Lately I’ve been intensely disappointed with cyberpunk authors Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. The latter has enthusiastically retweeted the most inane pseudo-philosophical articles about Wikileaks, most of which entirely miss the point of the enterprise and speak only in clichés and/or falsehoods. The worst of all these was written by Sterling, and I was quite surprised to see a rebuttal of sorts in The Economist of all places. (Just don’t read the comments section.)
I suppose it’s all a good demonstration of the fact that the culture related to the new technologies of the internet isn’t necessarily progressive, even when it superficially claims to be. After all, it is old-fashioned artists like Ken Loach who are speaking up about Wikileaks while all the “geek icons” are sitting on their arses as net neutrality and free speech go to hell. (Not to mention Wired‘s extremely suspicious part in the Bradley Manning business.) But I would have expected more of these people; because they are artists, and because right now it’s not all about abstract theorizing and nonsense about subcultures. Now it’s about freedom, real everyday freedom, and now their voices would have mattered.
