You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.
Interpretation
Our past digital actions continuously influence our future, as all information leaves traces behind.
This quote emphasizes the concept that our digital footprint is inescapable and accumulates over time from numerous sources of data. Bruce Sterling vividly illustrates that no matter how much we may want to forget or restart, the information we generate is like a shadow that accompanies us, composed of countless bits of data that reveal our habits, decisions, and identities.
In practice
In a talk on digital privacy, you might quote this to stress the importance of understanding our online actions.
If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats. This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth. It won't go away because we cover our eyes. THAT is cyberpunk.
When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.
I like technology, but 'Black Mirror' is more what the consequences are, and it doesn't tend to be about technology itself: it tends to be how we use or misuse it. We've not really thought through the consequences of it.
It's wonderful to move forward technologically, but we cannot forget that we are human beings who thrive on relationships, who thrive on interconnectivity, who thrive on sharing your feelings and emotions.
The Internet's abundance - of information, goods, tastes and sources of authority - creates unparalleled opportunities for individuals to get exactly what they want. But this plenitude threatens political and cultural authorities who believe in telling individuals what they can have rather than letting them choose for themselves.
Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.
Technological society has succeeded in multiplying the opportunities for pleasure, but it has great difficulty in generating joy.
If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning.
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