Wired 11.07: "New World Disorder"
"The New World Order, proclaimed in Gulf War I, died in Gulf War II. The Next World Order has means, motive, and opportunity now. Instead of the customary 20th-century hot air and phony baloney, it might turn out to be rather hands-on, tough-minded, and practical. There are good reasons to think this will happen, with or without American cooperation. The Next World Order may well look like nothing we previously were led to expect."

Wired 11.06: "There's Something About Rummy"
"My favorite Bush administration figure is the president's gnomic futurist, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Rummy thinks outside the box. He talks in aphorisms, adages, and apothegms, rather like a magazine columnist. So I find it hard not to like him."

Wired 11.05: "The New Cold War"
"A decade after the end of the Cold War, good old-fashioned space programs still matter. Not for exploration's sake, but to settle new cold wars. If you doubt it, imagine this scenario: It's 2029, and a lunar mission lands at Tranquillity Base. A crew of heroic young Indians - or Chinese - quietly folds and puts away America's 60-year-old flag. If the world saw that on television, wouldn't the gesture be worth tens of billions of rupees or yuan? Of course it would."

Wired 11.04: "The Secret War Machine"
"Osama bin Laden's crew is a band of government-funded anticommunist counterrevolutionaries who grew up and cut the apron strings. These new-model Contras don't need state support from Washington, Moscow, or any Accessory of Evil. Like Project Democracy, they've got independent financing: oil money, charity money, arms money, and a collection plate wherever a junkie shoots up in an alley. Instead of merely ignoring and subverting governments for a higher cause, as Poindexter did, al Qaeda tries to destroy them outright. Suicide bombers blew the Chechnyan provisional puppet government sky high. Cars packed with explosives nearly leveled the Indian Parliament. We all know what happened to the Pentagon."

Wired 11.03: "Silent But Deadly"
"As chief of Enron's Western energy trading wing, Timothy N. Belden is the guy who turned out the lights in Silicon Valley during summer 2001's bogus energy crisis. He described his depredations as 'experiments,' and in some profound sense that was true: They were so far ahead of the curve that a lot of them probably weren't even illegal. Nonetheless, he recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, coughing up $2.1 million and promising to sing in federal court. His cadre of 100 or so energy traders, crammed onto a tight little floor together under his supervision, was just like Johnson's Skunk Works - an elite division of wonks who were quick, quiet, and right on time."

Wired 11.02: "Dumb Mobs"
"It's a crisp November day in Florence. The city's clear blue skies are clouded by black police helicopters anticipating the 2002 European Social Forum, a rally of the international protest movement the Italians call No Global. This European complement to the annual World Social Forum in Brazil counterbalances meetings of the WTO, G8, and other secretive capitalist overlords. As 60,000 delegates meet within the Fortezza da Basso convention center, a rabble 1 million strong gathers outside."

Wired 11.01: "The Cybersecurity Industrial Complex"
"Computer cops have long predicted that a massive cyberdisaster would transform their field from an underfunded annex into a law enforcement cornerstone. On 9/11, disaster struck, and while al Qaeda doesn't appear to have mastered high tech, a year later the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board has unveiled a comprehensive plan: 'The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.' It's not a precise scheme for defeating cyberwar, cyberterror, and cybercrime, but the 58-page document does give a firm sense of the immense bureaucratic scale and vast budget required."

Wired 10.12: "Absolute Corruption"
"I have before me the Corruption Perceptions Index for 2002. Transparency International, the German activist organization that publishes this document, calls itself “the coalition against corruption.” Every year, the group asks policy wonks in 100 nations to report on local dirty business. The aim is to assign each country a number on a scale of malfeasance, from 1 to 10, and rank them from least to most corrupt. Viewed through Transparency International’s lens, the world’s nations divide not between Eastern and Western, developed and developing, or Judeo-Christian and Muslim, but between accountable and expedient."

Wired 10.11: "The Future Is... Then"
"Who needs science fiction? Federal tech and science wonks this summer went wild in a 400-page assessment of what nano, bio, info, and cogno might do for humanity. Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance - a joint effort by the Commerce Department and the National Science Foundation - looks forward to a new age in federal science procurement. Consciously or not, the report echoes classic science fiction from 70 years ago at almost every turn. Too bad the prose isn’t as good."

Wired 10.04: "Peace Is War"
"Space War III began on September 11 with a direct assault on the Pentagon. That tactic made sense; with the ominous exception of Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles, terrorism is the only thing that seems to dent the US military. Terror bombs have killed more American soldiers than has combat in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. It's not that terror bombs make good weapons. They don't. It's just that space-based communication, surveillance warning, navigation, and weather watching make every other mode of attack obsolete. The rest of the world suffers a massive satellite gap with the US, and it's widening every day."

Wired 10.04: "Death To America"
"Capitalist democracy has buried many competing systems. Top challenger blatantly suicidal and feared by all. Huge American sums spent on space strengthen US economy by creating Tang instant orange drink and heat-trapping pizza delivery bags. US will commodify your discontent, sell it back to you on DVD."

Wired 8.01: "Newer York, New York" (with Michael McDonough)
"Looking back on it all now from the rising bamboo spires of Newer York, I realize it was the architecture of the past that was weird and far-fetched. Those old, greenhouse-gas-spewing buildings ... full of fragmented technology ... deaf-and-blind stand-alone boxes that didn't even have operating systems! Gates' capital and energy allowed me to rethink the very nature of human dwellings. We designed residences and offices that were ultralight, modular, made from ecofriendly organic materials, available in any size or configuration, running all kinds of new applications and appliances. We allowed for plug-and-play, hot-swapping peripherals, all of it with a 24-hour wireless uplink to the Net. It wasn't about wiring the house. It was about housing the wires. Energy lines, plumbing, security, fire, structural integrity, indoor air quality, lifestyle data - it was all built in, all autotested and automaintained."

Wired 8.01: "OK/Not OK"
"Since oral contraception became inexpensive and easily available, country after country has gone below zero replacement. This raises the question of whether the human race is really in the mood to replenish itself. In Russia, reproduction rates have fallen so drastically that it can only be interpreted as a comprehensive vote against the future of the nation. Japan and Italy portend a new gerontocracy."

Wired 7.08: "One Nation, Invisible"
"One may naturally wonder how this fertile and fragrant island, the legendary birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite, got so utterly messed up. Well, Cyprus is a very, very old place. It's no use beginning at the beginning, because then you have to point out that Cyprus once had its own race of dwarf elephants. Modern Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are no help at all because, although they claim they have a national history and they loudly chew over it all the time, what they really have are two intricate, dual theologies of vicious ethnic grudges. Outsiders who dare to describe Cypriot history will be sternly reminded that they know nothing - that they have abjectly failed to mention, for instance, the vile enosis doctrine of Archbishop Makarios, or the ghastly cruelties of the Grey Wolf commandos."

Wired 6.11: "Hardware for Hard Time"
"American prisons are small, highly totalitarian societies crammed with angry, vengeful, evil people. Corrections officials are expected to spend
 20 years of their lives in cramped, nasty, repugnant places, punishing bad people who hate them. That leads some of the guards to wish for simple fixes, pragmatic improvements that might change real life inside. Paint prison walls pastel. More daylight and skylight. More air. Furnish little goodies useful in manipulating prisoners: talcum powder, cookies, that sort of thing. And indeed, candy and cookie companies make a showing at the congress - the Keebler elves are here. But the focus is definitely on hardware."

Wired 6.07: "The Spirit of Mega"
"My beat is Jules Verne's idea of Big, the Prestigious Big - megaprojects that exist because they exceed humanity's previous limits and break all the expected scales. Prestige megaprojects are not big simply for functional reasons. They are not about the economic bottom line. Megaprojects are about the top line - the transcendent, the beautiful, and the sublime. They are built for the purpose of inspiring sheer, heart-thumping awe - not unmixed with lip-gnawing envy from the competition. Mega is a very special conceptual world, a territory of fierce engineering ambition, of madly brash technical self-assertion. Mega is a realm that abolishes the squalid everyday limits of lesser beings."

Wired 6.01: "Art and Corruption"
"Being Russian, the River Club likes to think big. A common squatter's tactic in Saint Petersburg involves legally renting an apartment, then refusing to leave the premises while not paying the rent. That tactic is OK for wimps and sissies, but the River Club rarely bothers with 'paper permissions.' Back in 1994, the River Club squatted a big fishing trawler called the Stubnitz. They swarmed on board while the authorities weren't looking, equipped the ship with PCs and pirate radio, and turned it into a mobile ocean-going rave. The Riverniks and their allies then puttered around the Baltic with a crew of bewildered professional sailors, emitting crazed radio manifestos about invasions from Jupiter and a World War III breaking out inside the human brain."

Wired 4.11: "Greetings From Burning Man"
"Woke up, had breakfast. Looked out my RV window and saw a guy sitting on a toilet. He was skidding by at about 45 mph in a massive trail of dust. He had his toilet mounted on a wooden sled, and he was being towed by a pickup. His pants were around his ankles, and he was reading a magazine as he skidded along. It was the magazine reading that made this truly a memorable gesture."

Wired 4.07: "Is Phoenix Burning?"
"Mark Pauline has a good line of gab, in his elliptical, left-handed fashion. He's at relative rhetorical ease with classy theoretical jabber such as emergent behavior, cyborganics, chaos theory, transparent interfaces, artificial life, and the machinic phylum. However, the machinic phylum and 45 cents will get you a cup of coffee. They won't get you a "Spectacular Mechanical Performance," and Mark Pauline is a hardened 17-year veteran of more than 50 such shows. His performances always boast very apt titles such as the recent 'A Calculated Forecast of Ultimate Doom ­ Sickening Episodes of Widespread Devastation Accompanied by Sensations of Pleasurable Excitement,' and the early but classic 'A Cruel and Relentless Plot to Pervert the Flesh of Beasts to Unholy Uses'."

Wired 3.05: "Good Cop, Bad Hacker"
"People in law enforcement often ask me, Mr. Sterling, if you're a science fiction writer like you say you are, then why should you care about American computer police and private security? And also, how come my kids can never find any copies of your sci-fi novels?"

Wired 3.01: "Triumph Of The Plastic People"
"Nevertheless, Václav Havel embarrasses people sometimes. Not every president in the world will hold a formal audience with Pink Floyd, but Havel did just that last week. Havel also redesigned the night lighting for Hradcany Castle because he used to be a stage-lighting hand in Prague's little alternative theaters. The Hradcany Castle looks terrific now, tastefully lit in low-key, magic-realist verdigris and salmon pink, but most other presidents don't even know what verdigris and salmon pink are."

Wired 2.04: "Compost of Empire"
"They can't go on like this. It's not possible. And yet the nation - whatever its name is - has been in an official state of 'crisis' and 'transition' since 1986. The restructuring, the openness, is out of hand and will not stop. To watch the structure of daily life writhe and mutate in Moscow, under the incredible dual impact of Western technology and Western pop culture, is intensely fascinating. It is one of the great postmodern spectacles, magical and comical and seamy, like watching Rip Van Winkle slapped awake, dusted off, doused in cologne and given a PC, a VCR and a safe-sex blow job. Almost any society imaginable would crack under this terrific level of future shock and stress, but the Russians are already so far gone that they simply haven't any choice left. Most Russians today only want Russia to be a 'normal country,' but this is the end of the millennium, and there isn't any normality left for anybody, least of all Russians."

Wired 1.01: "War Is Virtual Hell"
"A wired Armed Forces will be composed entirely of veterans - highly trained veterans of military cyberspace. An army of high-tech masters who may never have fired a real shot in real anger, but have nevertheless rampaged across entire virtual continents, crushing all resistance with fluid teamwork and utterly focused, karate-like strikes. This is the concept of virtual reality as a strategic asset. It's the reasoning behind SIMNET, the 'Mother of All Computer Games.' It's modern Nintendo training for modern Nintendo war."