read about history is because I am so interested in the future).
