Bruce Sterling closing keynote at SXSW 2014

The chairman speaks.

Bruce Sterling's "Closing Benediction" for SXSW 2013

Now let's all head over to his house with a keg and our Google goggles.

NO FUTURE IS FUTURE

We're in the middle of a blind spot in time, and everyone's mad about it. Science fiction's move toward the present leaves a lack of inspiration for real-world innovators, as Neal Stephenson noticed. Russell Davies sees it in fashion, too, in all that military-derived heritage wear. NASA can't launch a man into space, let alone the moon, anymore. Neil DeGrasse Tyson weeps for the future. Is this a Great Stagnation, or are we just having an idea breather before coming up with the new New New Thing?

Well, Chairman Bruce thinks these New Aesthetic kids have caught onto something, with their See Like a Machine, pixellated reality follies. It's the opposite, or maybe just the next iteration of the blobject; it's the incursion of mobile screens into the 3D world. James Bridle is the theorist, or maybe just the blogger, behind the movement, but the core inspiration is Minecraft. Will we be wearing 8bit pixelpunk clothes to our New Aesthetic get-together at the next SXSW? Who knows. I just like the bright colors.

Sterling:

Look at those images objectively. Scarcely one of the real things in there would have made any sense to anyone in 1982, or even in 1992. People of those times would not have known what they were seeing with those New Aesthetic images. It’s the news, and it’s the truth...

It’s contemporary. It’s temporal rather than atemporal. Atemporality is all about cerebral, postulated, time-refuting design-fictions. Atemporality is for Zenlike gray-eminence historian-futurist types. The New Aesthetic is very hands-on, immediate, grainy and evidence-based. Its core is a catalogue of visible glitches in the here-and-now, for the here and for the now.

It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.

State of the World

Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowski are back for the 2012 State of the World discussion, and they're spinning memes at a furious pace. A sample:

The "Caste." Since Italy has had a very low birthrate for a very long time, it's dawning on people that everybody in power is amazingly old and that young people can't get a job or a house. Since the guys at the top of the heap never really leave power or change their policies, they are increasingly decried as the "Caste." Unfortunately for the young, old people vote very regularly and aren't gonna vote against themselves. Japan suffers a similar political helplessness; there's just not enough fresh blood to renew the state. It's gerontocracy in action and it's getting worse. Italy now has a "technocratic" emergency government, but they're all old guys.

It's all good. Go now and join in over on the WELL.

Chairman Bruce

Two talks from Bruce Sterling. STRP 2011:
Bruce Sterling - Symposium Playful Post Digital Culture (STRP 2011) from STRP Festival on Vimeo.
2011 Arts & Entertainment Conference

Bruce Sterling SXSW Keynote 2011

I still miss the parties he used to throw, back when SXSW was tiny, even though I never got to go to any of them.

Links for Later

1. Bruce Sterling and others discuss JG Ballard
2. How to write a book? Start by not writing a book
3. William Hertlings' SXSW Notes on Tim Ferriss' keynote on the 4 Hour Body and Notes on Jim Coudal, John Gruber & Michael Lopp's talks (mostly on successful writing)
4. Maxim founder Felix Dennis on big ideas: excellent execution is more important than having them in the first place. More from Dennis
5. Bruce Chatwin's notebooks

Links for Later

1. Andrew Gelman's five recommendations for statistics books (via Alex Tabarrok)

2. Bruce Sterling's annual State of the World conversation on the Well

3. Calcio Fiorentino, "the manliest game on earth". Basically a brawl with a ball, played while wearing 16th century pants.

4. Cross sectional map of Kowloon Walled City, with annotations in Japanese. (via @greatdismal)

5. Chinese haute couture from Guo Pei's 1002nd Arabian Nights collection. Amazing and almost certainly unwearable (via Bruce)

6. First fights over the separation of church and state: the Anti-Federalists lost big time.

Links for Later

1. Molecular biology of the phylotypic bottleneck. More here.

2. Last night, The Invisibles saved my life. (via linkmachinego)

3. A response to Bruce Sterling's Wikileaks/Bradley Manning/Julian Assange piece, "The Blast Shack"

Augmented Reality 2010

The Augmented Reality Event: Bruce Sterling's keynote from Ori Inbar on Vimeo.

Brazilian Steampunk

What could be better?

Bruce Sterling/Shapeways Interview

Bruce answers quirky questions from 3-d printing company Shapeways. A little spiky, a little flinty, all zen:

Joris Peels: In the future will people still read science fiction?

Bruce Sterling: "Science fiction" is 80 years old. Mass-produced commercial fiction is about 250 years old. "The future" is a very long time. Do you suppose people will still be "people" forever? The human species is only two million years old and the universe is 13.7 billion years old.

...Joris Peels: Does [Avatar] suck?

Bruce Sterling: Not if the intention was to clear a billion dollars with a three hundred million dollar investment. The Bollywood people I follow are hugely impressed by "Avatar."

Joris Peels: Who is the most likely person to be the first to start his own species?

Bruce Sterling: Somebody not born yet. A "species" by definition would be required to breed only with itself and not with human beings. It's hard to believe that we couldn't finesse a minor problem like that one. If you somehow engineer yourself to have four arms and wings, we could just re=engineer your stem cells and restore your so-called "species" to the status quo. Big deal.

Joris Peels: If you could resurrect one dead media, which would it be?

Bruce Sterling: The Incan quipu. It would be great to learn how those really worked.
...
Joris Peels: The hoverboard is the greatest piece of technology ever imagined, discuss.

Bruce Sterling: If we're talking strictly imaginary technology, it's hard to beat the Hindu pantheon churning the entire universe from a sea of milk by using a giant cobra.

(via boingboing)

State of the World 2010

Bruce Sterling gives his annual State of the World interview on the Well.

Quick summary: Something of a downer--we aren't facing groovy teenage problems like a war or a natural disaster, so much as we're facing middle aged crises of befuddlement and general worn-down-ness. Your best option is to move to Brazil and join some kind of post-post-modern tribe of artisans and disaster recovery experts.

Gothic High Tech and Favela Chic

Bruce Sterling at Reboot




"These are people who position themselves in the narrative rather than building any permanent infrastructure."

(via Jamais Cascio)

Fire! Fire!

Bruce Sterling: They're playing Philip Glass live on unicycles. "It's a bit BoingBoing, but..."

Design Fiction

Bruce Sterling on the changing nature of user experience and maker experience of science fiction in light of industrial design and technological change:

The “whole sense of the book” is not the whole sense of the words . Look at the weird “Google erudition” of journalism researched online. Consider the hybridized “Creole media” of blog platforms. The line commands in software are text as an expression of will.

Let me offer an older example here, to show how deep this goes. Consider the literary platforms of a thousand years ago. This remote period saw the birth, or rather the stillbirth, of the novel, with Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. This Japanese manuscript scroll, written with an ink brush in the late 900s and published in modern times as a book, is nevertheless a true novel. More specifically, it’s a romance. Jane Austen fans could easily parse The Tale of Genji.

While this proto-novel was being written, a rival work appeared, known as The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. This other composition is certainly not a novel. It’s intensely literary, yet it can’t be described by contemporary literary-platform terminology. The Pillow Book is a nonlinear set of writings jotted down on a loose heap of leftover government stationery.

The Pillow Book is not a diary, a miscellany, an almanac, a collection of lists, or even a resource for composing Japanese poetry, although it seems to us to have some aspects of these modern structures. It is better described in terms of user experience.

This experience was a four- or five-year effort to beguile the tedium of a tight circle of Imperial ladies-in-waiting. The experience had a star author/designer-the glamorous and attention-hungry Court Officer Sei-but it had no press, no publisher, no editor, no distributor, and it was never for sale. Its user base- in total, maybe 200 women-probably never read it. Instead, they heard the work recited aloud by someone crouching near a lantern after dark.

A strictly literary approach to this experience hurts our ability to comprehend what The Pillow Book is doing. This ancient “book” is related only distantly to our books; in function and audience, it has more kinship with a small-scale blog.

The Ninth Battalion of Hot Chicks

Bruce Sterling calls Caitlin Moran a "British Pop Music Critic as International Military Strategist". I'd just call her brilliant:

This is unfortunate because, had the Americans read the report, they would have noted two vital findings. The first is that while the same old countries — Iran, China, North Korea, France probably, haha — want to have a pop at the US, America has to accept that we are now in a “nonpolar” world and must redefine its strategies to cope with “nonstate actors” — your Hezbollahs and al-Qaedas. These are defined as forces that are “strong enough to resist an American agenda but too weak to shape an internationally attractive alternative”.

Of course, by those criteria, America’s newest enemies are not merely Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. They would also include atheists, pedestrians, socialists, European film directors who make films with unhappy endings, drizzly weather and Courtney Love — but not, interestingly, vegetarians, who have been pretty strong in “shaping internationally attractive alternatives”, what with the Quorn burger and McDon-ald’s Toasted Deli Grill Veggie Melt.

The IISS’s second conclusion was that, in the “complex battlefield” of the 21st century, America needs to concentrate more on psychological warfare. Of course, those who have read Jon Ronson’s excellent The Men Who Stare At Goats will know that the US has already been, albeit in a low-key and mad way, experimenting with psychological warfare. The conclusion of its 20-year-long experiments resulted in the playing of heavy rock music, including Guns’n’Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle , within earshot of the former Panamanian President Manuel Nori-ega when he was holed up the Vatican Embassy in 1989. As many will have subsequently noticed, this particular tactic of psychological warfare did remarkably little in ending the siege, but oddly coincided with the high-water mark in Guns’n’Roses’ career — possibly marking out the thin red line between state-sponsored psychological combat and a very effective marketing campaign.

However, once an entity loses the ability to use Guns’n’Roses as a weapon, it’s understandable why the ensuing period would be one of intense confusion, bordering on panic, with no obvious alternative taking its place. US psychological warfare is at an all-time low at the moment. Luckily, however, I do have a few suggestions for future activity:

1)Stage a massive army-recruitment drive among the table-staff of Hollywood, and assemble a battalion of actresses/models/ whatevers. When invading a city, send in the Ninth Battalion of Hot Chicks first, dressed in skin-tight catsuits. Get them to enter the city with a series of excitable screams and yelps, while doing leaps, rolls and cartwheels down the high street — like Catherine Zeta-Jones’s training scene in Entrapment but, obviously, without Sean Connery sitting on a chair and watching. A man may well be devout enough to shoot old men in the head, but I’m pretty sure he would at least pause for a few vital seconds before shooting at an Angelina Jolie lookalike doing the splits in mid-air. And while he’s pausing, some giant Marine can shoot him.

State of the World

People with loose money still think we're the Hill. That's why all the loose change is moving into Treasury bonds. I mean, if you buy China, you're basically buying US Treasury Bonds anyway... Japan is old and gray and has no rate of return... Rich Europeans can't take Europe seriously. They're afraid it will turn into an actual empire instead of their toy trading bloc, so they're always parking their cash somewhere far outside their own legal jurisdiction...

So what does that leave you, if you've got a spare 50 billion? Brazil? Russia? India, for heaven's sake? What kind of rich person preserves his wealth in INDIA? You'd have to be crazy. Should you buy oil? Oil's got blood all over it and it's skyrocketing up and down.

So that leaves the Americans -- the global wealthy are clinging to 'em like a drunk to a lamppost. When Russia collapsed, every Russian with a shred of wealth shipped it to Cyprus and Switzerland. The Americans don't have a place to offshore their money. They can offshore their LABOR, that's dead easy, but their money? If the American dollar goes, finance as an industry gets the blue screen of death.

--Bruce Sterling
Annual SotW Thread on the Well

RIP Viridian Design Movement 1999-2008

Pope-Emperor Bruce Sterling declares the movement dead, four years ahead of schedule. The online movement was launched by the online/email publication of the Viridian Design Manifesto, a document incribed with the movement's own incept date of 2012. It was intended as a counterbalance to the austerity-driven green movement then popular, and substituted an esthetic of sexy, high design green. As Cory Doctorow puts it, the Manifesto held:

That the world was under serious threat due to anthropogenic global warming, andThat the answer wasn't to live simply, but rather to use better technology to help us make better choices and conduct our lives in a better way

These two ideas are incredibly inspiring, and have served as a powerful antidote against the Three Stupidities of Global Warming:

There is no global warming, or if there is, it's natural

The only answer to global warming is to live in log cabins, unplug your fridge and never get on another airplane

Global warming is inevitable, so let's go buy some more Hummers and pass the
spotted owl omelette, wouldya?

The Stupidities are, at root, counsels of despair. They rely on denialism, or hold humanity to an impossible standard (witness the goofball commenters to my post about entertaining your children with a single bucket of water on a hot day who immediately leapt in to characterize this as a sin against the very planet, since water is precious and shouldn't be wasted by splashing around in the summer), or throw up their hands and give up.

The Last Viridian Email offers up both a summation of the movement and a suggestion for prioritizing one's stuff into four important categories:

1. Beautiful things.
2. Emotionally important things.
3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
4. Everything else.

"Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year -- this very likely belongs in "everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe -- along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space.

Also, get a multitool, so as to be as useful and personally effective as possible.

Full text:

The Last Viridian Note
By Bruce Sterling

Recent events have clearly established that the character of the times has changed. The Viridian Design Movement was founded in distant 1999. After the years transpiring – various disasters, wars, financial collapses and a major change in political tone – the world has become a different place.

It remains only to close the Viridian episode gracefully, and to conclude with a few meditative suggestions.

As I explained in the first Viridian speech, any design movement – social movements of any kind, really – should be designed with an explicit expiration date. The year 2012 would have been the extreme to which Viridian could have persisted. Since the course of history has grown quite jittery, this longer term was spared us.

Some Viridian principles can be lightly re-phrased, buffed-up and likely made of practical use in days to come. Others are period notions to be gently tossed into the cultural compost. I could try to describe which are which – but that's a proper job for someone younger.

I'm following current events with keen interest. There's never been a better time for major political and financial interventions in the green space. However, Viridian List is about design interventions, it was not about politics or finance, so a decent reticence is in order at this juncture.

I would like to cordially thank Viridian readers and contributors and advisors for their patience and their generous help over nine years. I hope you feel you derived some benefit from it. I did my best with the effort, I learned a lot by it, and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I can't say what Viridian may have done for you; that's up to you to judge. Since this is last Viridian note, however, I'd like to describe what Viridian did for me.

Since the halcyon days of 1999 my life has changed radically.

Rather than "thinking globally and acting locally," as in the old futurist theme, I now live and think glocally. I once had a stable, settled life within a single city, state and nation. Nowadays, I divide my time between three different polities: the United States, the European Union and the Balkans. With various junkets elsewhere.

The 400-year-old Westphalian System doesn't approve of my lifestyle, although it's increasingly common, especially among people half my age. It's stressful to live glocally. Not that I myself feel stressed by this. As long as I've got broadband, I'm perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet's surface is arbitrary. It's the nation-state system that is visibly stressed by these changes – it's freaking out over currency flows, migration through airports, offshoring, and similar phenomena.

I know that, by the cultural standards of the 20th century, my newfangled glocal lifestyle ought to bother me. I ought to feel deracinated, and I should suffer from culture shock, and I should stoically endure the mournful silence and exile of a writer torn from the kindly matrix of his national culture. A traditional story.

However, I've been at this life for years now; I really tried; the traditional regret is just not happening. Clearly the existence of the net has obliterated many former operational difficulties.
Furthermore, my sensibility no longer operates in that 20th-century framework. That's become an archaic way to feel, and I just can't get there from here.

Living on the entire planet at once is no longer a major challenge. It's got its practical drawbacks, but I'm much more perturbed about contemporary indignities such as airport terrorspaces, ATM surchanges and the open banditry of cellphone roaming. This is what's troublesome. The rest of it, I'm rather at ease about. Unless I'm physically restrained by some bureaucracy, I don't think I'm going to stop this glocally nomadic life. I live on the Earth. The Earth is a planet. This fact is okay. I am living in truth.

Another major change came through my consumption habits. It pains me to see certain people still trying to live in hairshirt-green fashion – purportedly mindful, and thrifty and modest. I used to tolerate this eccentricity, but now that panicked bankers and venture capitalists are also trying to cling like leeches to every last shred of their wealth, I can finally see it as actively pernicious.

Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any effective way. It doesn't do or say anything conceptually novel – nor is it practical, or a working path to a better life.

My personal relations to goods and services – especially goods – have been revolutionized since 1999. Let me try your patience by describing this change in some detail, because it really is a different mode of being in the world.

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is "sustainability?" Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It's not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It's not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.
Do not "economize." Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It's melting the North Pole. So "economization" is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don't seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It's in your time most, it's in your space most. It is "where it is at," and it is "what is going on."

It takes a while to get this through your head, because it's the opposite of the legendry of shopping. However: the things that you use every day should be the best-designed things you can get. For instance, you cannot possibly spend too much money on a bed – (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact I do not). You're spending a third of your lifetime in a bed. Your bed might be sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to that situation and cannot see it. That calamity might escape your conscious notice. See it. Replace it.

Sell – even give away– anything you never use. Fancy ball gowns, tuxedos, beautiful shoes wrapped in bubblepak that you never wear, useless Christmas gifts from well-meaning relatives, junk that you inherited. Sell that stuff. Take the money, get a real bed. Get radically improved everyday things.

The same goes for a working chair. Notice it. Take action. Bad chairs can seriously injure you from repetitive stresses. Get a decent ergonomic chair. Someone may accuse you of "indulging yourself" because you possess a chair that functions properly. This guy is a reactionary. He is useless to futurity. Listen carefully to whatever else he says, and do the opposite. You will benefit greatly.

Expensive clothing is generally designed to make you look like an aristocrat who can afford couture. Unless you are a celebrity on professional display, forget this consumer theatricality. You should buy relatively-expensive clothing that is ergonomic, high-performance and sturdy.
Anything placed next to your skin for long periods is of high priority. Shoes are notorious sources of pain and stress and subjected to great mechanical wear. You really need to work on selecting these – yes, on "shopping for shoes." You should spend more time on shoes than you do on cars, unless you're in a car during pretty much every waking moment. In which case, God help you.
I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.
A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.

Do not lug around an enormous toolchest or a full set of post-earthquake gear unless you are Stewart Brand. Furthermore, unless you are a professional emergency worker, you can abstain from post-apocalyptic "bug-out bags" and omnicompetent heaps of survivalist rations. Do not stock the fort with tiresome, life-consuming, freeze-dried everything, unless you can clearly sense the visible approach of some massive, non-theoretical civil disorder. The clearest way to know that one of these is coming is that the rich people have left your area. If that's the case, then, sure, go befriend the police and prepare to knuckle down.

Now to confront the possessions you already have. This will require serious design work, and this will be painful. It is a good idea to get a friend or several friends to help you.
You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.


1. Beautiful things.
2. Emotionally important things.
3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
4. Everything else

"Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren't born with it. You won't be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.

Beautiful things are important. If they're truly beautiful, they should be so beautiful that you are showing them to people. They should be on display: you should be sharing their beauty with others. Your pride in these things should enhance your life, your sense of taste and perhaps your social standing.

They're not really that beautiful? Then they're not really beautiful. Take a picture of them, tag them, remove them elsewhere.

Emotionally important things. All of us have sentimental keepsakes that we can't bear to part with. We also have many other objects which simply provoke a panicky sense of potential loss – they don't help us to establish who we are, or to become the person we want to be. They subject us to emotional blackmail.

Is this keepsake so very important that you would want to share its story with your friends, your children, your grandchildren? Or are you just using this clutter as emotional insulation, so as to protect yourself from knowing yourself better?

Think about that. Take a picture. You might want to write the story down. Then – yes – away with it.

You are not "losing things" by these acts of material hygiene. You are gaining time, health, light and space. Also, the basic quality of your daily life will certainly soar. Because the benefits of good design will accrue to you where they matter – in the everyday.

Not in Oz or in some museum vitrine. In the every day. For sustainability, it is every day that matters. Not green Manhattan Projects, green moon shots, green New Years' resolutions, or wild scifi speculations. Those are for dabblers and amateurs. The sustainable is about the every day.
Now for category three, tools and appliances. They're not beautiful and you are not emotionally attached to them. So they should be held to keen technical standards.

Is your home a museum? Do you have curatorial skills? If not, then entropy is attacking everything in there. Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays. Entropy is an inherent property of time and space. Understand this fact. Expect this. The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke anguished spasms of denial.

You will be told that you should "make do" with broken or semi-broken tools, devices and appliances. Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by poverty, do not do this. This advice is wicked.

This material culture of today is not sustainable. Most of the things you own are almost certainly made to 20th century standards, which are very bad. If we stick with the malignant possessions we already have, through some hairshirt notion of thrift, then we are going to be baling seawater. This will not do.

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from today's. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely "non-materialistic." There is nothing more "materialistic" than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

Now for a brief homily on tools and appliances of especial Viridian interest: the experimental ones. The world is full of complicated, time-sucking, partially-functional beta-rollout gizmos. Some are fun to mess with; fun in life is important. Others are whimsical; whimsy is okay. Eagerly collecting semifunctional gadgets because they are shiny-shiny, this activity is not the worst thing in the world. However, it can become a vice. If you are going to wrangle with unstable, poorly-defined, avant-garde tech objects, then you really need to wrangle them. Get good at doing it.

Good experiments are well-designed experiments. Real experiments need a theory. They need something to prove or disprove. Experiments need to be slotted into some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to other practitioners. That's what makes them true "experiments" instead of private fetishes.

If you're buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you'll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.

If you're becoming a techie magpie packrat who never leaves your couch – that's not good. Forget the shiny gadget. You need to look in the shiny mirror.

So. This approach seems to be working for me. More or less. I'm not urging you to do any of this right away. Do not jump up from the screen right now and go reform your entire material circumstances. That resolve will not last. Because it's not sustainable.

Instead, I am urging you to think hard about it. Tuck it into the back of your mind. Contemplate it. The day is going to come, it will come, when you suddenly find your comfortable habits disrupted.

That could be a new job, a transfer to a new city, a marriage, the birth or departure of a child. It could be a death in the family: we are mortal, they happen. Moments like these are part of the human condition. Suddenly you will find yourself facing a yawning door and a whole bunch of empty boxes. That is the moment in which you should launch this sudden, much-considered coup. Seize that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and sustainable constitution.

But – you may well ask – what if I backslide into the ancien regime? Well, there is a form of hygiene workable here as well. Every time you move some new object into your time and space – buy it, receive it as a gift, inherit it, whatever – remove some equivalent object.
That discipline is not as hard as it sounds. As the design of your immediate surroundings improves, it'll become obvious to you that more and more of these time-sucking barnacles are just not up to your standards. They're ugly, or they're broken, or they're obsolete, or they are visible emblems of nasty, uncivilized material processes.

Their blissful absence from your life makes new time and space for something better for you – and for the changed world you want to live to see.

So: that summarizes it. Forgive the Pope-Emperor this last comprehensive sermon; it is what I learned by doing all this, and you won't be troubled henceforth.

Now. If you've read this far, you're a diehard. So you may be interested in my next, post-Viridian, project. And yes, of course I have one. It's not so direct, confrontational and strident as the Viridian Movement; instead, it suits a guy of my increasingly scholastic and professorial temperament.

Viridian "imaginary products" were always a major theme of ours, and, since I'm both a science fiction writer and a design critic, I want to do some innovative work in this space – yes, the realm of imaginary products. Conceptual designs; imaginary designs; critical designs; fantastic and impossible designs.

This new effort of mine is a scholarly work exploring material culture, use-value, ethics, and the relationship between materiality and the imagination. However, since nobody's easily interested in that huge, grandiose topic, I'm disguising it as a nifty and attractive gadget book. I plan to call it "The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets."

My first step in composing this new book is to methodically survey the space of all possible imaginary gadgets. It's rather like the exploratory work of "Dead Media Project."

I'm not yet sure what form this new research effort will take. There will likely be a mailing list. I may be turning my Wired blog into something of a gadget site. There might be a wiki or a social network, depending on who wants to help me, and what they want out of that effort. Still: "design fiction," "critical design," "futurist scenario design," and the personal, individual, pocket-and-purse sized approach to postindustriality: this is something I need to know a lot more about.

If you want to play, send email.

Bruce Sterling bruces [at] well.com

Originally distributed to the Viridian email list and at the Viridian Design web site.

The Future Is Now Vol. LXVII

Bruce is right. If a telomerase pill could be developed, then we'd all be living a good bit longer at the cellular level, although not necessarily at the level of the whole organism. Still, every bit helps.

Unfortunately, the article at the other end of the links seems to be a confirmation of what we already knew: cortisol and other stress-related hormones result in telomeric shortening, bringing closer the day when a particular cell can no longer divide.