Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years [Hardcover]

I have read recently, Pierre Baldi's The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (2001); Howard Bloom's Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000); The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century (2002), a collection of essays edited by John Brockman; Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002); Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999), and others; and I can tell you this is as impressive (in its own way of course) as any of those very impressive books, and has the considerable virtue of being beautifully and compellingly written in a style that is polished, lively and sparkles with deft turns of phrase and a cornucopia of bon mots and apt neologisms. Furthermore, Sterling really is a visionary of the present in that he sees connections and developments that most of us miss. Here are some examples:

"The sense of wonder has a short shelf life." (p. xvii)

Speaking of SUVs and cross-training shoes: "Modern devices are overstuffed with functionality..." (p. 81)

"The right wing wants to leave the market alone but to regulate sex. The left...[tolerates] domestic license but wants to regulate private industry." (p. 160)

"...[F]oreign investors are entirely indifferent to...[the] phony-baloney national mythology" of any given country. "They may feel very ardent about their own country, but they won't tolerate any pretension from" someone else's country. (p. 162)

"Garage sales became Ebay." (p. 224)

Speaking of the abundance of "giant armadillos, sloths as big as hippos, three kinds of elephants," etc., and other fauna in North America before humans arrived: "A natural Texas would look like the Serengeti on steroids." (p. 270)

On what is causing the glaciers to melt: we are "digging up fossils...and setting fire to them." (p. 279)

"The actual likelihood of people...getting atomically bombed is much higher today than it was during the cold war." (p. 260)

On the human-caused "extinctions, and the sheer air-borne filth that comes from burning fossils": "It will...[transform] the whole Earth into something like a grim mining town in East Germany, only without frogs." (p. 281)

Sterling sees the first "superbaby" as a very sad creature indeed because it will be superceded almost immediately by a superior version, and then by a super-superbaby, and will be superior only to its "moronic parents." (p. 30)

"Blobjects...are computer-modeled objects manufactured out of blown goo." They "tend to be fleshy, pseudo-alive, and seductive..." Some examples: "the Gillette Mach 3 razor. The Oral-B toothbrush... The Handspring Visor PDA. Gelatinous wrist rests. The curvy, slithery Microsoft Explorer mouse..." (p. 75)

In addition to "blobjects" there are also "gizmos" which are "small, faddish, buzzy machine[s] with a brief life span." A computer is a gizmo. There are also "blobject gizmos." (p. 89)

And on and on. What Sterling is really writing here is social criticism. He is revealing us to ourselves by highlighting our technology, our consumerism, and the way the various economic and political players--governments, corportions, terrorists, NGOs, etc.--are all out to manipulate us to their advantage. His take on what he calls the dichotomy between the New World Order (the technological haves who are able to effectively manage information) and the New World Disorder (blighted areas of the planet taken over by terrorists, drug dealers and other high risk takers) is especially interesting. He sees the weapons of the unconventional warfare that is now, and will continue to be, the norm in a revealing way. He notes, for example, that terrorist-induced plagues, sometimes called "the poor man's bomb," will only lead to the "poor man's doom" because "Areas with organized governments and public health systems will be the last to collapse from germs and viruses, not the first." (p. 262)

Sterling's vision is of the postmodern world giving way to the posthuman. He sees the disadvantage of our becoming part machine and part biologically-enhanced beings: we will "still have some kind of everyday treadmill" to negotiate, and we may even acquire a renewed respect for death. (pp. 299-300)

In the final chapter he touches on the notion of a "Vingean Singularity" (from Vernor Vinge) which is a place in the future "impossible to describe, simply because" we as human beings "cannot comprehend" such a posthuman environment. In other words, like the event horizon of a black hole, the singularity allows no communication between us and that future world, and that it why it is called a singularity. (pp. 295-296)

Bottom line: be not dissuaded by the nay-sayers about this book, who may not like the unnecessary use of the extended metaphor from Shakespeare's As You Like It, which Sterling uses to frame the text ("All the world's a stage..."), or who are put off by Sterling's sometimes paternal and self-centered expression. This is a terrific read. I enjoyed it from first page to last and found myself nodding in agreement and surprise with much of what he writes.

But the rest?

Filler. The ideas about the importance of networks in the future (whether cell based terrorist groups, or profiteers) are covered in more depth in both sterling's fictional DISTRACTION and Rheingold's SMART MOBS. The critique of education is pedantic, as is the discussion about the future of politics.

I get the sense that these pieces were just lying around on the hard drive, and he realized there was a book in there. He was almost right...some tight editing would've been very helpful.

I know and admire the author, whose other non-fiction book, "Hacker Crackdown" was an extraordinary contribution to social understanding, of both the abuse of uninformed government power, and the potential enlightenment that could be achieved by hackers (who are like astronauts, pushing the envelope in cyberspace).

This book is uneven. There are some truly brilliant gems, but there is also a lot of rambling, and I fear that the author's brilliance as a science fiction writer may have intimidated the publisher and editor into settling for what they got, instead of what the author is truly capable of producing when diligently managed. However, after thoroughly reviewing the book to write the review, I ended up going for 5 instead of 4 stars because this kind of writing is uncommon and provocative and my lack of patience may be the external limiting factor.

There are a number of gifted turns of phrase and ideas, and so I do recommend this book for purchase, for reading, and for recurring review. The author focuses on generic engineering, imagining an order of magnitude of achievement beyond what is now conceptualized; he properly redefines education in the future as being disconnected from the schools that today are socializing institutions, beating creativity out of children and doing nothing for adults that need to learn, unlearn, and relearn across their lifetimes; he is brilliant in conceptualizing both crime as necessary and exported instability as tacitly deliberate--Africa as the whorehouse and Skid Row of the world; he recognizes oil as the primary source of instability and inequality, sees all politicians as devoid of grand vision (and we would surmise, character as well); he is hugely successful in talking about the mythical "American people" that do not exist, about moral panics after Enron or 9-11 that achieve no true reform; and his focus on the information age basics that make it cheaper to migrate business than people, that make it essential for the Germans to see through Microsoft's insecure code and thus to opt for LINUX or open source code for their military as well as their government systems in general.

He ends brilliantly in conceptualizing a new world order within a new world disorder, in which very rich individuals combine with very poor recruits from a nationless diaspora, a new network that looks like Al Qaeda but has opposite objectives.

In the larger scheme of things, as the author concludes, Earth is debris and the humans are on their way to being the Sixth Extinction. Party while you can.