Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2000 13:50:16 -0800 (PST)
Subject: The Manifesto of January 3, 2000 [09-23-98] (fwd)
The Manifesto of January 3, 2000
by Bruce Sterling
The rapidly approaching millennium offers a unique cultural
opportunity. After many years of cut-and-paste, appropriation,
detournement and neo-retro ahistoricality, postmodernity is
about to end. Immediately after the end of the fin de siecle,
there will be a sudden and intense demand for genuine novelty.
Any new year offers a chance for sweeping resolutions and brave
efforts at self-reform. But the end of a millennium offers a
rare and vital opportunity to bury all that is dead within us
and issue proclamations of particular scope and ambition.
I suspect that a group that can offer a coherent, thoughtful and
novel cultural manifesto on the target date of January 3, 2000
has a profound opportunity to affect the zeitgeist. (On January
1, everyone will be too hung over to read manifestos; on January
2, nobody's computers will work. So naturally the target date
must be January 3.) In this preliminary document, I would like
to offer a few thoughts on the possible contents of such a
manifesto.
The central issue as the new millennium dawns is technocultural.
There are of course other, more traditional, better-developed
issues for humankind. Cranky fundamentalism festers here and
there; the left is out of ideas while the right is delusional;
income disparities have become absurdly huge; these things are
obvious to all. However, the human race has repeatedly proven
that we can prosper cheerfully with ludicrous, corrupt and
demeaning forms of religion, politics and commerce. By stark
contrast, no civilization can survive the physical destruction
of its resource base. It is very clear that the material
infrastructure of the twentieth century is not sustainable.
This is the issue at hand.
We have a worldwide environmental problem. This is a truism.
But the unprecedentedly severe and peculiar weather of the late
1990s makes it clear that this problem is growing acute. Global
warming has been a lively part of scientific discussion since at
least the 1960s, but global warming is a quotidian reality now.
Climate change is shrouding the globe in clouds of burning rain
forest and knocking points off the GNP of China. Everyone can
offer a weird weather anecdote now; for instance, I spent a week
this summer watching the sky turn gray with fumes from the
blazing forests of Chiapas. The situation has been visibly
worsening, and will get worse yet, possibly very much worse.
Society has simply been unable to summon the political or
economic will to deal successfully with this problem by using
20th century methods. That is because CO2 emission is not
centrally a political or economic problem. It is a design and
engineering problem. It is a cultural problem and a problem of
artistic sensibility.
New and radical approaches are in order. These approaches should
be originated, gathered, martialled into an across-the board
cultural program, and publicly declared -- on January 3rd.
Global warming is a profound opportunity for the 21st century
culture industry. National governments lack the power and the
will to impose dirigiste solutions to the emission of carbon
dioxide. Dirigiste solutions would probably not work anyway. It
is unlikely that many of us could tolerate living in a
carbon-dioxide Ration State. It would mean that almost every
conceivable human activity would have to be licensed by energy
commissars.
Industry will not reform its energy base. On the contrary, when
it comes to CO2 legislation, industry will form pressure groups
and throw as much sand as possible into the fragile political
wheels. Industry will use obscurantist tactics that will mimic
those of American right-wing anti-evolution forces -- we will be
told that Global Warming is merely a "theory," even when our
homes are on fire. Industry is too stupid to see planetary
survival as a profit opportunity. But industry is more than
clever enough to sabotage government regulation, especially when
globalized industry can play one government off against the
next.
The stark fact that our atmosphere is visibly declining is of no
apparent economic interest except to insurance firms, who will
simply make up their lack by gouging ratepayers and exporting
externalized costs onto the general population.
With business hopeless and government stymied, we are basically
left with cultural activism. The tools at hand are art, design,
engineering, and basic science: human artifice, cultural and
technical innovation. Granted, these may not seem particularly
likely sources of a serious and successful effort to save the
world. This is largely because, during the twentieth century,
government and industry swelled to such tremendous
high-modernist proportions that these other enterprises exist
mostly in shrunken subcultural niches.
However, this doesn't have to be the case. With government
crippled and industry brain-dead to any conceivable moral
appeal, the future of decentered, autonomous cultural networks
looks very bright. There has never been an opportunity to
spread new ideas and new techniques with the alacrity that they
can spread now. Human energy must turn in some direction.
People will run from frustration and toward any apparent source
of daylight. As the planet's levees continue to break, people
will run much faster and with considerably more conviction.
Our cultural substance-abuse problem with CO2 may have very
severe consequences to human happiness, but the immediate
physical problem is rather well understood. Clever people,
united and motivated, should be able to deal with this. Carbon
dioxide is not a time-honored philosophical dilemma or some
irreducible flaw in the human condition. Serious fossil-fuel
consumption, as a practice on the grand scale, is only about 200
years old. The most severe rise in carbon emission occurred
during the past fifty years. We're painfully dependent on this
practice, but it's not as if we've married it.
It's a question of tactics. Civil society does not respond at
all well to moralistic scolding. There are small minority
groups here and there who are perfectly aware that it is immoral
to harm the lives of coming generations by massive consumption
now: deep Greens, Amish, people practicing voluntary
simplicity, Gandhian ashrams and so forth. These
public-spirited voluntarists are not the problem. But they're
not the solution either, because most human beings won't
volunteer to live like they do. Nor can people be forced to
live that way through legal prescription, because those in
command of society's energy resources will immediately game and
neutralize any system of legal regulation.
However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that
looks attractive, glamorous and seductive.
The task at hand is therefore basically an act of social
engineering. Society must become Green, and it must be a variety
of Green that society will eagerly consume. What is required is
not a natural Green, or a spiritual Green, or a primitivist
Green, or a blood-and-soil romantic Green.
These flavors of Green have been tried, and have proven to have
insufficient appeal. We can regret this failure if we like. If
the semi-forgotten Energy Crisis of the 1970s had provoked a
wiser and more energetic response, we would not now be facing a
weather crisis. But the past's well-meaning attempts were
insufficient, and are now part of the legacy of a dying century.
The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous
Green. A Viridian Green, if you will.
The best chance for progress is to convince the twenty-first
century that the twentieth century's industrial base was crass,
gauche, and filthy. This approach will work because it is based
in the truth. The twentieth century lived in filth. It was
much like the eighteenth century before the advent of germ
theory, stricken by septic cankers whose origins were shrouded
in superstition and miasma. The truth about our physical
existence must be shown to people. It must be demonstrated
repeatedly and everywhere.
People with networks, websites and sophisticated sensors should
not find this task very difficult.
The current industrial base is outmoded, crass and nasty, but
this is not yet entirely obvious. Scolding it and brandishing
the stick is just part of the approach. Proving it requires the
construction of an alternative twenty-first century industrial
base which seems elegant, beautiful and refined. This effort
should not be portrayed as appropriate, frugal, and sensible,
even if it is. It must be perceived as glamorous and visionary.
It will be very good if this new industrial base actually
functions, but it will work best if it is spectacularly novel
and beautiful. If it is accepted, it can be made to work; if it
is not accepted, it will never have a chance to work.
The central target for this social engineering effort must be
the people who are responsible for emitting the most CO2. The
people we must strive to affect are the ultrarich. The
rentiers, the virtual class, the captains of industry; and, to a
lesser extent, the dwindling middle classes. The poor will
continue to suffer. There is clearly no pressing reason for
most human beings to live as badly and as squalidly as they do.
But the poor do not emit much carbon dioxide, so our efforts on
their behalf can only be tangential.
Unlike the modernist art movements of the twentieth century, a
Viridian culture-industry movement cannot be concerned with
challenging people's aesthetic preconceptions. We do not have
the 19th-century luxury of shocking the bourgeoisie. That
activity, enjoyable and time-honored though it is, will not get
that poison out of our air. We are attempting to survive by
causing the wealthy and the bourgeoisie to willingly live in a
new way.
We cannot make them do it, but if we focussed our efforts, we
would have every prospect of luring them into it.
What is culturally required at the dawn of the new millennium is
a genuine avant-garde, in the sense of a cultural elite with an
advanced sensibility not yet shared by most people, who are
creating a new awareness requiring a new mode of life. The task
of this avant-garde is to design a stable and sustainable
physical economy in which the wealthy and powerful will prefer
to live. Mao suits for the masses are not on the Viridian
agenda. Couture is on the agenda. We need a form of Green high
fashion so appallingly seductive and glamorous that it can
literally save people's lives. We have to gratify people's
desires much better than the current system does. We have to
reveal to people the many desires they have that the current
system is not fulfilling. Rather than marshalling themselves
for inhuman effort and grim sacrifice, people have to sink into
our twenty-first century with a sigh of profound relief.
Allow me to speak hypothetically now, as if this avant-garde
actually existed, although, as we all know, it cannot possibly
come into being until January 3, 2000. Let's discuss our
tactics. I have a few cogent suggestions to offer.
We can increase our chances of success by rapidly developing and
expanding the postmodern culture industry. Genuine "Culture"
has "art" and "thought," while the Culture Industry merely
peddles images and information.
I know this. I am fully aware of the many troubling drawbacks of
this situation, but on mature consideration, I think that the
Culture Industry has many profound advantages over the twentieth
century's physically poisonous smokestack industries. Also, as
digital technologists, thinkers, writers, designers, cultural
critics, und so weiter, we Viridians suspect that the rise of
the Culture Industry is bound to increase our own immediate
power and influence vis-a-vis, say, coal mining executives.
This may not be an entirely good thing. However, we believe we
will do the world less immediate damage than they are doing.
We therefore loudly demand that the Culture Industry be favored
as a suitably twenty-first century industrial enterprise.
Luckily the trend is already very much with us here, but we must
go further; we believe in Fordism in the Culture Industry. This
means, by necessity, leisure. Large amounts of leisure are
required to appreciate and consume cultural-industrial products
such as movies, software, semi-functional streaming media and so
on. Time spent at more traditional forms of work unfairly lures
away the consumers of the Culture Industry, and therefore poses
a menace to our postindustrial economic underpinnings.
"Work" requires that people's attention to be devoted to other,
older, less attractive industries. "Leisure" means they are
paying attention and money to us.
We therefore demand much more leisure for everyone. Leisure for
the unemployed, while copious, is not the kind of "leisure" that
increases our profits. We specifically demand intensive leisure
for well-educated, well-heeled people. These are the people who
are best able to appreciate and consume truly capital-intensive
cultural products.
We Viridians suspect that it would require very little effort to
make people work much less. Entirely too much effort is being
spent working. We very much doubt that there is anything being
done in metal-bending industry today that can justify wrecking
the atmosphere. We need to burn the planetary candle at one end
only (and, in daylight, not at all).
As much time as possible should be spent consuming immaterial
products. A global population where the vast majority spend
their time sitting still and staring into screens is a splendid
society for our purposes. Their screens should be beautifully
designed and their surroundings energy-efficient. The planet
will benefit for everyone who clicks a mouse instead of
shovelling coal or taking an axe and a plow to a rain forest.
The tourist industry is now the number one industry on the
planet. Tourists consume large amounts of pre-packaged culture.
We believe tourism to be a profoundly healthy development. We
feel we must strongly resist the retrograde and unprofitable
urge to make migrants and migration illegal.
Given the unstable condition of the environment, this practice
may soon become tantamount to genocide. It is also palpably
absurd to live in a society where capital can move faster and
more easily than human beings. Capital exists for the sake and
convenience of human beings.
We believe that the movement of human beings across national
boundaries and under the aegis of foreign governments is
basically a design problem. If guest workers, refugees,
pleasure travellers and so forth were all electronically tracked
via satellite or cell repeaters, the artificial division between
jet setters and refugees would soon cease to exist. Foreigners
are feared not merely because they are foreign, but because they
are unknown, unidentified, and apparently out of local social
control.
In the next century, foreigners need be none of these things.
Along with their ubiquitous credit cards and passports, they
could carry their entire personal histories. They could carry
devices establishing proof of their personal bona fides that
would be immediately obvious to anyone in any language. A
better designed society would accommodate this kind of human
solidarity, rather than pandering to the imagined security needs
of land-based national regimes.
We believe that it should be a general new design principle to
add information to a problem, as opposed to countering it with
physical resources (in the case of migrants, steel bars and
barbed wire). Electronic tracking seems a promising example.
While the threat to privacy and anonymity from electronic
parole is obviously severe, there is nothing quite so dreadful
and threatening as a septic refugee camp. We consider this a
matter of some urgency. We believe it to be very likely that
massive evacuations will occur in the next few decades as a
matter of course, not merely in the disadvantaged Third World,
but possibly in areas such as a new American Dust Bowl. Wise
investments in electronic tourist management would be well
repaid in stitching the fraying fabric of a weather-disrupted
civilization.
For instance, we would expect to see one of the first acts of
21st century disaster management to be sowing an area with
air-dropped and satellite-tracked cellphones. We believe that
such a tracking and display system could be designed so that it
would not be perceived as a threat, but rather as a
jet-setter's prestige item, something like a portable personal
webpage. We believe such devices should be designed first for
the rich. The poor need them worse, but if these devices were
developed and given to the poor by socialist fiat, this would be
(probably correctly) suspected as being the first step toward
police roundup and a death camp.
Replacing natural resources with information is a natural area
for twenty-first century design, because it is an arena for
human ingenuity that was technically closed to all previous
centuries. We see considerable promise in this approach. It
can be both cheap and glamorous.
Energy meters, for instance, should be ubiquitous. They should
be present, not in an obscure box outside the home, but
enshrined within it. This is not a frugal, money-saving effort.
It should be presented as a luxury. It should be a mark of
class distinction. It should be considered a mark of stellar
ignorance to be unaware of the source of one's electric power.
Solar and wind power should be sold as premiums available to
particularly affluent and savvy consumers. It should be
considered the stigma of the crass proletarian to foul the air
every time one turns on a light switch.
Environmental awareness is currently an annoying burden to the
consumer, who must spend his and her time gazing at plastic
recycling labels, washing the garbage and so on. Better
information environments can make the invisible visible,
however, and this can lead to a swift re-evaluation of
previously invisible public ills.
If one had, for instance, a pair of computerized designer
sunglasses that revealed the unspeakable swirl of airborne
combustion products over the typical autobahn, it would be
immediately obvious that clean air is a luxury. Infrasound,
ultrasound and sound pollution monitors would make silence a
luxury. Monitor taps with intelligent water analysis in
real-time would make pure water a luxury. Lack of mutagens in
one's home would become a luxury.
Freedom from interruption and time to think is a luxury;
personal attention is luxury; genuine neighborhood security is
also very much to be valued. Social attitudes can and should be
changed by the addition of cogent information to situations
where invisible costs have long been silently exported into the
environment. Make the invisible visible. Don't sell warnings.
Sell awareness.
The fact that we are living in an unprecedently old society, a
society top-heavy with the aged, offers great opportunity.
Long-term thinking is a useful and worthwhile effort well
suited to the proclivities of old people.
Clearly if our efforts do not work for old people (a large and
growing fraction of the G-7 populace) then they will not work
at all. Old people tend to be generous, they sometimes have time
on their hands. Electronically connected, garrulous oldsters
might have a great deal to offer in the way of managing the
copious unpaid scutwork of electronic civil society. We like
the idea of being a radical art movement that specializes in
recruiting the old.
Ignoring long-term consequences is something we all tend to do;
but promulgating dangerous falsehoods for short-term economic
gain is exceedingly wicked and stupid. If environmental
catastrophe strikes because of CO2 emissions, then
organizations like the anti-Green Global Climate Coalition will
be guilty of negligent genocide. Nobody has ever been guilty of
this novel crime before, but if it happens, it will certainly be
a crime of very great magnitude. At this moment, the GCC and
their political and economic allies are, at best, engaged in a
risky gamble with the lives of billions. If the climate spins
out of control, the 21st century may become a very evil place
indeed.
The consequences should be faced directly. If several million
people starve to death because, for instance, repeated El Nino
events have disrupted major global harvests for years on end,
then there will be a catastrophe. There will be enormous
political and military pressures for justice and an accounting.
We surmise that the best solution in this scenario would be
something like the Czech lustration and the South African truth
commissions. The groundwork for this process should begin now.
The alternatives are not promising: a Beirut scenario of
endless ulcerous and semi-contained social breakdown; a
Yugoslav scenario of climate-based ethnic cleansing and
lebensraum; a Red Terror where violent panic-stricken masses
seek bloody vengeance against industrialism. Most likely of all
is a White Terror, where angry chaos in the climatically
disrupted Third World is ruthlessly put down by remote control
by the G7's cybernetic military. It is very likely under this
last scenario that the West's gluttonous consumption habits will
be studiously overlooked, and the blame laid entirely on the
Third World's exploding populations. (The weather's savage
vagaries will presumably be blamed on some handy Lysenkoist
scapegoat such as Jews or unnatural homosexual activities.)
With the Czech lustration and the South African truth
commissions, the late 20th century has given us a mechanism by
which societies that have drifted into dysfunctional madness
can be put right. We expect no less for future malefactors
whose sly defense of an indefensible status quo may lead to the
deaths of millions of people, who derived little benefit from
their actions and were never given any voice in their decisions.
We recommend that dossiers be compiled now, for the sake of
future international courts of justice. We think this work
should be done quite openly, in a spirit of civic duty. Those
who are risking the lives of others should be made aware that
this is one particular risk that will be focussed specifically
and personally on them.
While it is politically helpful to have a polarized and
personalized enemy class, there is nothing particularly new
about this political tactic. Revanchist sentiment is all very
well, but survival will require a much larger vision. This
must become the work of many people in many fields of labor,
ignoring traditional boundaries of discipline and ideology to
unite in a single practical goal: climate.
A brief sketch may help establish some parameters.
Here I conclude with a set of general cultural changes that a
Viridian movement would likely promulgate in specific sectors
of society. For the sake of brevity, these suggestions come in
three parts. (Today) is the situation as it exists now.
(What We Want) is the situation as we would like to see it.
(The Trend) the way the situation will probably develop if it
follows contemporary trends without any intelligent
intervention.
The Media
Today. Publishing and broadcasting cartels surrounded by a haze
of poorly financed subcultural microchannels.
What We Want. More bandwidth for civil society, multicultural
variety, and better-designed systems of popular many-to-many
communication, in multiple languages through multiple channels.
The Trend. A spy-heavy, commercial Internet. A Yankee
entertainment complex that entirely obliterates many
non-Anglophone cultures.
The Military
Today. G-7 Hegemony backed by the American military.
What We Want. A wider and deeper majority hegemony with a
military that can deter adventurism, but specializes in meeting
the immediate crises through civil engineering, public health
and disaster relief.
The Trend. Nuclear and biological proliferation among minor
powers.
Business
Today. Currency traders rule banking system by fiat; extreme
instability in markets; capital flight but no labor mobility;
unsustainable energy base
What We Want: Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure;
vastly increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and
resources
The Trend: commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism,
criminalized banking systems, sweatshops
Industrial Design
Today: very rapid model obsolescence, intense effort in
packaging; CAD/CAM
What We Want: intensely glamourous environmentally sound
products; entirely new objects of entirely new materials;
replacing material substance with information; a new
relationship between the cybernetic and the material
The Trend: two design worlds for rich and poor comsumers; a
varnish on barbarism
Gender Issues
Today: more commercial work required of women; social problems
exported into family life as invisible costs
What We Want: declining birth rates, declining birth defects,
less work for anyone, lavish support for anyone willing to drop
out of industry and consume less
The Trend: more women in prison; fundamentalist and
ethnic-separatist ideologies that target women specifically
Entertainment
Today: large-scale American special-effects spectacle supported
by huge casts and multi-million-dollar tie-in enterprises
What We Want: glamour and drama; avant-garde adventurism; a
borderless culture industry bent on Green social engineering
The Trend: annihilation of serious culture except in a few
non-Anglophone societies
International Justice
Today: dysfunctional but gamely persistent War Crimes tribunals
What We Want: Environmental Crime tribunals
The Trend: justice for sale; intensified drug war
Employment
Today: MacJobs, burn-out track, massive structural unemployment
in Europe
What We Want: Less work with no stigma; radically expanded
leisure; compulsory leisure for workaholics; guaranteed
support for people consuming less resources; new forms of
survival entirely outside the conventional economy
The Trend: increased class division; massive income disparity;
surplus flesh and virtual class
Education
Today: failing public-supported schools
What We Want: intellectual freedom, instant cheap access to
information, better taste, a more advanced aesthetic,
autonomous research collectives, lifelong education, and dignity
and pleasure for the very large segment of the human population
who are and will forever be basically illiterate and innumerate
The trend: children are raw blobs of potential
revenue-generating machinery; universities exist to supply
middle-management
Public Health
Today: general success; worrying chronic trends in AIDS,
tuberculosis, antibiotic resistance; massive mortality in
nonindustrial world
What We Want: unprecedently healthy old people; plagues
exterminated worldwide; sophisticated treatment of microbes;
artificial food
The Trend: Massive dieback in Third World, septic poor
quarantined from nervous rich in G-7 countries, return of 19th
century sepsis, world's fattest and most substance-dependent
populations
Science
Today: basic science sacrificed for immediate commercial gain;
malaise in academe; bureaucratic overhead in government support
What We Want: procedural rigor, intellectual honesty,
reproducible results; peer review, block grants, massively
increased research funding, massively reduced procedural
overhead; genius grants; single-author papers; abandonment of
passive construction and the third person plural; "Science"
reformed so as to lose its Platonic and crypto-Christian
elements as the "pure" pursuit of disembodied male minds;
armistice in Science wars
The Trend: "Big Science" dwindles into short-term industrial
research or military applications; "scientists" as a class
forced to share imperilled, marginal condition of English
professors and French deconstructionists.
I would like to conclude by suggesting some specific areas for
immediate artistic work. I see these as crying public needs
that should be met by bravura displays of raw ingenuity.
But there isn't time for that. Not just yet.
Bruce Sterling (bruces-AT-well.com)
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