(Image: Steve Wall.)
Continuing in our one, two, oh, screw it, let’s make it a three-part series of posts on BoingBoing’s De Facto Bruce Sterling Day — here’s an excerpt from the latest edition of His Futuriness’ Viridian Design newsletter. He points to an end-of-2006 essay by the “dazed, miserablist-apocalyptophile” John L. Petersen, founder of The Arlington Institute. Petersen’s words are a fascinating read, but the ride’s a heck of a lotmore fun with Sterling’s thoughts interspersed in (((nested parentheses))). Snip:
The world has to act now on climate change or face devastating economic consequences. Sir Nicholas estimated that at most humanity has ten years before the shift is unrecoverable. (((What if it’s already ten years too late? Or twenty years? Shouldn’t we be giving this prospect a lot more serious thought? We’re not averting anything much; there are daisies blooming in Moscow.)))
What’s going on here? What does this all mean? (((Settle in, folks; he’s about to let fly.)))
These are extraordinary statements about massive earth changes. Are they just random trends that happen to be coincidentally showing up at the same time, or perhaps they reflect some big, historic, underlying dynamic == maybe the world is about to experience a shift unlike anything ever seen before. (((You know what’s worse than a futurist who over- promises? A futurist who over-delivers.))) There are reasons to believe the latter could be the case. Many sources, both conventional and unconventional, suggest that we are living in a special time == that between now and 2012 the world will undergo an epochal shift to a new era.
This rapid evolution will produce a world that operates in fundamentally different ways than it has in the past.(((For instance, it might well operate the way a 500-pound gorilla operates when it (a) has Ebola (b) is on fire and (c ) has recently converted to Islam.)))
Link.