“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that the futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management.”

–Bigend, p. 57 from Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.

I’m re-immersing myself in the world that William Gibson introduced in Pattern Recognition before reading the just-released Spook Country. Good stuff.