Futures thinking with Bruce Sterling
Bryan Alexander,
Jan 03, 2019
Summary and link to a talk by Bruce Sterling. There are two propositions: first, to be a futurist is to pick an audience "that agrees to value a certain aspect of futuring." Second, these audiences can be defined along the lines of Stewart Brand's Pace layers. Clearly Sterling's talk was tailored to this audience, the Long Now Foundation. Me, I would classify change along another axis as well: duration. Culture, commerce and infrastrcuture change rapidly and the changes have a short duration. Governance, culture and (aspects of) nature change slowly, and the changes endure. But my own focus is on a layer not even present - we can call it, perhaps, 'scientific and technological discovery', where the changes may be very rapid but have great duration, because these discoveries don't go away - planets, algorithms, materials: once we find them, they don't disappear, and the changes they create are more or less permanent.
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