Cybergreen

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

Mike Godwin from the January 2004 issue

(Page 6 of 7)

reason: You were not engaged by that?

Sterling: I'm extremely interested in that, actually, but it doesn't really get me anything. One of the things I introduced deliberately in the Viridian movement is Viridian hate objects. There are people who are our bête noirs, on whom we focus scorn and loathing, and of course they are the people who are most Viridian-like but on the other side. Like the Greening Earth Society, which is like six guys getting paid by coal companies. They sit in a hangar out by the Beltway making up lies. So they've got a better budget than us.

Sure, we hate Exxon because they're huge and they're everywhere. They are the worst of the oil majors, and plus they are involved in a lot of black propaganda activities. But the real people you want to hate from a Viridian perspective are the Greening Earth Society, because they are so much like us.

I singled out the Greening Earth Society as a psychological experiment in the manufacture of a social movement because I've noticed that other social movements hate heretics far more than they hate pagans. Pagans who have never heard the gospel -- you should clothe them. You should send out missionaries. They just don't know. It's the people who do know, who have the opposite idea, whom you hate.

reason: Nowadays the political lines seem increasingly blurry, but there were periods in the 20th century when it seemed you could draw some lines.

Sterling: Right now, the Republicans are the party of reckless spending, and the Democrats are the party of responsibility and the balanced budget.

reason: Not many of us saw that coming.

Sterling: In the 17th century, the guys with short hair were the radicals and the guys with long hair were the royalists. The signifiers move, and the issues move from place to place, but there are certain psychological aspects to human social organization that -- I wouldn't call them timeless, but they are commonalities.

I also like to experiment with them. I like to experiment with the media. I'd like to see what people can do with the Internet that they cannot do on paper. And there are certain things one can do that are not worth doing. Like I can set up a discussion group that's open to everybody! And that is not worth doing. It's sort of proven that it immediately turns into a cesspool because it's badly designed.

What I've got in Viridian lists are things like: How do I attract people's attention? How do I not attract too many people's attention? How do I attract interest groups and not alienate other interest groups? How do I move ideas from one interest group to another interest group?

reason: You did something clever by declaring yourself a pope-emperor of the Viridian Greens -- simultaneously declaring yourself as a leader and putting an ironic distance between yourself and that role.

Sterling: "Pope" is from surrealism. For someone to call himself a pope is not a new thing.

reason: I know, but you're a pope-hyphenate. That's new.

Sterling: I'm a pope-emperor. That actually did not work out. The pope doesn't work without a college of cardinals. In the early days of Viridian lists I had that; I would declare people things and give them stars and asterisks and ranks. You can do that for 20 people, but you cannot do it for 3,000.

reason: I've been amused by the spectacle of Harlan Ellison ranting against bulletin boards because they say bad things about him.

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