Food for thought from Bruce Sterling.
".....Now as you might guess, my own technological studies have led me
to a rather different conclusion. My idea of technological development
is not this Hegelian march toward the sunlit uplands of historical
determinism. That's because I actually know some engineers personally.
And I consider technologists to be those peculiar, vaguely congenial
people who buy and read my fantasies. So given these facts on the
ground, I consider technology to be a fertile, squalid orgy of invention
and caprice that is always teetering on the edge of chaos. I may be a
futurist, but I write what I see, dear people. And the past is this
place - it is this very place at a different time.
Every historian is an imaginative author, engaged in an act of
retro-diction. When it comes to media palaeontology, I favour the ideas
of biological evolution developed by Stephen Jay Gould. Now, according
to Gould's ideas of punctuated equilibrium, our current moment in
evolutionary history was never any matter of destiny. In Gould's idea of
nature, there is no teleology, no divine single guiding force to
development. Nature is not destiny. There is no predetermined, so-called
"natural" way of life. The idea of the "natural" is severely under
question....."
http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/g...file=4&tlang=0
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