I somehow have it in my mind that Bruce Sterling is always wrong about the future. That said, I just read a little essay of his about current events that was neat.

Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.

The “true” 20th century — the Communist century — began in 1914 and ended in 1989. We are now in the true 21st century.

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where “history ended.”

I like that idea, that attempt to block out chapters in some future history book by date. The original link in the chain, via BB, has a good little bit too:

So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly blows one’s brains out for no sane reason.

Thinking you live at the end of history is the most widespread petty arrogance.

I suppose I mean: What’s the big deal? There’s no new information coming out: Most big companies are poorly run; jobs and banks aren’t 100% safe; pollution is bad for the environment. Nothing new. What else? Oil comes from the Middle East, and so do most of the Wars. Africa is fucked up. Corporations are psychotic. All of these are things that have been true, from what I’ve read, since the 1970s.

Maybe this crisis is Gen X finally coming into its own — they’ve replaced enough Boomers to uncover the depths of custodial negligence and are whipping the public into a raging froth of mad-dog plebiscite reformers and counter-counter-revolutionary death squads. Call Nikitchenko, we’re having a media event to usher in the Bust and Echo: Our very own Hate Week.

Watch, take notes. We outnumber them, and we might have to stop the pendulum.