I just finished the last pages of Bruce Sterling‘s Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. It is double fun reading a futurist who has a way with words, who is an artist.

Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book:

Bits, for instance, are not immaterial. Bits in motion are physical things, electrons and photons. Bits sitting still are little patches of magnetized metal flakes, or little pits of molten plastic. They’re real objects, bits of atoms. They seem immaterial compared with wood pulps or tombstones. but if you visit a modern Internet backbone router, you will find yourself in a very large, extremely material info factory that sucks voltage just like a steel mill. A backbone router doesn’t employ any working-class guys in blue overalls, but it definitely occupies space and has mass; it has plumbing and pays real-estate taxes… These cybernetic smokestacks are every bit as solid and terrifying as any of William Blake’s “dark satanic mills.