Wealth & Money Quote by Bruce Sterling

Sterling’s line is a cold little thought experiment dressed as a punchline: apocalypse isn’t defined by body count, it’s defined by whose bodies - and whose budgets - get touched. By flipping the usual terror narrative (the desperate striking the merely comfortable) into an imagined class uprising (the comfortable targeting the wealthy), he exposes the unspoken operating system of modern security culture: violence is treated as “manageable” until it threatens the people who set policy, own assets, and underwrite the state.

The specific intent is provocation with a purpose. Sterling isn’t predicting a literal doomsday so much as diagnosing a threshold of legitimacy. If middle-class actors began treating the rich as the appropriate target, it would signal not just radicalization but a collapse in the social contract’s core promise: that upward mobility, stability, and procedural politics still work. That’s why “apocalypse” lands; it frames class war not as an abstract ideology but as a contagion spreading upward into the group that normally buffers elites from consequences.

Subtext: our moral horror is selective, and our political urgency is priced. The contemporary order can absorb sporadic attacks from the margins and rebrand them as pathology, religion, or “security threats.” It cannot easily absorb violence that reads as rational retaliation by people who have jobs, educations, and social credibility - the kind of perpetrators media can’t other into caricature.

Contextually, this fits Sterling’s cyberpunk DNA: he’s obsessed with systems, asymmetry, and the brittle fantasies of control in high-tech capitalism. The line needles the reader into noticing that “terror” is also a branding category - one that changes the moment the target market does.