Bruce Sterling on 2008
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #0 of 12: What is going to amuse our bouches now? (bumbaugh) Mon 31 Dec 07 11:50
We ring in the new year with our ninth annual visit from Bruce Sterling, in
which we review recent events, gaze into the future, and generally discuss
the state of the world.
Bruce Sterling, author, journalist, editor, and critic, was born in 1954.
Best known for his eight science fiction novels, he also writes short
stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns, and introductions
for books ranging from Ernst Juenger to Jules Verne. His nonfiction works
include THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER
(1992) and TOMORROW NOW: ENVISIONING THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS (2003). He is a
contributing editor of WIRED magazine and a columnist for MAKE magazine.
During 2005, he was the “Visionary in Residence” at Art Center College of
Design in Pasadena and is currently the guest curator for the SHARE Digital
Culture Festival in Torino, Italy.
He has appeared in ABC’s Nightline, BBC’s The Late Show, CBC’s Morningside,
on MTV and TechTV, and in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, the New
York Times, Fortune, Nature, I.D., Metropolis, Technology Review, Der
Spiegel, La Repubblica, and many other venues.
Our interlocutor with Bruce is Jon Lebkowsky, an authority on social media
and online community and, like Bruce, a longtime member of the Well.
Jon writes about culture, technology, media, sustainability and other
topics for various publications, and has been blogging regularly since
2000. In 1991 he cofounded the pioneering online company FringeWare, Inc.,
the first company to attempt e-commerce. The company published the
influential magazine FringeWare Review, which had an international
distribution. He worked with bOING bOING (as associate editor for the
original paper zine), HotWired, The Whole Earth Catalog, Electric Minds,
and many other web and cyberculture projects and endeavors during the World
Wide Web’s first decade. In the late 90s, he was actively involved in the
creation of various e-commerce and community initiatives for Whole Foods
Market (and gained quite a few pounds, for obvious reasons).
So, guys, how *are* things? What’s going to hell in a hand basket? About
what can we be optimistic? How is this New Year’s different from all other
turnings of the calendar?
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #1 of 12: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Mon 31 Dec 07 13:08
Everything’s peachy, with a few exceptions… the economy of the USA
is crumbling, of course, and the U.S. government’s bleeding dollars (as
well as real American blood) in Iraq. Climate change is accelerating,
polar ice caps are melting, whole species are disappearing. Developing
nations want their chance to be the next USA, and they’re not
especially interested in hearing that it’s not possible for everyone to
leverage the same increasingly limited resources.
What happens when we pay everybody in the world a living wage, and
give ‘em all a chance to own an SUV and a house in the suburbs? How
many worlds would it take to float that boat? How pissed are they going
to be when they realize “lifestyles of the rich and famous don’t
scale,” in fact the lifestyle of the typical middle-class American is
not sustainable.
I’m writing from a quiet neighborhood in Texas where everybody’s
preparing for New Year’s Eve. They’ll celebrate like always, drink more
than they should, ogle the street performances and art at First Night
downtown, watch fireworks like it’s the fourth of July, Tomorrow
they’ll watch football and eat a spoonful of black-eyed peas for luck.
Nobody’s freaking out yet, but they’re shaky. And well they should be.
I’m not worried. I see via Boing Boing that I can buy moldable moon
sand and pancakes in a can. I’m okay, as long as the RIAA doesn’t catch
me copying a song from a CD that I supposedly own to a computer that
I’m pretty sure I own. Or maybe I don’t own anything; maybe I’m just
renting – licensing – all my surroundings. I hope they don’t repossess
that candle before it burns out…
At least I’m not living in Kenya, where all hell’s broken loose after
the latest election. I’m not living in Pakistan, where Bhutto was
martyred last week, assassinated, no doubt, by some Pakistani Lee
Harvey Oswald. Politics in the U.S.A. is safe, right? We’re completely
civilized.
In the geek circles that Bruce and I both know so well, there’s no
real sense of urgency about the state of the world, at least that I can
see. I wonder about that.
So my first question for Bruce: how’s Torino?
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #2 of 12: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Tue 1 Jan 08 04:07
Well, we were off to a rocking start here in Torino when New Years Eve
was cancelled for 2008. Instead of fireworks, booze and public
hijinks, the Mayor commissioned a solemn march of mourning for seven
laborers who have died in a local industrial accident.
So I was out on the streets last night… they were eerie. The only
people hitting the bottle and partying were the local Arabs, who were
blasting rai music and throwing glass and fireworks out of their
tenement windows… There were also a few puzzled tourists who didn’t
seem to get the last-minute bulletin.
The rest of the population seemed to fall in line as one with the
wishes of the Mayor and the Archbishop. They just shuttered the show,
end of story.
You always hear tell from other Italians that the Turinese are a
solemn, reserved and disciplined lot…. I wrote that story off
because, by American standards, it’s hard to find any fraction of the
Italian populace that comes across as genuinely solemn and reserved.
But to cancel New Years — even cancel *private parties* — is really a
surprising and impressive gesture.
So: instead of starting 2008 with some bubbly orgy of prosecco and
lambrusco, I went home and I started work on a new short story. This
is the only time in my 53-year lifespan that I spent New Years’ Eve
working.
And you know, I think I may be better off for it. Here in Italy, I
learn something new every day.
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #3 of 12: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Tue 1 Jan 08 07:08
I visited your blog and saw the Torino cancellation post
(http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/12/torino-suddenly.html), but what
caught my eye was the later post of the Hollywood Church of Religious
Science marquee
(http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/12/another-spectac.html), which
says “Nothing changes if nothing changes,” which you call “another
spectacular insight into 2008.”
What should change in 2008, and what critical changes can we actually
expect, from your perspective?
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #4 of 12: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Tue 1 Jan 08 08:13
Well, it’s an American election year. At the far-away end of it,
anyhow.
I don’t doubt we’ll see a few ‘critical changes’ in 2008, but I’d be
guessing they don’t arrive through any power-player’s focussed intent.
They will be dreaded changes that are predicted, and watched in detail,
and impossible to avert.
The political and economic landscape in 2008 is full of spinning,
tottering Chinese plates poised on tall pool-cues. Wild-card stuff
like currency collapses and international financial panics and loose
Pakistani nukes.
I wouldn’t have guessed this, but in 2008 it looks like even Al Qaeda
has finally lost its dance-beat. They used to kill whole airliners and
embassies and dance clubs and skyscrapers full of aliens and
unbelievers. They had the world set on its ear.
But if you look at what they’re up to lately, they’re almost entirely
obsessed with killing Sunni Moslems nowadays. They’re killing so many
Sunni Moslems that all the other parties who used to enthuse so about
killing Sunni Moslems are losing interest. Because if Al Qaeda
slaughters crowds of Sunni worshippers in Sunni mosques on major Sunni
holidays, what can the rest of us do to keep up?
I’m sure that, in the jehadi camps, there’s a lot of backpatting this
holiday season over getting a Lion of the Resistance to liquidate
Benazir Bhutto. Still: wouldn’t it have been vastly more effective to
assassinate, say, Angela Merkel the female Chancellor of Germany? Or
kill Putin, maybe? They used to think so big!
If Angela Merkel had been killed by a suicide bomber the Europeans
would be in fullscale antiterror lockdown right now. Whereas
destabilizing Pakistan is like…. it’s doable, but what gives there?
Millions of pious Moslems die in a civil war in the birthplace of the
Taliban? And this advances the general cause of piety in what way,
exactly?
Pakistan could very easily smash to bloody pieces in 2008. If it
does, nobody anywhere is gonna try and stitch Pakistan back together.
Pakistan has a bigger population than Russia. It is just too big for
any of the other power-players to handle. So if it ignites, it’ll
burn.
So they’ll just blow up the local missile sites (if they can), and
then watch in grim disbelief.
Some people still think that there’s an “Islamo-fascist tyranny”
somewhere that hates our freedoms and can organize Islam-dom into a
coherent fascist state… There’s just no way. Al Qaeda and the
Taliban aren’t true “fascists.” Fascists can at least make trains run
on time. Even Communists were better-organized. The mujihadeen have
no organized army and no industrial policy and they don’t know where to
find any. Because God was supposed to handle all that for them.
You’re supposed to die nobly in a crowd of unwitting strangers, and
then God’s supposed to make that all better. That’s the big plan.
But when you blow up the china shop, God doesn’t reassemble the plates
for you. Being faith-based doesn’t trump reality.
It’s pretty good news that Al Qaeda is getting tired and losing its
charisma. They’ve held center stage more than long enough.
I think “we” in the largest sense, planetary civilization, world
culture or whatever, we’re closer to a consensus idea of futurity than
it’s been since, say, 1997. It’s a green futurity. People don’t like
it much, but they know it’s coming anyway.
Ten years ago, there was a little Belle Epoque era of good feeling
there when the “Washington Consensus” held its sway… and the thought
among opinion-makers of the time was, you know, let the dot-com Long
Boomers run that show. Everybody knew that what they were saying and
doing didn’t make much sense — but at least there was plenty of pie
there for the Formerly Free World.
Now the Americans have clearly lost the thread… the Americans are
really just horribly out of it, they’re like some giant fundie Brazil,
nobody takes their pronunciamentos seriously or believes a word they
say… Whereas the world is much more seriously global now. China and
India are real players, they’re part of the show and they matter.
Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the
resource crisis and the climate crisis. Becaus the world-machine’s
backfiring and puffing smoke. Joe and Jane Sixpack are looking at
four-dollar milk and five-dollar gas. It’s hurting and it’s scary and
there’s no way out of it but through it.
Everybody’s reluctant to budge because they sense, probably correctly,
that they have to wade through a torrent of mud, blood sweat and
tears. Maybe, then, they emerge into the relatively sunlit uplands of
something closer to sustainability.
So: I don’t expect too much to happen in 2008: except for that
intensified smell of burning as people’s feet are held to the fire.
“Nothing changes if nothing changes.” But if nothing changes, then more
and more china is going to flat-out shatter and break.
THEN they’ll move. If they see somebody making money at it, they
might move pretty fast.
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #5 of 12: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Tue 1 Jan 08 11:59
I suppose regime change in the U.S. could improve its standing and
influence in the world community, but who will lead in the 21st
Century? I suppose New York and Los Angeles will seem quaint, somewhat
tired communities next to Shanghai, Moscow, and Dubai?
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #6 of 12: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Wed 2 Jan 08 06:46
I’d be guessing there’s a pretty good chance that cities will lead.
Nation-states seem bewildered by the contemporary political and
economic climate. Still, there are lots of urban areas that seem
lively. New York looks downright dynamic. There are a lot of words to
describe Los Angeles, but “quaint” certainly isn’t one of them.
Here in Italy the national government is the despair of the populace
(to judge by the press coverage), but Torino’s got a lot going on as
an urban center. They’re not going to lead in national politics — at
least, I don’t *think* so — but in terms of grabbing an aging, vacant,
screwed-up industrial infrastructure and retrofitting it successfully
for new conditions, Torino really *does* lead. Torino’s full of
opportunity.
I don’t think anybody wants to become a Chinese Communist any more –
except for a few cocaine-crazed Maoist weirdos in the Andes — but
there really does seem to be a Chinese model-of-development now. In
the Balkans, in Europe, you can see it at work. It’s very
street-level, very under-the-legal-radar — it comes out of car trunks
and off the backs of bicycles, and the labels are dodgy and its all
sold for the “china-price.”
Torino’s got the biggest outdoor market in Europe, a place called the
“Porta Palazzo” — Chinese, Rumanian emigres, Arabs, a few Nigerians
and Eritreans and such… the economic vitality there is awesome.
Turin is a chilly, Alpine-foothill kind of place… and there are a lot
of poor people here, mostly the emigres… yet *nobody is cold.*
Nobody’s blue and shivering. Because they’re all warmly dressed, in
new, cheap, Chinese clothes. Boots, hats, gloves, mufflers, they’re
crazily cheap.
Ragged clothes were the signature of poverty for centuries. That
former reality is just gone now. The fancier clothes here are also
made in China, but with more IP protection. I don’t know if that’s
“leadership” — but it sure is transformative.
My guess is that, among your list, Dubai has got the best chance to be
called “quaint” one of these years. It’s built on oil and
autocracy…. its got a phantom-like, Fatehpur Sikri feeling to it,
like a Las Vegas desert dream. Maybe it can thrive as an offshore
colony for India. In much the way that, say, Vegas seems really sexy
and sophisticated to someone from Omaha.
We expect somebody to “lead” by acting all conventionally leaderlike
– Putin “leads.” Sarkozy would like to “lead.” Bush imagines that he
“leads.” But it’s entirely unclear where these guys think they’re
leading people: they lack much in the way of any explicit societal
vision, and if they made that explicit, I don’t think people would much
want to live there.
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #7 of 12: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 2 Jan 08 12:43
Conspiracy theories abound; I hear occasional theories about shadow
governments and stealthy wealthocracies that are engineering a future
that works for them, if for no one else. The economic reality you
describe sounds very laissez-faire, decentralized, and out of control
(in the Kevin Kelly sense). Given the “bewilderment” of nation-states
that you describe, are we evolving away from monolithic government
entities? What about the scattered pockets of already-built WMDs,
organized and disorganized armies, other instruments of lethal force?
And where are powerful corporations in this? Are they, too, bewildered?
Are we going to see a massive unraveling of force in the world,
similar to the unraveling of the USSR, if only because no entity can
afford to pay the increasing costs of control?
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #8 of 12: What is going to amuse our bouches now? (bumbaugh) Wed 2 Jan 08 13:19
Is this anticipated “leadership of the cities” the herald of the decline of
the nation state? Or has that ship sailed?
(And, for those following along on the World Wide Web: by e-mailing the
hosts at inkwell@well.com you, too can join the conversation with Bruce
Sterling on the state of the world.)
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #9 of 12: Jamais Cascio (cascio) Wed 2 Jan 08 14:11
Hey Bruce.
You’ve lived in Europe for a few years now, and this year you moved to a
genuine “old Europe” EU/NATO country. How has that shifted your view of
The Future?
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #10 of 12: Cogito, Ergo Spero (robertflink) Wed 2 Jan 08 15:27
Any comment on the affect of the growing entertainment (broadly
considered) industry in 2008? I mean something other than increased
obesity due to lack of exercise. Perhaps a profusion of imagination?
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #11 of 12: John Payne (satyr) Wed 2 Jan 08 18:43
This, in <4>, stood out for me…
> I think “we” in the largest sense, planetary civilization, world
> culture or whatever, we’re closer to a consensus idea of futurity than
> it’s been since, say, 1997. It’s a green futurity. People don’t like
> it much, but they know it’s coming anyway.
What’s up with people not liking a green future? Are they equating it
with deprivation? Do they imagine themselves raising their own food with
shovels and short-handled hoes? Are they thinking about gas rationing?
Water rationing?
Whatever happened to the notion that a green future might be more fun?
inkwell.vue.317 : Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2008
permalink #12 of 12: QUESTION FROM DEAN LOOMIS (davadam) Wed 2 Jan 08 22:39
Dean Loomis writes:
Your latest novel, The Zenith Angle, seemed to me to be a regular
Clancyesque techno-thriller, with similar chances at best-sellerdom.
William Gibson, writing stuff set in the recent past, has actually
made it on to the NY Times’ list for his most recent two efforts. The
Nebula Awards seem to be dominated by fantasy rather than SF. The
Sci-Fi Channel on TV shows Extreme Championship Wrestling. Mainstream
authors like Cormac McCarthy write books that would not raise an
eyebrow if included in SF collections. Gibson has been quoted as saying
that the critical event of the “technological singularity”, where the
future
becomes unforeseeable, has already been passed. Nobody would have
believed that the fabled “Northwest passage” ice-free from the
Atlantic to the Pacific was a realistic event, yet it was there last
summer. Is there any point to SF as something to be taken seriously
rather than as a branch of the “young adult” section of the bookstore?
Cheers,
- Dean
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