“[Sterling] writes in a plain, conversational style, which he interrupts with striking, apothegmatic formulations, i.e., sound-bites.… Some of these formulations sound almost too flip, but nearly all of them also seem correct or close to it.… Entertaining and stimulating.”

  —The Washington Post

  “[Tomorrow Now] maintains Sterling’s customary quick pace. His other strong points are also in evidence: a truly global world view; clear-eyed assessment of new technologies and their impacts; and a wit as tart as a food processor full of lemon rinds.… A canny guesser, Sterling, with his entertaining style and unorthodox mindset, is a great guide to tomorrow. You may or may not agree with his conclusions, but you’ll be glad you read this book.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Sterling is in the business of holding up a mirror to today and locating tomorrow somewhere in the reflection. When he gets the angle just right, the effect can be dazzling.… It’s a semi-scholarly work of nonfiction by a man who takes the future seriously.… Funny, fascinating … “Stage Seven: Mere Oblivion” is explosive apocalyptic stuff.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “The most striking aspect of this volume is its optimism.… Sterling doesn’t settle any issues, but he makes you think harder about the literal meaning of life and death. Throughout, Sterling infuses deep topics and moral quandaries with wit and insight.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Sterling provides an informative, straightforward and relatively jargon-free discussion of critical issues.… He has interesting things to say about education, politics, the economy and terrorism.… His examples are drawn from his wide reading, as well as his personal experiences as a writer and father. And he doesn’t hide his own quirky interests and obsessions.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Transforming hype into epigrams and forebodings into witty deconstructions of today’s moral panics … A tour de force … Well above ephemeral trend-spotting, Sterling’s high-IQ futurism is sure to be devoured by hackers and the remaining Silicon Valley CEOs.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Sterling’s breezy tone and insightful speculations reposition this ‘cyberpunk’ hero as a fun hybrid of Robert Kaplan and Faith Popcorn, ready to join the punditocracy and reach out to a broader readership.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Bruce Sterling

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This work was originally published in slightly different form in hardcover by Random House in 2002.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sterling, Bruce.

  Tomorrow now: envisioning the next fifty years / Bruce Sterling.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49199-2

  1. Social prediction. 2. Twenty-first century—Forecasts. I. Title.

  HM901.S74 2002

  303.49—dc21 2002024801

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  STAGE 1: THE INFANT

  STAGE 2: THE STUDENT

  STAGE 3: THE LOVER

  STAGE 4: THE SOLDIER

  STAGE 5: THE JUSTICE

  STAGE 6: THE PANTALOON

  STAGE 7: MERE OBLIVION

  AFTERWORD: TOMORROW THEN

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  In normal circumstances, I’m not the sober, serious futurist that you will see in this work. This is me as a full-blown pundit, a brow-wrinkled journalist who attends the Davos Forum, networks with Californian corporate forecasters, and mourns the tragic loss of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Most of the time I really don’t care to work that hard. Because I’m a science fiction writer.

  By trade, science fiction writers are pop entertainers. Science fiction can manage just fine without the future. Quite often the future is a drag on our market. The top contemporary earners in science fiction aren’t futuristic works, they’re fantasies—Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings. These mass entertainments have mythic plot structures, with cool special effects and fabulous set designs. People eat that stuff up, and the spin-off toy-collectible market alone is huge—yet it has nothing to do with tomorrow’s pressing realities. This book most definitely does; it assaults the future head-on. It is nonfiction, although people who “predict the future” must always tell fictions—even if they happen to tell the truth.

  Let me offer a personal example. Back in 1989 I wrote a science fiction story called “We See Things Differently.” This twenty-first-century story is narrated by a suicidal jihad Arab terrorist from Egypt who travels to Florida to kill a prominent American political figure by secretly poisoning him with a biowarfare powder.

  Come late 2001, and events of that ilk were in headlines all over. In the year 2001 I got quite a lot of e-mail about that story, much of it from people who were genuinely alarmed by my prescience. But I myself wasn’t much alarmed. I didn’t bother to tell them about the many other science fiction stories I’ve written that don’t involve any suicidal Islamic terrorists. For as this book makes clear, although I’m rather thoroughly aware of Islamic terrorists, I don’t consider them that big a deal in the long run.

  Sci-fi is supposed to be entertainment, yet futurism is a serious enterprise. Let me pull you behind the ol’ Wizard of Oz curtain and explain how futurists go about their work.

  First, you have to find somebody who’ll pay you to do it. This stark reality immediately splits “futurism” into interest groups.

  In corporate futurism (which pays the best), you’re concerned with new markets and new products. In government futurism (the most dignified), it’s about investment in basic R&D, the changing demographics of the political base, and new demands for bureaucratic public service. Military futurism is about new weapons platforms and new security threats: “thinking the unthinkable,” as Herman Kahn aptly used to put it. Police futurism (and yes, there are a few police futurists) is about figuring out how to apprehend, prosecute, and jail people involved in wicked activities not yet formally defined as crimes. Ethical futurism is about the moral conundrums posed by possible future actions such as human cloning and genetic alteration. And so forth.

  The future is the largest of all possible subjects. It encompasses everything on the far side of the ever-ticking clock. But professional futurists tend to work within narrow parameters. In Tomorrow Now I’m combining approaches. Thanks to my independent economic base as a pop entertainer, I can mess with the future in seven different ways all at once.

  Someone who could give you a detailed, fully accurate portrait of tomorrow would not be human but a wizard. Such a prophet would also be extremely dangerous and very uncanny, and would have to be arrested. I don’t pretend to be one here. At its best, futurism does what history can do. It suggests better decisions about our own actions in the context of the passage of time. Futurism teaches how to recognize profoundly changing circumstances. It offers paths forward that might have reasonable prospects of success. It offers humanity some fresh mistakes.

  We humans can never tackle time in its raw form. We can tackle only our perceptions of time: the language, the mindset, the sensibility, and the period frame of mind. Successful futurism assembles evidence of trends to aim at paradigms. Futurism is an art of re-perception. It means recognizing that life will change, must change, and has changed, and it suggests how and why. It shows that old perceptions have lost their validity, while new ones are possible.

  Futurism tends to work best in threes—not because time works in threes but because the human mind does. Good futuristic forecasts are like detective work, based in three factors: means, motive, and opportunity.

  The means are the driving forces of change. Futurists cluster most eagerly around scientific and technological changes, because their impact is so easy to spot. That’s been the case in Western society since the twelfth century, when people first understood the increased human command over forces of nature as progress. The future is no longer a synonym for “progress.” We now understand that world-changing trends strike from many angles: technical, social, economic, political, and environmental.

  Motives are found in the desires of humankind. People formally announce their intentions for change through political party platforms, but those declarations are stilted and phony. Markets supply broader hints about human desire, for people will buy what they want when they can. The most fertile ground for analyzing motives is pop culture—not because pop culture is deep but because it’s so shallow. It’s where those wishes and longings are most nakedly evident.

  Opportunity is the hole in the barriers to change. Opportunity knocks with new materials, new technologies, and new perceptions. The cold war ended when the technological base of one system defeated the other, when people realized that it had an exit. The victor’s advantages flowered slowly, but the transition was sudden.

  Contradictions and oxymorons often signal future opport
unities. They suggest that something formerly unthinkable is within humankind’s grasp. A paradox is a gap in competing systems of definition, a potential hole in the status quo, a frontier where the light of comprehension is dawning. “Science fiction” is an oxymoron. That term signals the spark gap between science and literature, an arena where cultural attitudes toward technology can be thrashed out.

  The portmanteau word “cyberpunk” pulled the same trick: it jammed together computer science and bohemian rebellion, two areas that were alien to each other yet complementary. Geeks require some trendy glamour for mainstream acceptance, while the trendy live and die through their alternative means of publicity—in this case, computer networks. Thus cyberpunk, an area of pop culture in which I worked happily for years on end. The material there was just great—one rarely saw such utter, stimulating confusion.

  Thus the futuristic trio of means, motive, and opportunity. Get those three halfway right, and you can analyze tomorrow’s perfect crime. But how to describe the result? What does it mean, and what do we make of it?

  Once again the future comes in threes: the upside, the downside, and muddling through. We can even name them after the famous prophets who champion these attitudes. They are Pangloss, Cassandra, and the Insurance Salesman.

  Dr. Pangloss is a character from Voltaire’s Candide. A very learned philosopher, he argues against the existence of evil. For Dr. Pangloss, all damage is collateral damage in a universe that is basically benign. Properly interpreted, every cloud is 90 percent silver lining.

  As a guide to the future, Dr. Pangloss has plenty to offer us. People’s fears and anxieties about their future are generally worse than undergoing the reality. People also have a marvelous facility for ignoring other people’s pain. This is where Dr. Pangloss gets his psychological acumen; as long as it’s not happening to you, how “evil” can it be? People demonstrate an impressive talent for forgetting even their own suffering. Time heals most wounds. Otherwise, no woman would have a second child; yet every generation breeds new Panglosses, who chuckle indulgently about every grief that befell their parents. Dr. Pangloss may seem a little fatuous, but there’s no denying his staying power. He enjoys his own cheery delusions and never has trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

  The drawback to a Pangloss approach is that it risks bewilderment, despair, or cynicism after any genuine setback. It’s not enough to put a brave face on events; sometimes people do have to be brave.

  Cassandra is Homer’s famous prophetess of doom, never properly heeded by ignorant scoffers. For Cassandra, the paths of future glory lead but to the grave. Nothing ventured, nothing lost. Things are far worse than they seem. The human enterprise is a ship of fools. Cassandra’s greatest benefit to futurology is in facing her harsh truth: that treasured things and circumstances will die and rot. People pay futurists to predict glittering novelties, not to mourn the solemn doom of the obsolete and the overthrown. But holes, defeats, and absences are every bit as much a part of the future as its triumphs and novelties. The twentieth century was the nineteenth with cars—and also without horses.

  Cassandra’s drawback is that she is melodramatic and eventually boring. She turned down a golden chance to embrace the god Apollo, so her children died young and she was killed by a jealous wife. It’s doom for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with Cassandra, for she has no appetite for risk. She deafens the ears that ignore her.

  The Insurance Salesman is not from myth or literature. He’s from “real life.” He cannily predicts that the ol’ routine will bumble along much as it always has. Though the flags, names, and labels often change, no “revolution” is ever as big a deal as most revolutionaries let on. No tree ever grows to the sky. The pendulum swings, but the cord rarely snaps. The Insurance Salesman doesn’t much care whether you live or you die, but he’s willing to place a bet on the odds. Thanks to his close study of decades of actuarial tables, he knows that most people like you do tend to live for a certain amount of time (absent smoking and given seat belts).

  The Insurance Salesman is the voice of common sense. His pragmatism deflates Pangloss’s hype and bucks up Cassandra’s depression. He eats bulls and shoots bears for a living. He considers himself “realistic.”

  His drawback is that he misses events that are genuinely weird. He can quote the going rate for buggy whips but never for tires. In a catastrophe, insurance companies go broke. Tomorrow’s weather is most likely yesterday’s weather—but not in all circumstances. Insurance companies are going broke today, in a rote of record-breaking floods, fires, and hurricanes.

  The victory condition for futurism is hard to define. One might imagine that it means precisely predicting some important event that nobody ever thought would happen. Then you’d become the Famous Guy Who Predicted That. But dramatic, standout events are rarely truly important. They’re symbolic, not determinative.

  As the Chinese general Sun Tzu said more than two millennia ago, the apex of military skill is not a hundred victories in a hundred battles. It’s subduing the enemy in such a thorough, silent way that it involves no war. The enemy of Sun Tzu probably doesn’t even recognize that Sun Tzu is the enemy. Very likely he considers Sun Tzu a harmless, bumbling, likable figure who needs to be indulged.

  In a similar way, the victorious futurist is not a prophet. He or she does not defeat the future but predicts the present. Futurism doesn’t mean predicting an awesome wonder; rather it means recognizing and describing a small apparent oddity that is destined to become a great commonplace. Cyberpunk involved a lyrical statement of the unthinkable (in the mid-1980s): that someday there would be a world rather like the late 1990s. When the late nineties indeed arrived, cyberpunk was not “predictive”—it was clichéd. It was banal and marked as archaic because its authors were feverishly proclaiming certain objects and attitudes that had become background noise. Cyberpunks valorized things that earned a shrug for their corniness fifteen years later. The sense of wonder has a short shelf life.

  Nothing obsolesces like “the future.” Nothing burns out quite so quickly as a high-tech avant-garde. Technology doesn’t glide into the streamlined world of tomorrow. It jolts and limps, all crutches and stilts, just like its ancient patron, the god Hephaestos.

  Tomorrow Now is a book about theory and design in an age of machines. It’s an ambitious, sprawling effort in thundering futurist punditry, in the pulsing vein of the futurists I’ve read and admired over the years: H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alvin Toffler; Lewis Mumford, Reyner Banham, Peter Drucker, and Michael Dertouzos. Colorful folks who think big, who tackle change on its largest scales, and who are quite unafraid to be loudly wrong.

  This book asks the future two questions: What does it mean? and How does it feel? That is what I would most like to know about the next fifty years. My quest is not for the future’s hardware or statistics; it’s for its sensibility, its basic attitudes and deep convictions. Its meaning, its feeling.

  When I was younger, I had the world ahead of me, a blank page. It’s different here, in my involuntarily dignified middle age. I find myself living in the thick of tomorrow. Many things that I merely imagined in the glowing dawn of my career have oozed, more or less, into today’s realities. It’s not too awfully hard to recognize the cozy, globalized consumers of Islands in the Net (1988) in today’s malls or in Fortune magazine. I’ve even lived to see my books The Hacker Crackdown (1992) and The Difference Engine (1990) taught in universities. Taught not as futurism, mind you, but as historical studies.

  For a science fiction writer, the passage of time is the gift of Pygmalion. The ancient Greek sculptor, all pitifully enamored of his own genius, saw his most imaginative work brought to life by the goddess Venus. What an irony: that sleek marble masterpiece reduced to being Mrs. Pygmalion! No longer a stunning creative feat of his imagination, icy Galatea became an everyday human being, reduced to living and breathing, laughing and sobbing, dying and rotting. Just like the rest of us.

  If I have a core conviction about the future, it’s that it isn’t made of marble. The future’s not real, yet it’s no abstraction. There’s nothing pure, cold, and timeless about the future. Nothing at all. The world and its people are very provisional. Only their absence is permanent.