Maybe what we’re presented here, under the slick rhetoric of the Paperless Office, is yet another staggering stack of old-fashioned Pentagon paperwork – a brand new way to make megabuck hammers and toilet seats to an entire new set of ridiculous, endless bureaucratic specs … Maybe the whole scheme is just updated hype – for that same old fat-cat, imperialistic, hypertrophied, overfed, gold-plated military bureaucracy… Could be. It could go either way, maybe both ways at once.
Predictor: Sterling, Bruce
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 article for Wired magazine, Bruce Sterling looks at the future of digital warfare, including paying a visit to the U.S. Army’s National Training Center to see the work of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the Defense Mapping Agency and the Army’s Topographic Engineering Center. Sterling writes: ”Maybe you can believe that idea and all that it implies – ‘simulate before you build.’ Or maybe you might wax a little more cynical. Maybe what we’re presented here, under the slick rhetoric of the Paperless Office, is yet another staggering stack of old-fashioned Pentagon paperwork – a brand new way to make megabuck hammers and toilet seats to an entire new set of ridiculous, endless bureaucratic specs. Only this time, after all the studies and form-filling, you end up with absolutely no tangible product at all! Maybe it’s just a bizarre Silicon Valley power-play. Every other major American industry has got a sucker deep in the military-industrial juice. Maybe it’s time for the virtual reality, CAD-CAM, multimedia crowd to hunker down with the older industries and have some long, life- giving sips from the taxpayer’s bloodstream. Maybe the whole scheme is just updated hype – for that same old fat-cat, imperialistic, hypertrophied, overfed, gold-plated military bureaucracy… Could be. It could go either way, maybe both ways at once – make your own decision. One thing’s for sure though. The U.S. military today is the most potent and lethal gold-plated military bureaucracy of all time.”
Biography:Bruce Sterling, a writer, consultant and science fiction enthusiast, wrote or co-wrote “Schismatrix,” “The Hacker Crackdown” and “The Difference Engine” and edited “Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology.” In the 1990s, he wrote tech articles for Fortune, Harper’s, Details, Whole Earth Review and Wired, where he was a contributing writer from its founding. He published the nonfiction book “Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years” in 2002. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Global Relationships/Politics
Subtopic: Peacekeeping/Warfare
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: War is Virtual Hell: Bruce Sterling Reports Back from the Electronic Battlefield
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/virthell_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney