Life & Wisdom Quote by Bruce Sterling

Sterling doesn’t defend privacy so much as booby-trap the word. By firing off questions - “under what circumstance?” twice, like a cross-examination - he treats privacy not as a natural right but as a negotiated condition, something engineered by literacy, infrastructure, law, and power. The punchline is a deliberately nasty comparison: yes, you can maximize “privacy” by ensuring no one can read, record, or network. But that kind of privacy is just the absence of capacity. It’s not protection; it’s poverty of knowledge.

The subtext is a warning about nostalgia politics: the impulse to fix today’s surveillance by yearning for yesterday’s smaller, quieter world. Sterling, a cyberpunk elder statesman, comes from a tradition that distrusts sentimental tech backlash. He’s pointing at the uncomfortable trade: the same systems that threaten privacy (mass documentation, ubiquitous communication, searchable archives) are also the systems that enable autonomy, dissent, education, and modern life. If your privacy plan depends on everyone being less capable, it’s not a plan - it’s a regression.

Context matters: Sterling wrote across the rise of network culture, where “privacy” became a moral slogan even as everyday conveniences trained people to surrender data. His jab forces precision. What do you actually want: secrecy, dignity, safety, control, obscurity? He’s arguing that privacy isn’t the opposite of information; it’s governance of information. Without that distinction, “privacy” becomes an excuse to prefer darkness over agency - and to mistake ignorance for refuge.