In the mid-1980s, Bruce Sterling helped define the cyberpunk science-fiction movement. He edited the movement's zine (Shaved Truth), a collection of short stories (Mirrorshades), and wrote street-hip novels like Schizmatrix and The Artificial Kid.
Now Sterling hopes to earmark another cultural movement. Radicalized by what he sees as seriously disruptive weather patterns brought on by global warming, he calls his nascent movement Viridian Green. On 23 September, he sent out a statement called The Manifesto of January 3, 2000 over the influential Nettime list.
The manifesto posits that the best way to combat global warming is to ignore politics and to see it as an aesthetic design problem. Sterling challenges the design geniuses and culture hackers who've created the digital revolution to start a cultural movement that will view CO2-emitting designs as downright gauche, proffering alternative designs in their stead.
Meanwhile, Sterling's new novel, Distraction (Bantam Spectra), functions as a companion piece to his Viridian movement. The main character is a political operative in the post-global-warming chaos of America in the 2040s. Sterling uses this central character to show off his own strategic ideas and to conjecture on the nature of power in such a world.
Wired News: Your new project, Viridian Green, and your new novel Distraction, are both quite political.
Bruce Sterling: The novel's way political, but Viridian is about technological design. There are still some faint distinctions to be made there.
WN: Do you really imagine decentralized design activism producing a solution, even a partial solution?
BS: Yep. I have a very active imagination; it's been a personal condition of mine for years now.
WN: And do you think that resistance to these solutions by big business will be a big problem?
BS: Not one-tenth so much a problem as big business' tooth-gritting resistance to political solutions.
The greenhouse effect was never a political decision. We were never asked to vote to fill the atmosphere with CO2. You're never going to get a ballot asking whether your house ought to wash away, or if the local forest ought to catch fire.
Instead, you're just going to find yourself somehow doing weird, anomalous things, such as walking around in shorts and sandals during Christmas. That's not because of your Republican senator; that's because of that car in your driveway, basically. WN: A reduction of the Viridian Green idea would be this: There's only one major problem left facing humankind – global warming – but it's a doozy. We need to resolve it.
BS: This is a lame problem. We're smothering in our own trash like a bunch of drunken pigs. We should get this dumb crisis out of the way in short order, so that we can tackle the serious challenges of civilization, such as "What do we want?"
Choking on your own spew, though, that's not a serious problem; that's the kind of problem you have when you're dead drunk or strung out on smack.
We're doing this because we're not paying proper attention. Basically, the Global Climate Coalition just doesn't want us to notice that the climate is 10 times worse that it was 10 years ago, that 230 million people in China were dislocated by floods this year, that Mitch was the worst hurricane in 200 years, that jungles were on fire all over the place in 1998. We're not supposed to know about that; and if we do know, we're supposed to conclude that it's some kind of astonishing freak accident.
WN: You also seem to say that preachy, righteous, anti-consumerist environmental activism won't work because it's unattractive. People won't buy it, so ...
BS: The real problem is that we are buying a lot of lame crap that isn't worthy of us and is in bad taste. We buy cars so badly made that they kill you if you leave them running in the garage. I'm sick of these greasy kid-stuff cars. I want a car that's slick and silent and much, much smarter.
WN: And since most of the world's resources are controlled – and used up – by wealthy people, is the solution to make environment-friendly production and consumption chic in those circles?
BS: Yep. The wealthy are the world kings of trash. Hip teenagers and Third Worlders don't command enough resources to poison the sky. Rich yuppie micro-serfs ought to be the early adapters here. They're always whining about how technically clever they are and how great they are at networking, but the electrical nets that supply their every keystroke belong in the 1950s. Electrical utilities suck; they act like they were built by Stalin. They ought to be demolished in Internet jig-time, just the way Gates demolished IBM. The way things are now, every time we log on to a Web page we send up a foul little gush of soot somewhere.
I want a solar-powered logo on every Web page I see. I refuse to buy anything off your cheap, sleazy, oil-powered Web site. I want a clean Web. I don't want to be part of the problem every time I log on. I'm sick of living with that. It revolts me.
WN: Your new novel, Distraction, portrays a world that's post global warming. Yet, as your main character might say, "It's doable." Aspects of it are oddly liberating, even. Do you think the reality will be more dreary?
BS: Reality is a very multivalent place. I don't think poisoning the atmosphere is going to make us any happier. But you can have a pretty antic time when you're dealing with the awful consequences of your own stupidity. People in bad marriages, for instance, can have colorful, dramatic lives, full of thrown crockery, and torrid affairs, and suicide attempts.
People aren't going to be any less human just because the weather's screwed up and the seas are rising. We're going to be just as weird as we ever were, only everything will be damp and moldy and smelling of smoke. Kind of like East Germany, only without frogs.
And the planet can't all be as gray and dreary as East Germany. Parts of it will be as loud and crazy and foul as Mexico City. The great unanimity here is that everybody's sky looks bad, everything smells, and there is no place left to for anyone to hide. Even the rich.
