On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 5:52 PM Bruce Sterling <bru...@well.com> wrote:

>
> The worst we suffer is guys on nettime imagining that we disappeared
> culturally, just because we’re old.
>
> *Because we ARE old.  It’s 2019 and us cyberpunks are white-haired people
> in our sixties and seventies.
>


> *Or read some CHINESE science fiction writers, who are of severe
> tactical-media interest because they’ve got blockbuster Chinese sci-fi
> novels and blockbuster Chinese FX movie spectacles, not to mention Huawei,
> Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.



> If you don’t know where I am on 2019, it’s because I don’t WANT you to
> know.
>
> BruceS
>


Dear Bruce,

No disrespect intended. I know where you are, at least in cyberspace and
sometimes on terra firma because you write about it. I read avidly
everything by you I come across. But you know what it's like on nettime --
hard to stick to an argument.

I wrote in to yet another beef about Facebook. There was a time when
banging on about Zuck was a public service and, although I have wondered
about the energy he has put into it, I would say that Gert has been
vindicated in doing that. I wrote to him at the weekend to say so. But the
project was always rather specialized and I came to think of it (and the
founders of nettime) as part of a cohort who flourished before the
millennium and have been sidelined since.

My friend Patrice, whose contributions here are usually at least in part
whimsical, replied by disputing the form the coming war will take and
appeared to draw solace from the fact that "our side" (implicitly you and
friends) was right all along. I have no time for nostalgia in politics and
let him have it in abbreviated form. The sub-clause that would have
exempted you from over-classification had no room there.Sorry.

What's this about being old? I can give you more than a decade and I think
there is still life in the old dog. Us rich old farts -- I was born in the
war and came of age in the year of the Beatles US tour -- have more freedom
to tell the truth than most. I have a sixteen year old daughter and have
more hope in her generation that she has in our world. There's still a lot
to do, even if it isn't always in public.

I agree with you about Chinese sci-fi. I am off to Shanghai in  May. I have
been working on a science fiction murder mystery since 2005. I love the
genre and your work. I was not consigning you and your ilk to oblivion, but
wondering what new might be coming out of your fertile mind that I may have
missed.

Keith

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