Text of SXSW2013 closing remarks by Bruce Sterling | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com: It’s the same thing over and over. Basically, the only ones making money are the ones that have big, legal stone castles surrounded with all kinds of regulatory thorns. Meaning: the sickness industry, the bank gangsters, and the military contractors. Gothic High-Tech.
If more computation, and more networking, was going to make the world prosperous, we’d be living in a prosperous world. And we’re not. Obviously we’re living in a Depression.
Google Glass is not a platform for literary expression. It’s a platform designed for shared visual experience in near real time, and verbal communication with a search engine that has voice recognition. That’s what it’s for. And those are OK things to do, but they’re just not paper-based analog media. They’re nowhere near it. They’re electronic. They’re participative.
I have seen disruption in music, literature, the arts, entertainment publishing, the fourth estate, the military, political parties, manufacturing — pretty much everywhere except finance, health, the law, and the prison/military industry. Which is why they’ve got all the money now and the rest of us are pretty much reduced to disrupted global peons.