Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author, essayist, design thinker, and one of the founders of cyberpunk, delivered a closing keynote at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (a.k.a. SXSWi), the jewel in the crown of U.S. grassroots tech bashes held annually in Austin, Texas.

He said,

"In times of real trouble like today, pessimists die quickly."

Sterling's pithy quote, picked up via Twitter (Mickipedia), raises the salient issue of what might constitute a meaningful optimism, given...