Wealth & Money Quote by Bruce Sterling

Sterling’s jab lands because it treats Bollywood’s economics like a black-market fable: the official pipeline is so compromised that value leaks out the sides, and the industry survives by monetizing proximity instead of product. The first sentence is almost deadpan reportage - “so corrupt” that even the supposedly easy part, profiting from a hit, becomes difficult. That setup invites a moral diagnosis (greed, graft, middlemen), but Sterling pivots fast into grotesque commerce: not tickets, not DVDs, but shoes “that an actress stepped in.” It’s a perfect image of celebrity culture as residue. The star isn’t a person; she’s a brand that can be scraped off the ground and resold.

The subtext is less “Bollywood bad” than “systems rot creates perverse markets.” When formal distribution can’t reliably capture revenue, informal economies thrive: memorabilia, endorsements, gossip, access, the fetish objects of fame. Sterling’s science-fiction sensibility is audible here - he’s describing a cyberpunk-like marketplace where the body and its traces become commodities once institutions stop functioning.

Then comes the line that makes the joke curdle: “maybe they could sell the actresses.” The escalation is intentional, a cynical spotlight on how quickly commodification slides toward trafficking logic. He’s not literally predicting auctions; he’s pointing at an industry (and audience) that already treats actresses as assets to be leveraged, controlled, and consumed. “Turn up the amps” reads like showbiz slang and an electrical metaphor at once: amplify the spectacle, intensify the exploitation. The humor works because it’s sharp, not cozy - a laugh that implicates the market, the gatekeepers, and the spectators in the same transaction.