Bruce Sterling Opens LIFT

Nikolas + Carla = black swan factor

The High Impact of the Unexpected

I love Bruce Sterling. His book Disruption has stayed with me for over a decade. His predictions about the way technology will create even more manipulative political campaigns have come to pass. Think: the President-elect with an ear bud connected to feedback system in realtime that tells him what to say to keep the audience happy… Think: the shadowy power behind the throne with their hand fair-up-the-clackers of the puppet king.

The way he described how trust and reputation would be created and served online have come to pass. Think Couchsurfing or epinions and how we now expect our online karma to run over old-world dogma. Hyperlinks keep subverting hierarchy and our actions speak louder than our job title. New kinds of community can emerge.

Brucey baby’s laconic, voice of reason tells it like it is. 2008 is going to be a crap year, he says. Nothing to really inspire or motivate us there. Sorry. So he takes us on a random riff about this and that, building rapport and entertaining.

It’s great to see the work of futurism and journalism brought into an idiosyncratic person style that engages you and makes no false claims to empirical science.

What is truth and reality anyway? Outside of the physiological fact of the way hearts and lungs function, most claims to truth are subjective anyway, so why try and pretend otherwise. So why not take part in truth yourself….
I will always trust the word of someone who puts themselves fully into the frame. I want to know the context, the editor.

Bruce knows what’s going on in the world and has a great skill for feeding it back to us in a way we want to hear.

He said Gates would rather try and cure malaria than stay at Microsoft pretend Microsoft is interesting. There were a range of insightful remarks in his opening.

Then the Sarkozy / Bruni obsession began. Entertaining, well thought out, well communicated. The central point being, they are a “Black Swan” (”a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations”) when looked at as a futurist. That their rise and rise to power in 2008 marks a point in time we should be looking at. His scenarios involving the axes of ambition and publicity led to a central predication about the Empress Bruni becoming a central figure in the world, bringing together the power of celebrity and politics like perhaps never before.

I agree with him. I’m just not sure why it is was a keynote for LIFT. There are a great many other topics that might have been more relevant. Mind you, knowing Bruce, the Black Swans might just turn out to be flying into our digital Twin Towers.

And I can’t finish without mentioning my hometown Perth is the only place you can find a real black swan, bizarrely. But I found a pair in Norfolk the other day. What is it with these birds? They’re starting to follow me all around the world. Is it a sign to phone my Mum?