Bruce Sterling: XXI Century, “Universities are nine hundred years old.”
A conversation with Bruce Sterling
(#TheMakingOfaNewBook. Soon in italian, here)
Well, everyone knows @Bruces. So, no presentation is needed.
More than 10 years ago you wrote “Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years”. The Stage 2 was titled “The Student”. Do you think we need to evolve our educational system to face the XXI Century?
Everybody says this, but I’m unsure about it. It seems to me that the primary purpose of education is acculturation. Even people who are profoundly ignorant have no choice but to face the twenty-first century.
A good education should provide young people with cultural context and a sense of continuity and place. Universities in particular are nine hundred years old. It’s dangerous to tamper with institutions with such long histories — it’s like trying to have a temporary picnic barbecue fire in the basement.
What do you think are the forces and trends that are driving the change?
There are thousands of forces and trends. Demographics, urbanization and environmental changes in the landscape are large and important trends that are easy to measure and see. It’s important to recognize that massive change can occur swiftly from forces that are invisible and unpredictable even in principle. One has to learn to gracefully accept surprises.
Many forces and trends are obvious, but people train themselves not to talk about them, or even to think about them. Everyone knows in principle that their parents will die and go away, but who wants to dwell on that subject? It always arrives as a painful shock, no matter how well-prepared you are.
How do you envision, ten years later, the future of the our societies?
”The future is already here, just not well distributed yet.” That’s one of the reasons why I am an eager traveller. The future rarely arrives as a shocking and absolute novelty; the things that will seem new and important in ten years are already happening now, somewhere, just in smaller places or in smaller demographics.
What do young people seem to want in areas that are well-known for exporting innovation? Young people are never in power, but in ten years they will be closer to power, so they will be bending the world in their own direction. They won’t be behaving as young people any more, but they already have certain cultural assumptions that will become mainstream behavior, decade by decade.
You said: “Privacy is dead”. So, what we have to expect?
I don’t believe that privacy is dead; the 20th century’s expectations about privacy are dead, but the rich and the spy agencies both have plenty of “privacy” now.
I expect years of cultural struggle over digital surveillance issues. Who knows what, about whom, under what conditions and circumstances? When people realize the extent of the power and money that is involved in “privacy,” the struggle will be re-defined; we probably won’t use the old term “privacy” any more, but we’ll invent some new political terms for new technical circumstances.
Can you give us a tip and a warning for the present?
Climate change was slow, but we foolishly ignored that trend long enough for it to become lethal. The wolf is past the door: the wolf is in the living room.
