Comments on: The Poet Laureate of Web 2.0

By: Morgan

Morgan — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:54:38 +0000

I was surfing the web for cyberfunk pics and game across the face of the tickler of minds Bruce Sterling in your blog. I hadn't been able to find his orations anywhere, and here they are all annotated with very chic disclaimers. Your discourse was beautiful. I much appreciated your parallels in music, as it's similar in spirit in the way Sterling's touched the perspectives of the masses. And The Zombies are great. Overall I wanted to thank you for posting this, it was a pleasure to read. ps. I tried running a campaign to get the dude inducted into the science fiction hall of fame over here in Seattle, here's my flyer : http://img206.imageshack.us/my.php?image=finishedbrucewg0.png

By: Marcus

Marcus — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:10:47 +0000

One piece of the whole that Software culture is missing is the lack of sexual rewards granted to its heroes. So far, only Kevin Rose is getting laid. Seriously though, we need more women to join in. They can help. With the UX, at the very, very least:)

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 15:41:55 +0000

Believe it or not, I hadn’t actually thought through the full repurcussions of the metaphor: that software (at least the web and open source varieties, maybe) is to the contemporary counter culture what music was to that of the 60s. Your description of what they have in common is very eloquent: they’re the place where “our shared optimism and energy for collective change is organizing itself.”
I think that part of the reason that no contemporary counter culture ever feels as coherent and kind of magical as that of the 60s (or any past counter culture for that matter, like 80s cyberpunk itself) is that, being contemporary, they’ve yet to fade into myth. Any counter culture that you can actually get your hands on and experience on the ground is always going to be more complicated, piecemeal, and bric-a-brac than one that’s had a chance to get its edges and reality burnished off it by time and forgetting.
Give it a few years and all that’ll be left will be things like Sterling’s 2006 Keynote. See if this moment doesn’t feel whole then in retrospect. Doesn’t the nineties bubble era already have that revolutionary countercultural patina?

By: Marcus

Marcus — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 15:04:46 +0000

Greg, this is a classic Ideas for Dozens post, and so you. What I like is the tricky transit from using Rock n’ Roll as merely a handy metaphor for web culture, to an equation the two.
Software is to our generation what music was to the boomers, huh? You believe that don’t you? I do too, almost. It’s where our shared optimism and energy for collective change is organizing itself. But “generation” in this context really means counterculture and no counter culture will ever be so whole again.