Every year the Well (one of the early, pre-web, online communities) invites Bruce Sterling to chat about the state of the world. This year, he paints a grim picture of where the “present” is heading:
“Various entities and institutions have scrambled together safety pins and gobs of glue to rig the global economy so that it appears to be ambling along, but isn’t it a great conceptual Jenga, ready to fall if you move the wrong block? What kind of shuffling and reshuffling can we expect, if there’s a global economic meltdown? And has the collapse already happened – are we like the coyote, run far beyond the edge of the cliff, waiting for gravity’s effect?”
On Google News and Twitter:
“I’m looking over my Twitter stream here, because it seems a more useful barometer to me now than Google News. Google News definitely has that rickety Jenga feeling that JonL is talking about. Whenever you see something on Google News nowadays, you have to wonder: “who owns this so-called news organization now? What’s left of them financially? Is there even a shred of objective fact in this?”
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Bruce Sterling
Every year on The Well, Bruce Sterling does an “overview of Things in General, the State of the World, Where We Have Been and Where We are Tending.” I’ve cherry-picked a few thoughts from the latest installment:
“I always knew the “War on Terror” bubble would go. It’s gone. Nobody misses it. It got no burial. I knew it was gonna be replaced by another development that seemed much more burningly urgent than terror Terror TERROR, but I had a hard time figuring out what vast, abject fright that might be. Now I know. Welcome to 2009!”
“You know what’s truly weird about any financial crisis? WE MADE IT UP. Currency, money, finance, they’re all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it’s shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.”
“The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata. It’s like somebody burned their church.”
“I keep remembering the half-stunned, half-irritated looks on the faces of those car execs when they were chided for flying their company jets to Washington to beg. I felt sorrow for them. Truly. These guys are the captains of American industry at the top of the food chain. Of course they fly corporate jets. Corporate jets were *invented* for guys like the board of General Motors. And now they’re getting skewered for that by a bunch of punk-ass Congressmen they can usually buy and sell?”
“Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff.”
“People don’t have to solve every problem in the world in order to be happy. People will always have problems. People ARE problems. People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about. People need to LOOK AND FEEL they’re solving some of mankind’s many problems. People can’t stumble around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like Phil Gramm tell them to buck up.”
“When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.”
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Bruce Sterling
If you’re looking for an interesting read over the long weekend, may I suggest Distraction, by Bruce Sterling. I read this book in October of 2004, long before my political awakening. Here’s a short review on Boing Boing:
Distraction is the story of an America on the skids: economy in tatters, dollar collapsed, unemployment spiked, population on the move in great, restless herds bound together with networks and bootleg phones. The action revolves around Oscar Valparaiso, a one-of-a-kind political operator who has just put his man — a billionaire sustainable architecture freak — into the Senate and is looking for some downtime. But a funny thing happens on the way to the R&R: Oscar and his “krewe” (the feudal entourage who trail after him, looking after his clothes, research, security, systems and so on) end up embroiled in a complex piece of political theater, a media war between the rogue governor of the drowned state of Louisiana, the Air Force, the newly elected president, and a weird, pork-barrel science park in its own glassed-in dome.
I’d love to know how many books and screenplays about the 2008 campaign are in the works.
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Bruce Sterling
From Bruce Sterling’s State of the World, 2008:
“Some people still think that there’s an “Islamo-fascist tyranny” somewhere that hates our freedoms and can organize Islam-dom into a coherent fascist state… There’s just no way. Al Qaeda and the Taliban aren’t true “fascists.” Fascists can at least make trains run on time. Even Communists were better-organized. The mujihadeen have no organized army and no industrial policy and they don’t know where to find any. Because God was supposed to handle all that for them. You’re supposed to die nobly in a crowd of unwitting strangers, and then God’s supposed to make that all better. That’s the big plan.”
“But when you blow up the china shop, God doesn’t reassemble the plates for you. Being faith-based doesn’t trump reality.”
“Now the Americans have clearly lost the thread… the Americans are really just horribly out of it, they’re like some giant fundie Brazil, nobody takes their pronunciamentos seriously or believes a word they say… Whereas the world is much more seriously global now. China and India are real players, they’re part of the show and they matter.
“Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the resource crisis and the climate crisis. Because the world-machine’s backfiring and puffing smoke. Joe and Jane Sixpack are looking at four-dollar milk and five-dollar gas. It’s hurting and it’s scary and there’s no way out of it but through it.”
[Via Boing Boing]
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Bruce Sterling