Life & Wisdom Quote by Bruce Sterling

Sterling’s line reads like a coolly delivered update from the control room: the world is getting smarter, and also more hackable. The first clause flatters the Enlightenment story we like to tell ourselves - education spreads, access widens, basic factual ignorance becomes harder to sustain. Then he swivels to the real point: “the ability to accumulate data and manipulate it for various ends is increasing.” That “various ends” is the tell. He’s not celebrating progress; he’s underlining how competence scales alongside power, and how power rarely arrives with a conscience attached.

As a cyberpunk-adjacent writer, Sterling is speaking from the late-20th-century transition into the information age, when “data” stopped being clerical residue and became the primary raw material of politics and commerce. The subtext is that ignorance isn’t the only vulnerability. You can have a population that’s less gullible in the old-fashioned sense while still being exquisitely steerable through targeting, metrics, and feedback loops. The new asymmetry isn’t between educated and uneducated; it’s between those who are legible to systems and those who control the systems reading them.

The sentence works because it refuses the comforting binary where knowledge automatically liberates. It’s a diagnosis of a culture shifting from persuasion by rhetoric to persuasion by instrumentation: not arguing with people, but optimizing around them. In Sterling’s world, the threat isn’t stupidity; it’s sophistication deployed without accountability, where “manipulate” can mean marketing, governance, security - or something darker, all using the same toolbox.