In his 2002 book, Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling dedicates a rollicking chapter to the evolution of modern narco-terrorism that morphs as the connected economy meets the societal dissolution of former empires.

Here is a dispatch from closer to home in the US. Of course, we still kick it Old School, Capone-style, along the Mexican-American border. But, come on! Killing cock-crowing crooners?

How Not to Be a Border-Crossing Pop Star
It's not like pop-stars don't get shot when they've got ties to the drug trade. Gangsta rappers get shot with grim regularity. Even Bob Marley got winged once. But the "Golden Rooster" here -- he and his two top posse henchmen were wiped out, in their car, in a hail of *armor-piercing bullets.* Ay de mi. [read original article]
~ from Beyond the Beyond

As an ex-pat science fiction writer living in Belgrade--the capital of Eastern Europe's least favored, gansta-governed, Serbia--Sterling is fascinated with the methods and madness of almost-failed states.

His blog on WIRED covers the colorful chaos of blackmarket worlds, the economic mash-ups of the drug-addled digerati, and the Bollywoodification of the emerging world.

His recent little work of non-fiction,Shaping Things, he defines the emerging neologisms of intelligent object mediascape filled with spime and blobjects.

From When Blobjects Rule the Earth:

A Blobject is commonly defined as "an object with a curvilinear, flowing design, such as the Apple iMac computer and the Volkswagen Beetle." But computers and cars are just end products, they're not the process. The truth about a blobject is that is a physical object that has suffered a remake through computer graphics. It was designed on a screen with a graphics program. A blobject is what a standard 20th century industrial product, a consumer item, looks like after your crowd has beaten it into shape with a mouse.

Blobjects are blob-shaped objects, because of NURBS and meshes and splines and injection molding and CAD-CAM. They're highly curvilinear consumer items designed on workstations, and then they're generally blasted into being in a burst of injection-molded goo. ~from BoingBoing