Cybergreen

Bruce Sterling on media, design, fiction, and the future

Mike Godwin from the January 2004 issue

(Page 2 of 7)

reason: It was interesting that when Madonna started cir-culating ersatz MP3s to fool the file traders -- MP3s that had her cursing at them for trying to trade her music without paying for it -- people started sampling the cursing.

Sterling: Pop will eat itself. I predicted for a long time that the Internet would be a big, stinking deal when there was finally a pop song about it. Sure enough, Destiny's Child did a song that has a line about "some girl trashing me on the Internet." That's funny, but the thing that's peculiar about it is there was always a dark side. There was always the porn/mafia/drug dealer/pedophilia aspect -- the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

reason: The flip side of the empowerment dream.

Sterling: We're empowering people we're afraid of, and we cannot handle the consequences of the social change, some of which are always dark. There is no silver lining without its cloud. It's a Woodstock-Altamont transformation. It's like, hey, we're going to play free music for everybody, including these PCP-demented Hell's Angels with pool cues.

reason: I miss the days when porn and computer crime were perceived to be the big threat, not copyright infringement. Those were more inherently interesting.

Sterling: I miss the teenage menace days: "Children shouldn't have these computers. They're burglar tools. They should be kept out of their hands, like rifles and alcohol. No underage people should control all these extremely dangerous mechanisms."

There are historical periods of license and historical periods of oppression. But the records would get lost. At the height of Victorianism, when woman are shrouding the table legs, you're not really confronted with your regency grandfather who was some drunken fuck wandering down streets accosting semi-nude hookers in his heyday.

The history of pornography is you'd find it in your uncle's stuff when you were cleaning up after he died and you'd burn it. People would just destroy it. "Omigod, he had all this indecent stuff!" And you'd kind of whisper about it later. But there were these cleansing fires. You could burn it and there were only so many copies. A privately printed edition of Autobiography of a Flea, or Fanny Hill. Now it's pig easy to go on the Internet and just grab the planet's most scabrous excesses -- absolute debauchery -- you lay it out there with the complete sterile access of a surgeon or a medical test. By what means do we repress this information? Any red-blooded guy with 80 megabytes of rancid porn on his hard disk can be a publisher on a CD-ROM in seconds.

reason: You map out Tomorrow Now according to Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man: the infant, the school--boy, the lover, the soldier, the judge, the elderly man, and the senile one. When you characterize the soldier age, you talk less about terrorists and terrorism than figures who are somewhere between warlords and criminals.

Sterling: They're terrorist anti-terrorists. The warlords have got it going on because they command the means of production. Bin Laden is a prophet. He's a cultist, and made this tremendous suicide gesture, which is not that far from the Heaven's Gate/Jonestown thing.

reason: The trick is making other people commit suicide for you.

Sterling: No, that's not even the trick. He's probably more powerful dead than he is alive at this point. My suspicion is that the guy is dead. But I expect to see him issuing tapes for the next 30 to 40 years.

He may have been dying. He may have done this thing as a kind of Gotterdammerung gesture. Hitler did that. The Japanese were very into that. Fanatical gestures capture the public's imagination, but they're just not as important to people's lives as massive economic arrangements. A guy like Arkan, the Serb counterterrorist with connections to the Yugoslav government, is in the business of destabilizing nation-states in order to route the entire productive capacity of his population through his own pockets.

reason: When I started the lover chapter, I said to myself, "There is going to be some sex in there," but there wasn't much. Instead you talk about people's relationship with objects.

Sterling: What I'm trying to talk about are aspects of the 21st century that are visibly different from what we already have. And I don't really think love is going to be that different. There's a fringe for people who like blowup dolls, but in point of fact there's very little going on there that hasn't been going on since the advent of the birth control pill.