[thelist] FWD: The Manifesto of January 3, 2000 | Viridian List

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: The Manifesto of January 3, 2000
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2000 00:05:25 -0600
From: Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>
Reply-To: <bruces@well.com>
To: Viridian List <viridian@fringeware.com>

Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.com
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/

IDEOLOGICAL FREEWARE: DISTRIBUTE AT WILL

The Manifesto of January 3, 2000

    In 1914, the lamps went out all over Europe.  Life
during the rest of the twentieth century was like crouching
under a rock.

    But human life is not required to be like the twentieth
century.  That wasn't fate, it was merely a historical
circumstance.  In this new Belle Epoque, this delightful
era, we are experiencing a prolonged break in the last
century's even tenor of mayhem.  The time has come to step
out of those shadows into a different cultural reality.

    We need a sense of revived possibility, of genuine
creative potential, of unfeigned joie de vivre.  We have a
new economy, but we have no new intelligentsia.  We have
massive flows of information and capital, but we have a
grave scarcity of meaning.  We know what we can buy, but we
don't know what we want.

    The twentieth century featured any number of -isms. 
They were fatally based on the delusion that philosophy
trumps engineering.  It doesn't.  In a world fully competent
to command its material basis, ideology is inherently
flimsy. "Technology" in its broad sense: the ability to
transform resources, the speed at which new possibilities
can be opened and exploited, the multiple and various forms
of command-and-control -- technology, not ideology, is the
twentieth century's lasting legacy.  Technology broke the
gridlock of the five-decade Cold War.  It made a new era
thinkable.  And, finally, technology made a new era obvious.

    But too many twentieth-century technologies are very
like twentieth-century ideologies: rigid, monolithic,
poisonous and non-sustainable.

    We need clean, supple, healthy means of support for a
crowded world.  We need recyclable technologies, industries
that don't take themselves with that Stalinesque seriousness
that demands the brutal sacrifice of millions.  In order to
make flimsy, supple technologies thinkable, and then
achievable, then finally obvious, we need an ideology that
embraces its own obsolescence.

    The immediate future won't be a period suitable for
building monuments, establishing thousand-year regimes,
creating new-model citizens, or asserting leaden certainties
about anything whatsoever.  The immediate future is about
picking and choosing among previously unforeseen technical
potentials.

    Our time calls for intelligent fads.  Our time calls for
a self-aware, highly temporary array of broad social
experiments, whose effects are localized, non-lethal and
reversible -- yet transparent, and visible to all parties
who might be persuaded to look.

    The Internet is the natural test-bed for this
fast-moving, fast-vanishing, start-up society.  Because the
native technology of the coming years is not the 19th
century "machine" or the 20th century "product." It is the
21st century "gizmo."

    A gizmo is a device with so many features and so many
promises that it can never be mastered within its own useful
lifetime.  A gizmo is flimsy, cheap, colorful, friendly,
intriguing, easily disposable, and unlikely to harm the
user.  The gizmo's purpose is not to efficiently perform
some function or effectively provide some service. A gizmo
exists to snag the user's attention, and to engage the user
in a vast unfolding nexus of interlinked experience.

    The gizmo in its manifold aspects is the beau ideal for
contemporary design and engineering.  Because that is what
our culture will be like, at its heart, in its bones, in its
organs.  A gizmo culture.  We will go in so many directions
at once that most of them will never see fulfillment.  And
then they will be gone.

    This is confusing and seems lacking in moral seriousness
-- but only only by the rigid standards of the past century,
bitterly obsessed with ultimate efficiencies and malignant
final solutions.  We need opportunities now, not
efficiencies.  We need inspired improvisation, not
solutions.  Technology can no longer bind us in a vast
tonnage of iron, barbed wire and brick.  We will stop
heaving balky machines uphill.  Instead, we begin judging
entire techno-complexes as they virtually unfold, judging
them by standards that are, in some very basic sense,
aesthetic.

    Henceforth, it is humans and human flesh that lasts out
the years, not the mechanical infrastructure.  Our bodies
outlast our machines, and our bodies outlast our beliefs.
People will outlive this "revolution" -- if spared an
apocalypse, human individuals will outlive every
"technology" that we are capable of deploying.  Waves of
techno-change will come faster and faster, and with less and
less permanent consequence.  Waves will be arriving with the
somnolent regularity of Waikiki breakers.  This "revolution"
does not replace one social order with another. It replaces
social order with an array of further possible
transformations.

    Since gizmos are easily outmoded and inherently
impermanent, their most graceful form is as disposable
consumer technology.  We should embrace those gizmos that
are pleasing, abject, humble, and closest to the human body.
 We should spurn those that are remote, difficult,
threatening, poisonous and brittle.

    Most of all, we must never, ever again feel awestruck
wonder about any manufactured device.  They don't last, and
are not worthy of that form of respect.

    We must engage with technology in a new way, from a
fresh perspective.  The arts traditionally hold this
critical position.  The arts are in a position today to
inspire a burst of cultural vitality across the board.  The
times are very propitious for the arts.  There's a profound
restlessness, there's money loose, there are new means of
display and communication, and the nouveau riche have
nothing to wear and nothing that suits their walls.  It's a
golden opportunity for techno-dandyism.

    Artists, don't be afraid of commercialization.  The
sovereign remedy for commercialization is not for artists to
hide from commerce.  That can't be done any more, and in any
case, hiding never wins and strong artists don't live in
fear.

    Instead, we have a new remedy available.  The aggressive
counter-action to commodity totalitarianism is to give
things away.  Not other people's property -- that would be,
sad to say, "piracy" -- but the products of your own
imagination, your own creative effort.

    This is the time to be thoughtful, be expressive, be
generous.  Be "taken advantage of." The channels exist now
to give creativity away, at no cost, to millions.  Never
mind if you make large sums of money along the way.  If you
successfully seize attention, nothing is more likely.  In a
start-up society, huge sums can fall on innocent parties,
almost by accident.  That cannnot be helped, so don't worry
about it any more.  Henceforth, artistic integrity should be
judged, not by one's classic bohemian seclusion from satanic
mills and the grasping bourgeoisie, but by what one creates
and gives away.  That is the only scale of noncommercial
integrity that makes any sense now.

    Freedom has to be won, and, more importantly, the
consequences of freedom have to be lived.  You do not win
freedom of information by filching data from a corporate
warehouse, or begging the authorities to kindly abandon
their monopolies, copyrights and patents.  You have to
create that freedom by a deliberate act of will, think it
up, assemble it, sacrifice for it, make it free to others
who have a similar will to live that freedom.

    Ivory towers are no longer in order.  We need ivory
networks.  Today, sitting quietly and thinking is the
world's greatest generator of wealth and prosperity.  Moguls
spend their lives sitting in chairs, staring into screens,
and occasionally clicking a mouse.  Though we didn't expect
it, we're all on the same net.  We no longer need feudal
shelters to protect us from the swords and torches of
barbarian ignorance.  So show them words and images: make it
obvious, let them look.  If they're interested, fine; if
not, go pick another website.

    The structure of human intellectual achievement should
be reformatted, so that any human being with a sincere
interest can learn as much as possible, as rapidly as their
abilities allow.  The Internet is the greatest
accomplishment of the twentieth century's scientific
community, and the Internet has made a new intelligentsia
possible.

    Like the scientific method, the Internet is a genuine,
workable, verifiable means of intellectual liberation. Don't
worry if it's not universal.  Awareness can't be doled out
like soup, or sold like soap.  Intellectual vitality is an
inherently internal, self- actualizing process.  The net
must make this possible for people, not by blasting flags
and gospel at the masses, but by opening doors for
individual minds, who will then pursue their own interests.

    This can be made to happen.  It is quite near to us now,
the trends favor it.  The consequences of genuine
intellectual freedom are literally and rightfully
unimaginable.  But the unimaginable is the right thing to
do.  The unimaginable is far better than perfection, because
perfection can never be achieved, and it would kill us if it
were.  Whereas the "unimaginable" is, at its root, merely a
healthy measure of our own limitations.

    Human beings are imperfect and imperfectable, and their
networks even more so.  We should probably be happy for the
noise and disruption in the channel, since so much of what
we think we know, and love to teach, are mistakes and lies.
But nevertheless, we can achieve progress here.  We can
remove some modicum of the fatal, choking constraints that
throughout centuries have bent people double.

    A human mind in pursuit of self-actualization should be
allowed to go as far and as fast as our means allow.  There
is nothing utopian about this program; because there no
timeless justice or perfect stability to be found in this
vision.  This practice will not lead us toward any dream,
any City on a Hill, any phony form of static bliss.  On the
contrary, it will lead us into closer and closer, into more
and more immediate contact, with the issues that really
bedevil us.
Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.com
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/

IDEOLOGICAL FREEWARE: DISTRIBUTE AT WILL

The Manifesto of January 3, 2000



    Before many more decades pass, the human race will begin
to obtain what it really wants.  Then we will find ourselves
confronted, in our bedrooms, streets, and breakfast tables,
with real-world avatars of those Faustian visions of power
and ability that have previously existed only in myth.  Our
aspirations will become consequences.  That's when our
*real* trouble starts.

    However, that is not a contemporary problem.  The
problems we face today are not those somber, long-term
problems.  On the contrary, we very clearly exist in a
highly fortunate time with very minor problems.

    The so-called human condition won't survive the next
hundred years.  That fate is written on the forehead of the
21st century in letters of fire.  That fate can be wisely
shaped, or somewhat postponed, or brutally annihilated, but
it cannot be denied.  It is coming because we want it. It's
not an alien imposition; it is borne from the inchoate
depths of our own desires.  But we're not beyond the limits
of humanity, suffering that, exulting in that.  We're just
going there, visibly moving closer to it.  Once we get
there, we'll find no rest there.  The appetite of divine
discontent always grows by the feeding.

    This dire knowledge makes today's scene seem quite
playful and delightful by faux-retrospect.  Our worst
problems, which may seem so large, diffuse, and morbid, are
mere teenage angst compared to the conundrums we're busily
preparing for some other generation.

    Sober assessment of the contemporary scene makes it
crystal-clear that a carnival atmosphere is in order.  We
exist in a highly disposable civilization that is hell- bent
on outmoding itself.  The pace of change is melting former
physical restraints into a maelstrom of reformattable
virtualities.  That's here, it's real, it is truly our
situation.  We should live as if we know this is true. This
is where our own sincerity and authenticity are to be found:
in the strong conviction that the contemporary is temporary.

    We need to live in these conditions in good faith.  We
need to re-imagine life and make the new implications clear.
It's a murky situation, but we must not flinch from it; we
must drench all of it in light.  Because this is our home.
We have no other.  Our children live here.  The mushroom
clouds of the twentieth century have parted.  We find
ourselves on a beach, with wave after frothy wave of
transformation.  We have means, motive, and opportunity.
Spread the light.

    Henceforth, it will make more and more sense to base our
deepest convictions around a hands-on confrontation with the
consequences of technology.  That's where the action is.  On
January 3, 2000, that's what it's about.  The deepest
resources of human creativity have a vital role there.  It's
where inspiration is most needed, it's the place to make a
difference.  Come out.  Stand up.  Shine.

    Turn the lamps on all over the world.