must pull the sisters together in order to—you guessed it—save the world. It’s hard to say if Sterling is making any serious commentary on the world’s current state by offering this vision of the future because, although entertaining, the situation is grim. Sterling’s apocalypse is slow, dark, and depressing.

The satire of their plight becomes screamingly obvious in lines like, “Vera, I’m here from Hollywood! I’m here to help you!” But there is no comic relief when, sadly, you realize that in the world of the Caryatids there’s nothing and no one worth saving. These women are so annoying, I couldn’t care less what happens to them or the people who are incompetent enough to follow their lead. Sterling writes with an eerie certainty about the future, not in ifs but in whens, indicating that perhaps the human race is fated to fulfill the dark side of its imagination. Even after eradicating AIDs and Alzheimer’s, we will still be plagued by our hunger for power, money, and fame.

Sterling is a master of dreaming up a myriad of techy gadgets and gizmos with his usual quasi-prophetic, matter-of-fact style. Never mind the lack of description for these devices; there is no need, because the objects are closely tied to current technological trends and pervasive ideas that his readers already understand. Think e-commerce websites tracking your every move in order to serve you a custom experience; such motive is explored by Sterling: “Like any other commons-based peer-production method, an Acquis attention camp improved steadily with human usage. Exploiting the spex, the attention camp tracked every tiny movement of the user’s eyeballs… Comparing the movements of one user’s eyeballs to the eyeballs of a thousand other users, the system learned individual aptitudes.”

If you’re tempted to question the plausibility of these devices, you’ve missed the point. Sterling spells out how easily year 2065 technologies could be adopted no matter how unthinkable they may be today. Take the following and imagine a time before cell phones: “At first, they’d been bewildered. Soon they had caught on. Within a matter of weeks, they were adepts. Eventually, life became elite.” I like to read this line and think of any product you might see on QVC or the Home Shopping Network. Is a society that buys into “attention camps” and “neural helmets” so bizarre, when the Sham Wow won the best “As Seen On TV” tourna-

ment on CNBC.com? Sterling meshes existing technologies with plausible creations that appear just beyond our current capabilities, and he excites (or annoys) the creative mind in the process.

While I do not think Sterling’s technological devices are novel, the apocalyptic context he creates to make neural helmets and spex raises interesting questions: Were these technologies developed before or after the need to save the planet came to the fore? Would they be useful in today’s political, economic, or environmental climate? Can we live in the future world without them? Do we need them to sustain us in the world we have created? As breezily as Sterling conjures up his gadgets, he destroys them: “Those technologies advanced so fast that they vanished. The languages, operating systems, frameworks of interaction, the eyeball-blasting laser-colored neural helmets… all that stuff is more primitive than steam engines now.” He reminds us that our creations are not permanent, that there are always unforeseen consequences to our efforts. “I mean, you can tell how a steam engine works by just looking at it, but a complex, distributed, ubiquitous system? There’s no way to maintain that!”

The book culminates with the sisters huddled face-to-face, forced to reconcile their hatred for each other or continue alone with their own futile efforts. In this moment it seems Sterling is speaking directly to the reader: “You have a decision to make; is this the world you want in the future?” By expanding his reach to address the state of the natural world, the role of individuals in societies, and the proliferation of modern technology, Sterling constructs an intellectual playground for the thinkers and makers of technological marvels to not only paint a world we should avoid, but also to challenge our imaginations, our actions, and what is worth our time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ryan Jahn is an interac-
tion designer with Empathy Lab in Conshohocken,
Pennsylvania, where he advocates for contextual
research methods and user-centered design pro-
cesses for Fortune 500 clients. Jahn has a diverse
set of design experience and skills ranging from
financial and pharmaceutical software systems, to branded e-com-
merce websites, to researching truancy among teens in Savannah,
Georgia. He is also co-founder of Moat Design Studio and a mem-
ber of Part-Time Studios in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

DOI: 10.1145/1516016.1516022
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0500 $5.00