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Bruce Sterling: Bumper Sticker Cognoscenti
Bumper Sticker Cognoscenti is a new, semi-regular feature where we invite remarkable people to create a few bumper stickers and then let us pick their brains for a bit. Science fiction author, design theorist and general guru-for-all-seasons Bruce Sterling (blog | WikiP) has gamely agreed to be our inaugural subject – and really, who better? When it comes to teasing sense out of an increasingly entangled world, identifying the key threads that keep it hanging together – or threaten to pull it apart – and succinctly explaining why the future depends on you giving a damn, few thinkers rival Chairman Bruce.
22% of the revenue from the sale of these stickers benefits Solar Austin, a membership organization working to bring renewable energy to the Capital of Texas. Sterling has also autographed five stickers which are up for eBay auction until March 29. 100% percent of the auction revenue benefits Solar Austin.
Sterling submitted his concepts by email from his current home in Belgrade, Serbia, where he decamped to write his next SF novel. Although he “may have to go even remoter, like a mountain or an island,” he says. Presumably thanks to guys like us. Bumperactive sticker fabricators Kyle Johnson and Chris Waltrip (who also runs the Bruce Sterling Online Index) worked up the graphic designs per Sterling's specifications.
Explaining the basis for his designs, Sterling said “I like WEIRD FUNNY Bumper Stickers.” When pressed, he elaborated: “stickers that imply the driver is insane: ‘I Brake For Hallucinations’ etc.”
He spoke at greater length on other topics, including his 2005 essay Shaping Things, a 150-page meditation on the future as an “internet of things,” and how best to go about building it. He also discussed the legacy of the cyberpunk sub-genre of SF which he and a handful of other writers created in the 1980s. Lastly, he shared insights into the ongoing “Indian Centipede”, an internecine saga of sex, wiretapping and DVD piracy reaching to the highest levels of the world's largest democracy. If you’re not a regular reader of Sterling's blog, you might not have heard of The Centipede yet -- and won’t be able to get enough of it once you do. Interview conducted by email in February, '06. Edited transcript follows:
In the nonfiction Shaping Things, Sterling examines how human history is shaped by the tools we create, and contemplates a future built by the next generation of objects. He divides human history so far into four epochs:
The Age of Artifacts, all-the-way-back to the Mongol Empire. In this period, everything we own we either make ourselves or obtain from someone we know personally. We are “Hunters and Farmers.”
The Age of Machines, Mongols to World War I. Building more complicated objects requires more specialized skills. We are transformed into “Customers,” generally more distant from the people who make our stuff.
The Age of Products, W.W.I. to the www. Objects are mass manufactured, sold by a jingle, and come in a can. With only the foggiest notion where all the great stuff at Wal-Mart comes from, we are “Consumers.”
The Age of Gizmos, www to today (or maybe just yesterday). Objects are highly customizable, programmable and never quite work right, dammit. Your cell phone is a floor wax AND a dessert topping. You are the “End User.”
What next? Sterling posits The Age of Spimes, a word he made up for the book since nobody’s invented a true Spime yet. Many of our Gizmos, however, already exhibit strong Spimelike tendencies:
A Spime is a thing that exists in theory until the moment you purchase it, when it is called into being according to your precise specifications from the most elemental components. Throughout its physical life, the Spime maintains a total record of how it was created, where it is, what it does and how it changes. When you're through with it, this record allows the Spime to be disintegrated back to the dust from whence it came, or pretty close to it. Until you desire the Spime again. As Sterling explains:
“The Spime is a set of relationships first and always, and an object now and then. […] It is an historical entity with an accessible, precise trajectory through time and space.”
What will Spimes mean for us, the “Spime Wranglers”? Technology so disposed toward surveillance and “ruthless intrusion” could mean the end of privacy, perhaps even liberty. And/Or, technology promising such radical efficiencies of production, use, and disposal could mean the virtual elimination of both scarcity and waste.
Neither will happen entirely, of course. Ultimately the World of Spimes will be shaped by the people who fabricate them. If you’re casting about for something new and exciting to do with your life, how about a career in industrial design?
Sterling's blog posts on emergent Spimes, thru 3/23: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Sterling: If people are running fabricators, then they're running code that creates objects. I know that's not what actually and literally happens inside fabricators, any more than "cyberspace" is an actual and literal space, but the user impression is similar: you hit the return key, and whoosh. [Ed: fabricators are machines that essentially “print” physical objects -- and even other machines -- from powdered plastic or metal. The process is sort of like making rigid, durable Jello using a mold tooled to the precision of 1/1000 of an inch. ’Cept without the mold. See The Realizer.]
I use the word "instantiate" because the older word "manufacture" has the wrong etymology. Manufacturing literally means making something manually, with hands. Somehow the old term drifted into new use for a machine process that likely should have been radically renamed, like "mechafacturing." We lost that opportunity for clarity. In Shaping Things I'm trying to convince people that it's possible to approach physical possessions in an entirely different way than we do today. Tomorrow, they're no longer jealously guarded physical rarities that are hard to replace, they are hard copies whose histories and support processes are in continual flux.
I didn't learn this attitude entirely from programmers; I learned it from industrial designers. Sometimes they're a little clingy about a unique prototype they made in the studio with their own hands, but if a guy's chair design has made 10,000 chairs, and you bring him one of those 10,000 chairs, he's very matter-of-fact about the chair-as-object; he's like, "well, they could have done much better on the wheels in this product run."
I'm an author. I can remember when a typed manuscript of a novel was a desperately precious, idiosyncratic thing. Now it's a printout, an instantiation of an electronic word-process. Nobody's excited about printouts, not even fanatical book collectors. The value of a holograph ms has been radically altered. They're just not something you sweat blood about. Ever.
Imagine having that attitude about cars.
BAC: The implications of a world of Spimes are far reaching and pretty wild. I'm wondering, are there any that occurred to you that you left out of the book, either because they didn't seem to fit with your main thesis, or you just didn't feel you had the "goods" to support them?
That's the reaction one gets when one reads the works of design visionaries in general. I need to make something clear here: being accurate is not the victory condition for visionaries. John Ruskin is one of the greatest and most influential design critics of all time. His work is cram-full of pious, blinkered, self-serving hokum. Plus, every world-saving scheme he envisioned failed brutally. That makes Ruskin all the more valuable, not less. He's like a compass that (almost) always points south.
BAC: In the book you write of sharing your father's belief that a worthwhile life includes being capable at something besides what you do for a living. For your father, an engineer, that meant retiring to a ranch -- which was his father's career. For you, it's meant exploring your father's career of industrial engineering, specifically focusing on the arena of design. How has your study of design impacted your vocation, science fiction?
Sterling: I'm a science fiction writer all right, but I consider myself an artist whose theme is the interplay of technology and society. I've really learned a lot about science fiction from design studies. Most directly, I learned that every created object, even the most banal and crass, has a history, and it will tell a story to an attentive eye.
I haven't seen any science fiction critics commenting on the design angle in my science fiction, but they do seem to be noticing that my work is less abstract and visionary and more directly engaged in the material world. There's an elegance in good design that is linked to a poetry of objects; there is fiction in science and there is also fiction in design. It's a literary frontier, really.
If, when you hear the words "science fiction," you think of a movie before you think of a book, it's likely you're unaware of the impact Michael Bruce Sterling has had on your life. Sterling, along with writers William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Tom Maddox, Lewis Shiner and others, pioneered science fiction's cyberpunk movement -- the now familiar sub-genre blending noir, horror, punk and techno-thriller into a gritty, greasy vision of the future. A.k.a. black gold at the box office. Without cyberpunk, there would be no Blade Runner, Terminator or Matrix -- 'least not in any way we'd recognize 'em.
Although it was Gibson who would ultimately sell a kajillion copies of Neuromancer, among the early founders Sterling was first among equals. They dubbed him "Chairman Bruce" for his work to evangelize "The Movement," most memorably under the name Vincent Omniaveritas, editor of the brilliantly subversive Cheap Truth newsletter (click-thru mandatory). Sterling was also editor of- and contributor to- the 1986 Mirrorshades anthology that would largely come to define cyberpunk as a genre (Hungarian edition pictured above).
Summing up the cyberpunk ideal, Sterling has said: "Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. We can do just about anything you can imagine to rats. And closing your eyes and refusing to think about this won't make it go away. That is cyberpunk."
Which may explain how Keanu has emerged freakishly unscathed from lead parts in five cyberpunk flicks (Johnny Mnemonic, 3 Matrixes, and the upcoming A Scanner Darkly):
Dude's not human.
Sterling: There are Mirrorshades first-issues in odd corners of the world even now.
BAC: One of the things that's most interesting to me about "future fiction" is how, as it ages, the seams become apparent between the "present-at-the-time-of-writing" and the proposed future, (or present-at-the-time-of-narrative). To cite an obvious example, time has shown the go-go boots and swinging captain of the original Star Trek to be more about the amazing 60s than the amazing 24th century. So with two decades' perspective on cyberpunk, what aspects strike you as rather more about the 1980s than the 21st century? What aspects strike you as "timeless", in the sense they could have been written in 1900 or 2000?
Sterling: You don't have any guarantee that the amazing 24th century won't be about swinging captains and go-go boots. That judgment is based on your position now in the dour and repressive '00s. If you look at, say, historical fiction -- Hollywood movies about Cleopatra, let's say -- you can see that every decade projects its own temporally local version of Cleopatra. Was the real Cleopatra more like Claudette Colbert or more like Elizabeth Taylor? History is a form of retrodiction. There are seams between the writing of the present and the past. There are even seams between the writing of the present and the present. Reportage is the first draft of history, but nobody expects today's hot report to be the full and final assessment of what happened today.
Of course cyberpunk is full of period gestures. For instance, my novel Islands In The Net, from the late '80s, is set in 2020 and has Soviets in it. Pretty much anything written before the collapse of Communism has some tinge of communism in it. If capitalism collapses, that's gonna be similarly tough on anything written today.
BAC: On your blog you've been extensively chronicling and glossing the "Indian Centipede" scandal. It basically looks like someone very high up in India intercloned Karl Rove and Tony Montana and set him loose on all political comers. By your reckoning, is this Gary Condit stuff -- trashy, compelling, but ultimately of little larger political consequence -- or could it be Indian Watergate?
"The BJP's silver jubilee celebrations lay in tatters after a carefully timed in-house sting operation forced BJP general secretary and RSS insider Sanjay Joshi to quit his party post on Tuesday..." (India Times, 12/28/05)
So begins an epic tale of sex, bugging and bootlegging snaking its way from the porn shops of Ahmedabad to India's highest tiers of money and power. It's a potboiler-in-progress, populated by gumshoe reporters and hapless P.I.'s, fundamentalists and industrialists, Bollywood ingenues, hackers, phreakers and bare-knuckle partisan brawlers of the highest rank. "There are so many shoes left to drop in this ruckus," quipped Sterling in early January, "that we could outfit a centipede."
This much is known: Sanjay Joshi was set up. Somebody videoed him inflagrante diplimatico with a schoolteacher -- bad news if your job in a conservative religious party depends on a vow of celibacy. Days later, flamboyant socialist playboy Amar Singh, of the liberal Samajwadi Party, announced his phone had been tapped. A salacious CD of purported chats with Tolly- and Bolly-wood starlets soon began making the rounds (hey, he's a flamboyant socialist playboy).
In quick succession, more than half a dozen prominent ministers and pols stepped forward with claims that they too had been filmed, shadowed and bugged. More than a few signs point to a dirty tricks arm of the ruling Congress Party, with rumblings of deep-pocketed corporate backing. A crew of snoops for hire, black-hat script kiddies and renegade telco underlings has been rounded up and are under the screws. Meanwhile, the Sanjay sex tape is the hottest DVD bootleg on the market, and rumors of many more discs compromising many more pols abound....
Sterling's Centipede Posts, thru 3/23: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21
Bizarrely enough, eerily similar sex and bugging scandals -- all at least tangentially involving actresses -- have cropped up worldwide since the dawn of '06. See also British Centipede: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 ; Greek Centipede: 1 | 2 | 3 ; Hollywood Centipede (American Centipede is reserved for when the NSA wire tapping really blows up):1 | 2 ; and South African Centipede:1 .
Could there be one, gargantuan Hydra Centipede?
I'm inclined to think that the Bofors scandal is the Indian Watergate. For one thing, Bofors is damn near as old as Watergate, and it's still going on, unresolved, at a bullock-cart's pace.
BAC: Outside of your blog and the Indian press, I haven't seen anyone else talking about this story. And yet it seems like a huge story. What will it take for Western media to pick up the Centipede?
Sterling: If it turns out that Bill Clinton is seriously involved, and/or if there is sex with some celebrity Americans recognize. Singh does claim that Clinton was wiretapped on his phone.
If I were editing an American newspaper, I doubt I would cover this scandal. Americans just don't have much skin in the game there. This is best understood as culture-studies. It's well-suited for blogging as a medium.
BAC: Best guess, are we at halftime in this scandal? End of the first quarter?
That depends on how many shoes this centipede has to drop. I'm looking for a direct conspiratorial connection between the BJP sex-video scandal and the Amar Singh sex-wiretapping scandal. If these turn out to be two operations by the same group of Indian Watergate Plumbers, then it'll blow bigtime.
There may well be some undiscovered operations, too. There are four guys in custody: a phone employee, a private dick, and two hackers. Phone employees aren't exactly made of chrome steel, and hackers tend to sing their heads off in police custody. What are they saying?
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