Bruce's speech wasn't the only reason I dropped out, but it's certainly been the most *durable*, and I frequently return to it in my mind as I navigate the difficult and turbulent waters of art and technology. In particular, I've had much cause to ponder Sterling's ideas about the very weird way that game developers relate to their art-form's history:

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> My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I’m in direct competition with Homer and Euripides. I mean, these guys aren’t in the SFWA, but their product is still taking up valuable rack-space. You guys on the other hand get to reinvent everything every time a new platform takes over the field.

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> This is your advantage and your glory. This is also your curse. It’s a terrible kind of curse really...

> ...A lot of our art aspires to the condition of software, our art today wants to be digital… But our riches of information are in some deep and perverse sense a terrible burden to us. They’re like a cognitive load. As a digitized information-rich culture nowadays, we have to artificially invent ways to forget stuff.

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> I think this is the real explanation for the triumph of compact disks...

> ...The real advantage of CDs is that they allow you to forget all your vinyl records. You think you love this record collection that you’ve amassed over the years. But really the sheer choice, the volume, the load of memory there is secretly weighing you down...

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> ...By dumping the platform you dump everything attached to the platform and my god what a blessed secret relief. What a relief not to remember it, not to think about it, not to have it take up disk-space in your head...

> ...I’ve noticed though that computer game designers don’t look much to the past. All their idealized classics tend to be in reverse, they’re projected into the future.

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When you’re a game designer and you’re waxing very creative and arty, you tend to measure your work by stuff that doesn’t exist yet...

> ... I can see that it’s very seductive, but at the same time I can’t help but see that the ground is crumbling under your feet. Every time a platform vanishes it’s like a little cultural apocalypse...

> ...I can imagine a time when all the current platforms might vanish, and then what the hell becomes of your entire mode of expression?

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Even by the high standards of a Bruce Sterling keynote, this is a *very* good one, and Sterling does that amazing thing where he's iterating different ways of making this point, examining it from every angle, and it makes it hard ro excerpt it for an article like this. I mean, you should just go and read the whole thing and then come back, honestly:

bruces.medium.com/the-wonderfu…

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“The Wonderful Power of Storytelling,” by Bruce Sterling, 1991

*This speech was delivered thirty-three years ago, and that was quite a different world. The audience hadn’t been expecting much, because…

^{Bruce Sterling (Medium)}

But the reason I quote those specific excerpts above is because of what they say about the strange terror and exhilaration of working without history, of inhabiting a world shorn of all object permanence. This was a very live question in those days.

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In 1993, *Wired*'s Jargon Watch column ran a definition for "Pickling":

> Archiving a working model of a computer to read data stored in that computer's format. Apple Computer has pickled a shrink-wrapped Apple II in a vault so that it can read Apple II software, perhaps in the not-too-distant future.

wired.com/1993/05/jargon-watch…

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In 1996, Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive, with the mission to save every version of every web-page, ever, forever. Today, the Archive holds more than a trillion pages:

blog.archive.org/trillion/

Digital media are paradoxical: on the one hand, nothing is easier to copy than bits. That's all a computer does, after all: copy things. What's more mass storage gets cheaper and faster and smaller every year, on a curve that puts Moore's Law to shame.

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Library Leaders Forum 2025

Discover emerging library services and updates from the Internet Archive. Join the conversation on how libraries empower 21st-century research. REGISTER NOW for the free, virtual session.\n

^{blog.archive.org}

After dropping out of university, I got a job programming multimedia CD ROMs for The Voyager Company, and they sent me my first 1GB drive, which was the size of a toaster, weighed 3lbs and cost $4,000.

30 years later, I've just upgraded my laptop's SDD from 2TB to 4TB: it cost less than $300, and is both the size and weight of a stick of gum. It's 4,000 times larger, at least 10,000 times faster, is 98% lighter, and cost 97% less.

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We can store a *hell* of a lot of data for not very much money. And at that price, we can back it up to hell and back: I rotate two backup drives at home, keeping one off-site and swapping them weekly; I also have another drive I travel with and do a daily backup on. Parts of my data are also backed up online to various cloud systems that are, themselves, *also* backed up.

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And while drives *do* fail, drives that are attached to computers that people use every day tend to fail gracefully in that their material defects typically make themselves felt over time, giving ample warning (at least for attentive users) that it's time to replace them.

Given the spectacular improvements in mass storage, there's also no problem migrating data from one system to the next.

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Back in the 1990s, I stored a ton of my data offline and near-line, on fragile media like floppies, Zip cartridges and DAT cassettes. I pretty much *never* conducted a full inventory of these disks, checking to see if they were working, much less transferring them to new media.

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That meant that at every turn, there was the possibility that the media would have rotted; and with every generation, there was the possibility that I wouldn't be able to source a working drive that was capable of reading the old media.

But somewhere in there, storage got too cheap to meter. I transferred all those floppies - including some Apple ][+ formatted 5.25" disks I'd had since the early 1980s - to a hard drive.

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