Sterling has posted a transcript of his atemporality from Transmediale. This part reminds me of my essay Birthers and the Democratization of Media:
There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor.
This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. This is the source of our gnawing discontent.
It means the end of post-modernism. It means the end of the New World Order, which is about civilizing the entire planet, stopping all the land wars, repressing the terrorism. It means the end of the Washington Consensus of the nineteen nineties. It means the end of the WTO. It means the end of Francis Fukiyama’s ‘End of History’; it ended, and it’s moving in a completely different and unexpected direction.
The idea that history ended, and that the market sorts that out, and that the Pentagon bombs it if that doesn’t work – it’s gone. The situation now is one of growing disorder. A failed state, a potentially failed globe, a collapsed WTO, a collapsed Copenhagen, financial collapses, lifeboat economics, transition to nowhere. Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don’t match the territory, and that’s why we are upset.
Beyond the Beyond: Atemporality for the Creative Artist
I feel like I grok his “gothic high tech” idea better now, as well. It’s a reference to gothic romance, where the old gothic architecture is in ruins, not contemporary “goth” subculture.
First, Sterling grimly runs through all the various potential threats we face in 2009.
So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly blows one’s brains out for no sane reason.
Full Story: SEED
Then he runs through the opportunities we have:
We now come to the useful word “precarity,” which is part of the American lifestyle but distant from American politics. “Precarity” is, of course, the condition of existing precariously. The condition of losing one’s safety and security, of losing predictability and the ability to rationally plan ahead, the condition of being humiliated and in danger. [...]
Normally Americans and Europeans fail to agree about “precarity”?—?Americans think their precarity is a kind of fluidity and dynamism, while Europeans are lazy featherbedders dawdling over two-hour lunches. But what’s certain is that, whatever its definition, precarity is now global. The wealthy and powerful?—?especially the wealthy and powerful?—?are precarious. They are being flung about like flotsam, and the precarity once reserved for blue-collar workers is now inside the corner office and the corporate boardroom as well.
Full Story: SEED
I first came across the term precarity last year when I found The Tarots of Precariomancy. It perfectly describes the nature of work in the US today. I’ve come to see precarity as inevitable, but certainly it would be nice to be free of.
So, what made Mondo 2000 so special? It was, in my opinion, the best alternative culture magazine that America ever had. They wrote about smart drugs, brain implants, virtual reality, cyberpunk, Cthulhupunk and cryogenics. They covered Laibach and Lydia Lunch in the same issue. The pantheon of writers was a force to be reckoned with: Bruce Sterling, Robert Anton Wilson, and William Gibson all lent their talents, and there was even a Burroughs vs. Leary interview face-off. Then there was the famous U2-Negativland interview, in which Negativland, disguised as reporters, interviewed U2 into a corner to reveal the band’s hypocrisy over their lawsuit against Negativland over sampling. All in all, the magazine took risks. ‘The good dream for me and Mondo,’ said editor R.U. Sirius in an interview with Purple Prose, ‘is overcoming the limits of biology without necessarily leaving sensuality or sexuality behind.’ Issue after issue, Mondo 2000 threw a sexy dystopian bash and invited the decade’s best thinkers.
Full Story: Coilhouse. And be sure to read Joshua Ellis’s comment!
See also: My 2002 interview with R.U. Sirius.
Science fiction author Bruce Sterling’s latest book Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years is a non-fiction collection of speculations about the future. I caught Sterling’s Q&A session after a reading at the University of Washinton. Here’s what he had to say.
The new design is finally live. I still need to create archive templates, and upload new content. An outdated interview with Warren Ellis is coming, and so are notes from a talk by Bruce Sterling. A less edited version of my interview with R.U. Sirius will come later than that. I also need to do a lot of editing of old content.
There was a time when the name R.U. Sirius was synonymous with cyberculture. His seminal magazine Mondo 2000 predated Wired, and was even more enthusiastic in its wow-gosh sexification of the new geek order. Articles predicting a slick future of nanotech parties and smart drugs were mixed in with batches of fearful predictions of terrorism, economic collapse, draconian copyright enforcement, increased surveillance and invasive advertising. But Sirius didn’t stop there: After the collapse of Mondo, he went on to write for magazines like 21C, Salon and Disinformation, and edited Getting It. He created the Revolution Party, a non-ideological anti-authoritarian political organization (“If even the alternative parties like Libertarian and Green seem a bit rigid to you, consider joining us”), and campaigned for Presidency of the United States. His latest project, The Thresher, is a political magazine.
But The Thresher is a print magazine. Sirius hardly goes online anymore, except for research. The truth is, the Godfather of GeekChic has moved on.
Read the rest of this entry »
The latest issue of Shift profiles their selections of the ten most important “green innovators” – people who are using technology to better the environment. Some of these people are doing some pretty cool projects. And yes, they include Viridian Design founder Bruce Sterling.
Link.
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