Sci-fi and design's bad habits

Bruce Sterling writes:

Fiction about truth is inherently more interesting and engaging than fiction about delusions. It took me a surprisingly long time to figure this out. I had the disadvantage of having to unlearn a lot of my genre’s bad habits in order to get here. But I’m no longer interested in my genre’s bad habits; instead, I’ve become interested in design’s bad habits.

I'm not totally sure what his larger point is, but it seems to come back to techno-utopianism that doesn't pan out:

Perhaps you don’t believe that the quest for the transcendental will cause you to fall into the pit of human squalor, going down with all hands like a struggling mastodon. But it is the higher truth. Consider Wernher von Braun, the European interplanetary rocket visionary. He aimed at the stars and hit London. What are those big, shiny space rockets for? Ideally, for escaping the grip of gravity and touching the face of the cosmos. But they’re also for annihilating children as they sleep in their beds.The harder you aim for that first goal, the more likely it is that you’ll hit the second.

[via]