The Laboratorium : The Pressure of Raw Possibility

She remembered suddenly the Vienna agent she’d met in Galveston, the polite, handsome Russian who had talked about the “evil pressure in a bullet.”

Now for the first time, she was grasping what the man had meant. The pressure of raw possibility. If something was possible—didn’t that mean that somewhere, somehow, someone had to do it?

—Bruce Sterling, Islands in the Net

November 27, 2010 at 2:12 PM

Jan

Great quotation — thanks.

November 27, 2010 at 10:05 PM

Frances Grimble

Real possibilities include things like World War 3 or global warming wiping out our entire species, plus many or most others.

Just because something is possible does not, by a very long shot, mean that it is either desirable or inevitable.

November 29, 2010 at 9:40 PM

Frances Grimble

Another thing I think should be called into question is the high-tech ethos that constant change is necessary and leads to improvement. They should really look at some of the content-free blogs and bloated software this leads to.