(FORTUNE Magazine) – Bruce Sterling, a science fiction writer, lives in Austin, Texas. His books include A Good Old-Fashioned Future and The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. He was interviewed by Erick Schonfeld of eCompany Now.

I'm not a believer in the Whig version of technological history, that we smoothly accelerate into realms of greater and greater command over resources and more and more technological sophistication. I think the Iridium fiasco is our best kind of anti-Whig notion. You can ask me the same question about Iridium: "So, as they get more and more satellites in orbit, and they're able to make more and more phone calls, what does this mean for us in 16 years?" Well, it means in 15 weeks these suckers are going black and plunging into the Atlantic Ocean. Just because you build it doesn't necessarily mean they will come.

People don't just buy broadband. It's not like, "I'm going down to the Home Depot to buy myself five kilograms of broadband." I want broadband in order to further my ability to do something useful. So what is that? I think that's an open question. People I know who are into broadband like it because they don't have to sit there waiting and drumming their fingers to download the stuff that's available on the common, everyday Internet.

But the price they pay is that they're now mortgaged up to the eyeballs to one of these old-media titans, or cable providers, which are extremely corporate, extremely pyramidal, festooned with layers of bureaucracy, slow on the uptake, greedy, dumb, obsessed with intellectual property. And I've yet to see them really get traction. Since the early days of the info superhighway it was all about, "Hey, copper co-ax, I'm good to go, man. Five hundred channels of anything you want." But in terms of the stuff that's provided in the home, I don't see a lot of explosive creativity there. It's more like a bass-fishing channel--all bass fishing all the time.

It's a distinct possibility that we don't need broadband. If you're looking at a things-that-think scenario, I'm a lot more excited by that technology than I am by broadband. Because it seems much freakier than the idea of a faster Web page. The idea that my chair has an IP address--that is a visionary notion. My chair is going to be sitting there, sucking huge amounts of bandwidth, and doing heaven only knows what, probably reformatting itself to my body in real time. That would be an exciting thing for an office chair to do, because my body's been reformatting itself to my office chair for about five years now. Let the chair do the work! But this isn't something that's going to cause the moguls of co-ax to turn over in their beds at night.

There are a lot of people who want to make money by cornering the market on connectivity between individuals. I'm not a zealot about it, but I'm really happy to point out the burnt-out hulks of the many attempts to corporatize the flow of information.

I mean, a lot of money has been lost doing this. A hell of a lot of money. And a lot of very bright people have tried it and just failed utterly.