This post finally explains why Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author turned viridian green futurist, took a year “off” to be a design professor. Because in the future (i.e. now, no now, no right now), the future itself will be all ad hoc ephemera: designed in an instant, incorporating the sum total of the past, instantiated on the fly, used for a minute, and repurposed and recycled the next into someone else’s reality, like riding a speeder bike full tilt on the holodeck. That is, reality will scroll, just like your browser window. Sterling’s just hanging out with the progenitors of all this. So what else is new?