Bruce Sterling and Bruno Argento are at it again, this time from the pages of SEED magazine, with an article entitled “2009 Will Be a Year of Panic“, spreading their peculiar mix of breathless future, whose well worn form is tinted with skepticism and where the Utopian views thread together with a reality where the probabilities turn into daily demonstrations of human nature’s unchangeable basics.
They list several new sources of dread which—after the original source of the global financial crisis, that hasn’t still boiled over, and taken a manageable form in new institutions and new rules—have the power of rattling the human soul and its confidence in the power of reason to command nature: climate, intellectual property, national currencies, insurance and building codes, the elderly, the Westphalian system, science.
By the way, I realize that I didn’t report on Bruno Argento’s performance. He spoke in Italian, but here is an English rendering of what he said by Bruce: