The Secret Library  »   Bruce Sterling on the Uncertainty of the Future

Bruce Sterling is once again weighing in on the state of the world in 2010 over at The Well, and this year, he had this comment from Cory Doctorow:

"Bruce, you're godfather to my daughter Poesy. As I type this, I am
sitting in the driveway with her while she finishes her nap in the back
of the rental car we picked up on our Xmas holiday with the rest of
our family. I listen to her snoring away back there, and I think about
the enormity of fatherhood, and I realize that I've never been
confident enough in the future to make any kind of long-time plans...
Instead, I've always treated the future as a kind of unpredictable
lurching thing, and tried to keep my stance loose and wide so that I
could adjust my center of gravity from moment to moment as it shifted
beneath me. As a father, that strategy seems somehow irresponsible. Now
I'm thinking about college funds, about my will, about where I'll end
up living, all this stuff, and I realize that in order to do any of
this I have to have some coherent picture of where the future is
heading. If you were in my shoes, what concrete, discrete, individual
steps would you take on behalf of your snoring little toddler? "

The following two points in Bruce's made me both chuckle and shudder with their accuracy:

"*Okay, first, the college funds. Cory, you're a guy who rather
famously dropped out of college. I completed college with a lucrative
degree in (wait for it) JOURNALISM. There are people coming out of
colleges now with humanities degrees and debtloads of $100K. What
precise benefit are you trying to confer here? You want your kid to go
to some college? Move to a country like Italy where they've got FREE
college, and people don't leave school till they're 28 years old.

*Okay, you've treated your future as an "unpredictable lurching
thing..." and now you're all morose about that... You and your
generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of "disruptive
innovation," "disintermediation," "offshoring," "small pieces loosely
joined," "de-monetization," "plug and play," "the network as a
platform"? Of course you've heard of all that crap, because you've
been tub-thumping it your entire adult life, but what the hell did you
think that was all about? Did you think you were gonna bend every
effort to virtualize reality, and then get a gold railway-retirement
watch and a safe place to park the cradle? Guys with stacks of gold
bars and working oil wells don't have any stability now! Much less
guys like you, who move their fingers up and down on keyboards for a
living. "

What sorts of things have you concerned about the coming year, five years, ten years?

I've been at my current job for 11 years now. You would think I have some feeling of security. I look to the future and wonder if I'll still be doing this or something else. I look at my 401k and wonder, will it be enough? Should I boot camp MCSE or MySQL? Nothing's secure, nothing's certain. Then I look at my family and think, there's gotta be a way. I'm looking. I'm still looking. Maybe I should work on the dual citizenship in Italy that my godmother keeps going on about. Do you think they take 43 year olds in Italian colleges?