Every year Bruce Sterling gives a talk (well, a rant) at SXSW, and this year’s is a real barn-burner. The whole thing is available for download (along with quite a few other recordings of panels), and it’s really worth listening and then listening again to the whole 48 minutes. That’s a pretty tall order for people who don’t have mp3 players grafted into their lives, and long commutes or walks or whatever in which to multitask.

To give you reasons to download the whole thing, I’ve made a bunch of extracts of especially powerful bits, most of them pretty short:

American industrial policy 0:12
broadband in Serbia 0:21
technical backwardness 0:55
the last reels of Gone With the Wind 1:10
on Creationism 0:50
the ports scandal 0:25
where are Mladic and Karadzic? 0:48
quoting Warren Ellis 1:00
on spimes 6:00
the Semantic Web 2:20
the people tire… 0:20
Evil has a face 1:20
reading part of Sandberg’s The People Yes 2:40

This is heady stuff, and his reading of Sandberg (which ended the talk –I mean, how could you follow that?) makes the point pretty persuasively that hearing a poem is an essential complement to reading a poem silently. See also Jon Lebkowsky’s take at WorldChanging.