I live-tweeted Bruce Sterling’s talk at SXSW Interactive. Here are the tweets… in reverse chronological order, so read ’em backwards.
- “Women of Italy, cast away all the cowards from your embraces.” SXSW looks like a new world because it’s got women in it.
- Closing with a Garibaldi quote. “I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle, and death.” And people went for that.
- This is an era of organized deception! Days of rage, baby. Be realistic, demand the impossible.
- “Move to Austin, take over the town!”
- You need to take power, millenials. I’ll vote for ya! You need a global youth movement.
- Boomers, shut up! What you should study now is collaborative consumption, technomadism.
- Young people are the victims of a decaying status qo.
- They pretend to govern, we pretend to obey.
- Who would save us from the BP? We’re incapable of rapid deciseve action, and the world demands that sometimes.
- What worries me is the response to things that take courage and virtuosity and passion to work out, like disaster response.
- Obese people in the US: “Imagine if the Statue of Liberty looked like that.” It brings out one’s inner Bill Hicks.
- Catholic Church borgia-like devil’s bargain with Berlusconi to get the legislation they want.
- Republicans: “a joke to anyone outside the range of Fox News.”
- People don’t want to throw Berlusconi out, because they fear some kind of economic upheaval.
- Talking about Berlusconi – he’s a head of state behaving like Hugh Hefner. This is a big deal in Italy.
- ExxonMobil are not the only political malefactors, they’re just the best connected.
- ExxonMobil is the personification of corporate evil. (applause)
- You cn do whatever you want to a microbe and no hippie will show up with a protest sign. Microbes are not in the Bible.
- Beautiful social network for synthetic biology: http://bit.ly/ei4Wja (expand)
- Craig Ventner was at SXSW because he’s trying to reframe 20c genetic engineeering as 21stc synthetic biology.
- In our society, we don’t have any passionate virtuosity.Our political situation is the opposite,disgusted incompetence.
- We’ve got a series of problems that are poorly recognized.
- Passionate virtuosity…. the ideas in Worldchanging 2.0 are passionate but lack virtuosity.
- Bruce Sterling shows Worldchanging 2.0 (the book) at sxsw.
- As a design critic, I criticize stuff that doesn’t exist yet.
- Polarizing brand management. Culture wars. Politics from POV of a design critic.
- All the political language has been rendered toxic.
- “There are people here who are younger than the event.”
- At Southby, science fiction authors talk like they know what’s going on.
Do you know when the video of his talk will be published. I’ll have to listen a few more times to really digest.