"There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor."
Bruce Sterling, as usual, stimulating and weird at the same time. And, doubtless, yes, perhaps now, because of the internet / web there is a cacophony of voices... but...
Someone -- who, I forget who, but someone much smarter than me -- wrote about the fact that the present is always on the brink of a future that is unknown. There is always a basic "atemporality" in Sterling's sense, but I don't think it is the right word. He laments that the master narrative has been lost, but the fact is that the master narratives we create are always failing, not because some line of history is being lost, but because we never really understand the present in a complex enough way -- the way we will understand it when it is past. Atemporality may be messy or an intractable problem at the moment, but why lament the lack of a master narrative -- this is just for a dionysian moment a realization of the truth: there is no real master narrative, there never was.
