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

Reason, Jan, 2004 by Mike Godwin

IN THE 1980s, Bruce Sterling became a leader of the "cyberpunk" revolution--a literary movement that combined the artistic ambition of science fiction's 1960s New Wave with the hard-core speculation associated with Verne, Wells, Heinlein, and Clarke. Cyberpunk's chief theme was the way technologies evolve us even as we evolve them, and its influence can be seen in almost every science fiction writer of note today, from Ken MacLeod to Alastair Reynolds to Cory Doctorow.

Neuromancer authorWilliam Gibson may have been the best-known of the cyberpunks, but the movement's chief theorist and propagandist was Sterling, whose writing covered far more territory than that of his peers. Sterling's books from the period--Schismatrix, Islands in the Net, Crystal Express--range so widely in settings and characters that it's hard to talk about them collectively. What they have in common is their author's willingness to stare uncomfortable truths in the face. His 1989 story "We See Things Differently," for example, eerily predicted and captured the jihadic Islamism of the 9/11 era.

In the late '90s, Sterling launched another movement: the Viridian Greens. This one focused on how industrial design could be used to respond to global climate change. "Our society runs on fossil fuel," he wrote in an early manifesto. "We have a substance-abuse problem with carbon dioxide. This is a seemingly abstract issue now, but it's going to get very, very much livelier once we start having evacuation camps and dustbowls and so on. At that point, anyone who isn't talking about the Greenhouse Effect is going to seem very twentieth-century and extremely old-fashioned."

That proclamation in itself might sound old-fashioned--not entirely out of place in a Greenpeace pamphlet--but Sterling went on to classify his new cause as an art and design movement. He also gave it a built-in expiration date (2012). He named the movement the Viridian Greens because, as he puts it, "there's something electrical and unnatural about our tinge of green." Sterling's rhetoric is not the renunciatory language of back-to-the-land communal farmers or febrile eco-terrorists. We've made this problem, Sterling tells us, and now it's up to us to design our way out of it--not by denying ourselves modernity hut by embracing a more intelligent version of it.

Sterling is no one-note activist. His mind buzzes with ideas about history, technology, art theory, politics, global cultural trends, and more. The best introduction to the scope of Sterling's interests is his recent nonfiction book Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (Random House). The book is to typical futurist prognostications what jazz is to a symphony: Sterling riffs on what the present tells us about the world our grandchildren will inherit. But like all the best futurists, Sterling has his eyes set on the past as well. That may explain why, even as he describes the book as "an ambitious, sprawling effort in thundering futurist punditry," he frames it on a set piece from Shakespeare "The Seven Ages of Man," from As You Like It. Perhaps surprisingly, the Shakespearean trope works rather well as a way of outlining the oncoming histories, comedies, and dramas we're staging for ourselves.

Contributing Editor Mike Godwin talked with Sterling last summer, in the sprawling house the author designed for himself and his family in Austin, Texas.

reason: Not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, you wrote a cri de coeur about how the attacks signified the end of a belle epoque, during which the government is relatively technocratic, competent, and bland providing basic services but otherwise uninteresting--and the rest of the world is peacefully progressing, partly as a function of technological advance. Are we going to see that kind of era again?

Bruce Sterling: It depends on who "we" are. For the U.S., the belle epoque is over. It lost its steam under this tremendous necromantic thing that bin Laden pulled, and also it's over because this huge surge of energy that was in the dot-com world failed at the last mile. Socially, policy makers have made a series of choices very similar to what preceded the collapse into World War I. There's the same kind of massive gung-hoism for acts of violence and the same kind of irrationality. We're in a very dark time. It's dark enough that it cannot lift overnight.

reason: You were upbeat about the lnternet bubble. You don't think it was based on irrational exuberance?

Sterling: I don't think it was an irrational exuberance. Some of it was irrational--clearly there was a lot of embezzlement going on, buddyism on Wall Street, your basic Enron shenanigans. But computation and ubiquitous sensors and ubiquitous communication offer the opportunity to reform the industrial base along cybernetic and post-industrial lines. Should that be allowed to happen, it will bring a lot of prosperity.

But I think we made really serious missteps in 2000 and 2001 and we've really turned our backs on a world that could have been pleasant, delightful, peaceful, and technocratic. Now we face a world that is religious, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, and violent.