Life & Wisdom Quote by Bruce Sterling

The line lands like a confession from someone who helped invent the future and still got blindsided by it. Sterling, a godfather of cyberpunk, isn’t marveling at technology so much as indicting our habitual way of imagining it: we treat “the digital” as a distant event, a clean break scheduled conveniently after we’ve had time to prepare. His timeline collapses in thirds - fifty years, then ten, then “already here” - mimicking the accelerating curve of networked life, but also the psychology of denial. Progress doesn’t arrive with a trumpet; it seeps in through boring interfaces, workplace software, and small shifts in behavior until you look up and realize the premises of daily life have changed.

The subtext is that futurism often fails not because it can’t picture gadgets, but because it misreads adoption. The real revolution is social: who has access, who gets tracked, what becomes normalized. “I just wasn’t aware of it yet” is the tell. Cyberspace isn’t a place you travel to; it’s an ambient condition you gradually stop noticing, like surveillance, like dependency, like the quiet outsourcing of memory and attention.

Context matters: Sterling came out of an era when “cyberspace” sounded like neon noir - a metaphor with swagger. Here he strips it of glamour and turns it into a lesson about perception. The future isn’t late. Our awareness is.