Bruce Sterling’s keynote at the Transmediale conference in Berlin is one of his best-ever outings (and I say that as a person who dropped out of university and totally upended his life after reading a transcript of one of Bruce’s speeches). Sterling addresses the bankruptcy of tech giants, who have morphed themselves into intrusive presences that carry water for the surveillance industry, and lays out a credible case for a future where they are forgotten footnotes in our history. In particular, I was impressed by this speech because it corrected some serious errors from Sterling’s essay “The Ecuadorian Library,” which, as Danny O’Brien pointed out completely misattributed a kind of optimistic naivete to technology activists past and present. In this speech, Sterling revisits the origins and ongoing reality of the project to remake technology as a force for freedom, and corrects the record. As Sterling says, John Perry Barlow didn’t write the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace because he thought the cops couldn’t or wouldn’t try to take over the Internet: he wrote it because the cops were trying to take it over, and he was “shouting through a megaphone” at them.

Bruce Sterling on making the Internet safe for freedom and art – Boing Boing

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