empty rhetoric

Over at the WELL, there is an interview up with Bruce Sterling, whom Wikipedia describes as “an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his seminal work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.” Sterling, in short, is one of the modern giants of sci-fi– a kingmaker (look at Cory Doctorow) and incredibly influential voice not only in fiction, but in politics, technology, and society too. I once attended his keynote at Siggraph 2004 (back when I went to Siggraph), which I have to say, was somewhat disappointing in its preachiness, and only tangentially related to computer graphics– the main focus of the conference.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the interview contains the same level of somewhat self-righteous, politically-motivated doomsaying about Sterling’s favorite causes, nonetheless, beyond these flaws it makes not only for good reading, but also for significant deep thought. For example: why does Sterling believe what he believes? How is his opinion affected by his occupation and status? Sterling writes:

So: I don’t expect too much to happen in 2008: except for that intensified smell of burning as people’s feet are held to the fire. “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” But if nothing changes, then more and more china is going to flat-out shatter and break.

THEN they’ll move. If they see somebody making money at it, they
might move pretty fast.

Sterling is fairly cynical about the future– specifically the American future. I can’t say that I blame him. Beyond our political differences, Sterling and I both clearly agree that in 2008, Pakistan has the potential to “burn outright”, and I don’t think anyone won’t be worried when that happens. They do have a few nukes, after all, and share a border with still-unstable Afghanistan. (The U.S., too, hasn’t given the Pakistanis access to the so-called technology of “Permissive Action Links” which safeguard nuclear weapons from accidental or unauthorized detonation)

Sterling talks a great deal about the failure of Al Qaeda, attributing it, of course, to their own ineptitude and fervent killing of Muslims. This is, I think, partly true, but also somewhat at odds with the classical “leftist” position on the (again, terribly named) “War on Terror”. Indeed, the notion that military intervention overseas has been a magnificent and total failure does not take into account the utter decimation of Al Qaeda’s global influence. After nearly a decade of killing little other than Sunnis, it seems that Al Qaeda’s unique ability to unite disparate groups against the West has waned significantly. This has a great deal to do with the fact that Al Qaeda has been singularly unable to mount attacks against the West due to the fact that they have no base of operations from which to stage them. It is an entirely different thing to destroy the World Trade Center than it is to set off an IED in Baghdad.

Sterling’s cynicism comes, I think, from the unique perspective he has come to embody– a “long term” thinker and futurist, more concerned with how the world will be than how it actually is. This sort of thinking is driven (especially in fiction) by a need to discover or create drama and excitement– to see the world as radically, rather than only slightly, different 50 years from now. Sterling may think that 2008 won’t bring many changes, but this, he seems to believe, (in ominous and eloquent words) is a dangerous thing.

Sterling’s pessimism re: the environment is likewise based (I think) in a fundamental misunderstanding of what a large segment of American believes. Americans don’t dislike environmental politics because they believe that the future will somehow be less prosperous or more regulated, but rather because of the extremism that daily emanates from much of the environmentalist movement. No matter what you think about global warming, I don’t think anyone really wants the crazies from Greenpeace rule the country while strapped to a giant oak in Northern California. The failure is not one of policy, but rather of of communication. The environmentalist movement has done a terrible job making their case to the modern American.

Indeed, many of the strides that environmentalists have made in the past few years are fundamentally ones of communication. It is popular to be a certain kind of environmentalist (at least in the circles I travel in) because of a more moderate, less shrill, far more optimistic stance toward the issue that seeks to solve, rather than simply unearth, problems.

Ultimately, one has to ask the question: would you rather hear a talk from a futurist who believed the world would be massively, or only pedantically, different from how it is now? The answer is, I would imagine, almost universally the former. No one wants to go hear a talk or read a novel about 2050, where everything is powered by hybrid ethanol engines that produce some new sort of pollution that everyone is worried about, where nuclear power has simply replaced coal, where China and the United States fight a low-intensity economic cold war and their hasn’t been a major international conflict in a decade, and politicians go about their famous mediocrity, just getting buy, barely keeping things running. And yet that might be the future we face. Even if its boring.

Me, I’d rather read a novel about how fusion power now ensures universal clean, free energy, where we’ve colonized Mars and accidentally created an extra-terrestrial nation state, where super-elite soldiers fight battles with robots, and square-jawed, attractive scientists fight off alien invasions. On the more realistic side, its more interesting to look at the possibility of an Orwellian world government and its oppression around the globe (plus the political chess matches that inevitably accompany such a behemoth), perhaps challenged by a shadowy underground resistance than it is to read about a world that isn’t a whole lot different than our own. That is, after all, the nature of fantasy and fiction.

Indeed, seeing a dramatic, dangerous future does something else: it gives meaning to the present. Its easy to look at the terrible field of candidates for the 2008 election and get depressed at how similar they really are, or to see the same problems plaguing the world that did 20 years ago and feel powerless. But if the future is filled with these dire enigmas rising to challenge humanity’s very existence, it suddenly means that now matters– far more than it does if one takes a more realistic view. In that sense, I don’t blame Sterling– in fact, I take part in this sort of excitement-mongering all the time.

It is, to be sure, only human.