Comment by OhMeadhbh
Gernsback Continuum is still my favorite story since Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Physical reality seems pretty solid, but social reality is certainly "flexible." And all the tech I work with is a continuum of different ages smushed together; javascript client apps embedding COBOL apps complied to wasm bytecodes. SQL databases whose schemas predate some of the developers working on the apps that use them. Instruction Set Architectures that were invented when we still thought Raymond Lowey-esque fins and gills were the height of material design.
In a bit of synchronicity, I found my copy of Islands in the Net last week and am re-reading it after 35 years. It's pretty interesting to see which bits Bruce Sterling accurately predicted and which were a bit off the mark.
I think he was generally just excellent at getting near term predictions right and interesting. To pick a small one of many there's a moment in Heavy Weather where they have trouble with their PBX, and he mentions that it's basically a shrunk-to-digital 20th century phone company in a box, and so it requires negotiation, rebooting, kicking, etc. Love that take on modern software layers.