I am consistently impressed by the quality of Bruce Sterling's thought. His recent Wired piece, Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future, is no exception. It's a fictional set of blog posts from 2017 made by a hyperconnected Cory Doctorow stand-in who specializes in the applications of computing power embedded in everyday objects and ubiquitous network connectivity. He calls this "hyperlocal" - hyper as in linked and local as in wherever you happen to be right now.
Every paragraph actually touches on a distinct ground-shaking implication of the ultra-connected computational wonderland we're heading for, almost too many to keep track of, which is sort of appropriate. One theme popped out at me in particular, an enhanced ability to discover the complex set of interactions that produce a social phenomenon. In Sterling's piece it's a torrent of real estate speculation in Dubai that his main character is hired to analyze and understand. What he uncovers is the convergence of a loophole in a treaty to unify Taiwan with China that allowed wealthy Taiwanese to hide their assets in the houses they own and the legal attributes unique to Dubai.
This is the same effect the Internet had, with its distributed architecture and resources rendered networked applications effectively transparent, exposing the guts of the machine to whoever wanted to dig around in them. In the "hyperlocal" world Sterling describes, the flows of people and capital will be similarly transparent and exposed to those who wish to look. What a contrast to the mysterious ways of our world as they have been, accessible only to those "masters of the universe" with skills and wealth and connections.
Also, who can resist the idea of the "Kraftwerk Kulturzentrum," a "vast, perpetual, swirling technorave ... [an] homage to the 20th century's supremely influential band"
