Re: <nettime> Cyberpunks who were right about everything, but so what

On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 5:52 PM Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com> wrote:

The worst we suffer is guys on nettime imagining that we disappeared culturally, just because we’re old.

*Because we ARE old. It’s 2019 and us cyberpunks are white-haired people in our sixties and seventies.

*Or read some CHINESE science fiction writers, who are of severe tactical-media interest because they’ve got blockbuster Chinese sci-fi novels and blockbuster Chinese FX movie spectacles, not to mention Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.

If you don’t know where I am on 2019, it’s because I don’t WANT you to know.

BruceS

Dear Bruce,

No disrespect intended. I know where you are, at least in cyberspace and sometimes on terra firma because you write about it. I read avidly everything by you I come across. But you know what it's like on nettime -- hard to stick to an argument.

I wrote in to yet another beef about Facebook. There was a time when banging on about Zuck was a public service and, although I have wondered about the energy he has put into it, I would say that Gert has been vindicated in doing that. I wrote to him at the weekend to say so. But the project was always rather specialized and I came to think of it (and the founders of nettime) as part of a cohort who flourished before the millennium and have been sidelined since.

My friend Patrice, whose contributions here are usually at least in part whimsical, replied by disputing the form the coming war will take and appeared to draw solace from the fact that "our side" (implicitly you and friends) was right all along. I have no time for nostalgia in politics and let him have it in abbreviated form. The sub-clause that would have exempted you from over-classification had no room there.Sorry.

What's this about being old? I can give you more than a decade and I think there is still life in the old dog. Us rich old farts -- I was born in the war and came of age in the year of the Beatles US tour -- have more freedom to tell the truth than most. I have a sixteen year old daughter and have more hope in her generation that she has in our world. There's still a lot to do, even if it isn't always in public.

I agree with you about Chinese sci-fi. I am off to Shanghai in May. I have been working on a science fiction murder mystery since 2005. I love the genre and your work. I was not consigning you and your ilk to oblivion, but wondering what new might be coming out of your fertile mind that I may have missed.

Keith

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