Cybergreen

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

Mike Godwin from the January 2004 issue

(Page 5 of 7)

reason: The Internet turned out to be a funhouse mirror in which everything is emphasized.

Sterling: It's also peculiarly carnal. In the early days of cyberspace, we were going to escape the meat. Well, there is more meat on the Internet than you can imagine. There are acres and acres of people just pointing cameras at their bodies.

reason: Blogging seems to have taken a place in the culture that used to be occupied by fanzines, and maybe by the science fiction magazines.

Sterling: It had its apotheosis in people like Cory Doctorow [author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom] and other writers who really aren't that interested in the old paper world. Cory actually publishes stuff electronically, and blogging is his Weird Tales. He is of a generation sufficiently divorced from the old pulps that he's the dolphin among mesosaurs here.

reason: It seems strange to go to the newsstand and see the lone science fiction magazine.

Sterling: It's been anachronistic since World War II. These are the last surviving pulps. I love them dearly.

There's nothing holy about them. Like all forms of media, they are very dependent on their technological circumstances. The transformation comes when the people who understood what it was like die. I'm a transitional figure. I'm the very last generation that worked professionally on typewriters. William Gibson wrote his first book on a typewriter. I wrote two books on typewriters. I was taught to use slide rules in schools. Now it's like having a pet trilobite.

reason: Let's talk about the Viridian movement. You're obviously trying to take some dimension of environmentalism and take it in a new and different direction that isn't particularly anti-modern or anti-technological. And you've tried to frame your "Greens" as an art movement rather than as a political movement.

Sterling: I've always been extremely interested in art movements and political movements and social movements, the small gangs of intelligentsia and who reads whom. Professional musicians are into that too. I just got this new Starbucks album that the Rolling Stones put together. Keith Richards, of all people, talks about how he always wanted to know who the musicians he likes listen to. That's the sign of a true adept there. You want to trace back your spiritual ancestors.

That's what André Breton did, and that's what the pre-Raphaelites did. And they self-published to get the news out. The pre-Raphaelites had this fanzine called The Germ, and it went through four issues. And it always goes through four issues. That's the classic fanzine thing. The surrealists had this fanzine called The Minotaur, and it went through four issues. The cyberpunks had two fanzines -- Cheap Truth and SF Eye. Cheap Truth went through 17 issues. But the issues were only one page long.

They're blogs now. And there are various other social software mechanisms. I'm doing a Viridian blog [www.viridiandesign.org] which is an electro version of a design magazine. I use it as a kind of social probe. It's an experiment for me, a way to give and get back at the same time. It's an organizational experiment. It's a private intelligence network.

reason: And the substance, the topic area, is what?

Sterling: The central topic is the greenhouse effect as a post-industrial design problem. It's not just about raising money for flood victims, which is one way to deal with the consequences. It's about thinking about how we got into this mess, making people realize the mess, and exploring mechanisms -- technologies -- by which we might conceivably get out.

reason: The traditional green approach, as distinct from the Viridian Green approach, is typically framed in negative terms: a "Thou shalt not" or "We must stop X."

Sterling: Traditional environmentalism is tied in with a human self-actualization movement, which says there are certain things we must renounce for moral reasons.

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