Viridians Invade Whole Earth, Seize Means Of Information

Whole Earth, Summer, 2001 by Bruce Sterling

"Virtual community" was once a far-fetched notion from San Francisco cyberspace. As a Whole Earth reader, you were hip to this concept long before normal people got hold of it and blew the seams off the economy.

In this issue, Whole Earth has finally been hoist on its digital petard. The Viridian Design Movement (www.viridiandesign.org), is a virtual community of high-tech greens. We have burst out of our customary nexus of lists and websites, and taken over the magazine.

The Viridian Movement began on the Whole Earth `Lectronic Link, or WELL, because that is where I, your Special Guest Editor, hang out cyberspatially. The WELL is a primeval, cranky, yet potent virtual community in San Francisco (www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/). Despite the fact that I use a WELL address in California, I live in central Texas. So when my wife upstairs on her Mac sends email to my home office, it has to route to the Bay Area and back but that's not even weird any more.

Let me cut to the chase. We Viridian cybergreen, futurist, networking types are concerned with the Greenhouse Effect. Here's our pitch in a nutshell: we're tired of breathing the dirty garbage that gushes from smokestacks and tailpipes. These gizmos were designed and built by long-dead industrial titans such as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John D. Rockefeller. These industries are touchingly traditional, but you and I have to breathe our own exhaust, plus Henry's, Tom's, and John's, because we are historically downwind from them and [CO.sub.2] stays up in the sky for centuries.

Our historical condition is to be trapped in a global garage with a giant, smoking engine. Breathing trash is a humiliation which is truly global; it extends to pandas, seals, whales, even moguls and Congressmen. Most of the time we pretend not to notice, because we've trained ourselves not to. But it's harder and harder to ignore the consequences, and all the really lively parts of this problem lie dead ahead of us.

We Viridians are natives of a Greenhouse world. We want to know what the Greenhouse really means and how it feels; not in some abstract, corny way, but in a way that's as immediate and visceral as breathing it.

For this issue of Whole Earth, I have shaken down my digital network and squeezed it into print. The mag is stuffed with heartfelt testimony from my Viridian friends and fellow travelers, a noble group of souls from Vancouver to Belgrade.

We Viridians are "Virtual Intelligentsia" types; our marvelous modems and our booming bandwidth are definitely not the point here. Instead, these are hands-on confessions about our new tools, new ideas, and new approaches.

My own line of work is science fiction writing; yes, that's my day job. The Internet is creating some starkly new possibilities here. One section of this magazine, "Futurefeedforward," looks rather like science fiction, but it isn't. It's design fiction: it boldly pretends that new technologies exist, then rapturously promotes them. It's rather like what Microsoft does when it floats nonexistent vaporware and promulgates "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). When Microsoft does this, federal courts take an interest, but when Futurefeedforward does this, it's rad hipster culture-jamming. It works great, and it was made up by this cool guy on the net I know, this guy named Dave. Dave's in law school.

Let me demo a Viridian approach for you. Let's get all cozy and hands-on together. I'm typing this editorial in the Whole Earth office in San Rafael, California. I have traveled here from Austin ("Berkeley on the Colorado") because assembling a print magazine entirely by modem does not, in fact, work. Here at Whole Earth HQ, I've got a chipped Formica table, a grimy keyboard, and an ancient Macintosh. I'm beneath some raddled, burnt-out fluorescents in a corner of a large Victorian mansion, amid a maddening flotsam of Post-it notes, FedEx packs, eco-posters, and photocopies; a literary landscape of cornstarch packing noodles, Tyvek envelopes, and homeburnt CD-ROMs....

Soon this chaos will become the magazine, and to nerve myself up, I'm sipping a take-out coffee. The product of a litigious society, it sports a taut plastic safety lid and a recycled-paper "java jacket" so that it won't scorch my lips and fingers. As a final fillip, since this is California, a power blackout could happen at any moment that could crash this computer and/or take down its network connections.

So you see, once you start really paying attention, we break down those corny print-centric roles in which I am Special Guest Editor and you are a mere hapless reader. Instead, our relationship becomes appallingly like real life! This is just what us Viridians are into; we'd like to deal with the atmosphere that way. We'd like to carry that attitude into our entire engagement with material reality. We'd like to think about our tools, ideas and practices as if we were native denizens of some wiser and more advanced civilization! Where the twentieth century's phony-baloney ideology is a remote and fading apparition, and real-life human beings can deal With that funny burning smell and those rising winds!