Cunning • 4 January 2008 • The SnowBlog

Cunning

          


How's this for a cunning idea? I quote a chunk of something Bruce Sterling said, and do so without permission, and when he gets in touch to yell at me, I can say 'hi' and see if he wants to hang out. Unless it's just his lawyers who call. Or he's really cross. Which I don't suppose he would be. Anyway, the following is excerpted from some remarks he was making about the shape of 2008, from his perspective:
 
Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the
resource crisis and the climate crisis.  Because the world-machine's
backfiring and puffing smoke.  Joe and Jane Sixpack are looking at
four-dollar milk and five-dollar gas.  It's hurting and it's scary and
there's no way out of it but through it.


Everybody's reluctant to budge because they sense, probably correctly,
that they have to wade through a torrent of mud, blood sweat and
tears.  Maybe, then, they emerge into the relatively sunlit uplands of
something closer to sustainability. 
 

So: I don't expect too much to happen in 2008: except for that
intensified smell of burning as people's feet are held to the fire.  
"Nothing changes if nothing changes." But if nothing changes, then more
and more china is going to flat-out shatter and break.


THEN they'll move.  If they see somebody making money at it, they
might move pretty fast.

I think that sums up a lot of what I think - only more eloquently. Except that I hope a bit of action will take place in 2008.
 
Rob