###### tags: futurism bruce_sterling medical_industrial_complex biotech longevity medecine

# Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tešanović - draft summary

[An episode of the podcast series howdoyoulikeitsofar](https://www.howdoyoulikeitsofar.org/episode-65-bruce-sterling-and-jasmina-tesanovic/).

## The Balkans and regional perspectives

Bruce and Jasmina live in Belgrade these days. Total lockdown in Belgrade. Pretty efficient in the struggle against the virus. Struggles between sports, religion, science, technology, politics...

Tennis star speaking out against vaccins and maybe 5G causes the illness.

New Age, UFO, ghosts, numerology, it's very alive in the Balkans.

Science fiction but Bruce has multicultural experience. Now he writes fiction in an Italian setting. Scifi from a global perspective.

Writing from other regional perspectives. Ibiza is super globalized certain periods of the year. But also sleepy Spanish island when they disappear. Local people can take it off and on.

In the Balkans every valley is different from the other, internally balkanized. 'I hate all Croats except you mom.'

Large Chinese charm-offensive, high profile. Soft power is surging. Much more capable as diplomats, business people, media manipuators.

The struggle against corona is totally inspired by the Chinese, lots of Chinese medics on the ground there.

In Italy too they are a big medical presence.

The US not having a very good 21st century, losing self-confidence, don't know what to tell themselves.

Xi looks on top of his game compared to Putin, Trump, Johnson. US created a power vacuum sucking the Chinese in.

The Chinese worry about Hongkong, Taiwan, maybe their own diaspora. **There sino-centric, not really nationalist or populist.**

While Great-Britain is more like post-scientific, the Chinese embrace science. However, they lack freedom of expression.

## Singularity and longevity

Sterling does not believe in it, he considers it physically impossible but also that Silicon Valley is too fat and too busy protecting it's lucrative markets rather than pushing things.

Interesting is that he hears longevity specialists taking over the language of the epidemic. They talk about '**flattening the mortality curve'**. The likelihood of us having something that deals with aging in ten years time, is going up.

A lot of money is going that way, look at Google Calico. Gates doing things, we're closer then ever into doing weird things with your body.

In China you have this medical AI network that actually extends people's lifespans. They have scanners in front of restaurants and hotels in Wuhan, face recognition, uploading data to the servers of the government. They could do this for other medical conditions as well. They have campaigns against anti-social and anti-health behavior such as smoking. So much knowledge about people's behavior and bodies. Medical-industrial complex, society obsessed with life extension.

The Mandarins know more about your body than you do. How will other societies handle all those extremely healthy Chinese?

Sterling wrote about mass-epidemics before the virus. The interesting is the post-disaster society, how they adapt.

Spanish flu, AIDS. If we can can develop a vaccin for it, we'll forget about it. We tend to forget about sickness rather fast. It's very human, a psychic resilience.

## Economy

Middle of this decade the big tech such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, maybe Huawei, maybe Samsung have the world at their feet. They got all the users, al the eyeballs, all the cash. They absorbed popular music, cinema, education, while theatre and sports won't even exist. Political struggle thoughout their network. Not bullet-proof but they become the new conglomerates. Expanding into business, all stores, gizmos, research in science including medecine. The Chinese will come up strong and Huawei is stronger than ever.

Big Tech becomes arms of power, a revolving door policy where the kids of the tech bosses become politicians. These things will integrate.

## Institutions

Narcos playing a role in the pandemic in Mexico. They enforce distancing and supply medical stuff. The Balkans are more like a regular consumer society these days, which make life far easier. The society becomes very digital indeed.

Not exciting disrutpion but wellfare state/resue emergency thing.

## The internet will go away

We'll have troubles such as environment, demographics, pandemic, we can defeat it. You track and surveil enough. It is doable for a high tech surveillance society - a new kind of normal.

The internet of things won't happen in this sense that there will be no internet but massive semi-governmental platforms. Enough of Moore's law, Bill Gates is now into medecine and biotech.

Desktop computers are old-fashioned, coders are not the pop heroes they once were. But Google has enough cash, no problem for them.

We don't need any more Twitter or Facebook revolutions, it won't work. Popular uprisings and they lead to transitions. People get contented and dull and bored. Denmark and Sweden less fun than Belgrade.

The hacker cowboy is dead. So who is the protagonist now? The contemporary scifi-writers are very bright and well-educated, very good in operating through social media. Why would they write about cowboys? They are an intelligentsia.

Hugo Wells is a Cory Doctorow figure, he started as a pulp writer and ended up as highly politically person and member of the literary establishment.

## Media

Nobody reads blogs. Kind of impressed by Medium but Twitter is deeper than people understand. Core of influential Twitter people becoming instant experts on pandemics, oil or whatever.

Collective intelligence which is sppoky. There are mania but also an intellectual firepower in a short time. Never seen it done so quickly. We would defeat the virus through that.

They don't go to the bottom but they spread it all super fast. DJ music rather than composing it.

Twitter is fascinating and potent. Bruce is doing research about the Baroque period on Twitter. Lots of digital humanities there on Twitter.

It reminds him of the early days of fanzines, promoting stuff nobody had heard from.

People in the maker scene making medical equipment, not daunted by regulations. Swarming at this medical hardware and remixing it like fandom. It seems like kind of working.

## Speculative fiction

(comments by the podcasters)

Design fiction, companies and institutions are engaged with world-building in order to understand change better.

The scifi is not trying to predict but speculates to make us think about the world which might come. Cyberpunk is being dismantled by Bruce. The future looks more banal: the masses rise up and you become mayor. Scifi has to move on. Cyberpunk helped to conceptualize cyberspace but now we need something different. The new authors are so different, but there is this relationship between builders of fictional worlds and actual power structures.