Gloomy thoughts from Chairman Bruce

Bruce Sterling, futurist and sf writer, has been issuing gloomy statements of late.

Item: "I wonder when FOREIGN POLICY is gonna nerve up and declare a ‘failed globe.”" Recent blog post.

Item: returning to older fears of big cities and high finance in BoingBoing,

I'd also like to point out that large financial centers in certain cities around the planet are certainly going to kill millions of us by destroying our social safety networks in the name of their imaginary financial efficiency. You're a thousand times more likely to die because of what some urban banker did in 2008 than from what some Afghan-based terrorist did in 2001. *Financiers live in small, panicky urban cloisters, severely detached from the rest of mankind. They are living today in rich-guy ghetto cults. They are truly dangerous to our well-being, and they are getting worse and more extremist, not better and more reasonable. You're not gonna realize this havoc till you see your elderly Mom coughing in an emergency ward, but she's going there for a reason.

Sterling is a writer and thinker I admire (and speaker I adore). His vision has darkened of late, with thoughts of favela chic and postindustrial Gothic (for example). We homesteaders could learn much from tracking how Chairman B.'s thought arrived at this point.