Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
We're supposed to be talking about the state of the world, and I'm thinking 
of the bits of news here as the year starts that will have an impact. Here's 
a few items in no particular order... 

Abramoff and other political scandals, and the Bush Administration's meltdown
Sharon's stroke
Pandemic Pandemonium
Domestic surveillance in the USA
Rebuilding New Orleans
Escalating climate change and other natural disasters
Digital convergence
Peak oil

What am I missing? And what kind of stew are we cooking here?
  

    
Well, you're missing Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and the entire
continent of South America.  Then again, South America is "the
continent of the future, and always will be."  Who cares what's
happening in gigantic Brazil, oil-rich Venezuela and those
revolutionary Amerindian cocaine states?

It's interesting, though, that we have misplaced the drug war while
fighting an oil war. Maybe we'll misplace the oil in ten years  while
fighting over intellectual property.

With the possible exception of "digital convergence," (which I take to
mostly mean that Microsoft owns every box and line of code, nothing
new happens ever), your list there is entirely grim.  The state of the
world in 2005 is not entirely grim.  One shouldn't underestimate
people's resilience, their abilities to patch up and make do.  There
are places and situations that were well-night hopeless 20 years ago
that look pretty good now. 

 India and China are tremendous stories.  Even big pieces of Eastern
Europe are getting onto the EU carousel.   America's being run by
corrupt Lysenkoist morons, but, debilitating as that may be for us
Yankees, it also means that the remaining 94 percent of the planet has
some chance at the limelight.  Hey, South Korea could have been full of
cloning superstars -- if they could just get over their endemic Asian
urge to cook the books.

    The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States
of America.  You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's the secret
textbook of the Bush Administration.   The South lost that war for a
reason.  The South didn't have it in them to be a major power, because
they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined
anxieties.

     The thing is, though: when a culture is "gone with the wind,"
it's never utterly and entirely gone. You can't make things go away by
distributing them into the wind.   It's just... up in the atmosphere. 
The emissions of the past form a smog.  A  breathable compost.  You
can't throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero.  There is no
"away."  Tomorrow is this place, at a different time.
  

    

(Note: Offsite readers with comments or questions can send them to 
<inkwell@well.com> to have them added to the conversation here)
  

    
>Brad Pitt

Not to mention missing white women.  What if there's another "runaway
bride?"

Here's what I'd add to that list: the absolutely unsustainable
economic model in the U.S.  Borrowing money from China so we can buy
stuff from China (and run huge federal deficits) -- it can't go on
forever.  Will it be a big story in 2006?  Maybe.  If not, surely soon
enough.
  

    
Speaking of off-site readers . . .


Mac asks:


Where do the stories in "Visionary in Residence" fit
in the Sterling canon?  Any particular recurring themes?


Evan Leatherwood wonders:


What about the slow murder of the American middle class, or at least the
slow death?  I'm thinking of "We See Things Differently" here.  Think we're
still headed in that direction?


Gerald Turner writes to inquire:

Greetings  Mr  Sterling

Do you think that the Mars rover discoverd alien artifacts posted
daily at my blog are real or rocks?

http://marsrelaystation.blogspot.com/
  

    
Gerald Turner's question reminds me of another item for the list - 
privatization of space travel. Won't be long before we have entrepreneurs in 
orbit, beginning with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic.
  

    
http://marsrelaystation.blogspot.com/

During my stay in Pasadena, I actually met the characters who drive
those Mars Rovers inside the Jet Propulsion Lab. I witnessed them at
their work.  If they'd rolled over any alien artifacts, I'm pretty sure
they would have let on about it.

They're a remarkably methodical and responsible lot, even if they do
eat sugar donuts for breakfast.


"What about the slow murder of the American middle class."  I'm not
nuts about radical income disparities, but do we  want to carefully
police the boundaries of the class system?  If any class has been
murdered in my lifetime, it's probably the East Coast Anglo
Establishment.  I mean the patriarchal, gentlemanly, Ivy-League
educated, liberal-Republican upper class.  When I was born they pretty
much ran the works, and if you met one of 'em now, you'd just laugh in
derision.  The poor bastards must be more endangered than bison.

There is a kind of theme in VISIONARY IN RESIDENCE.  It's all about
using the approaches of science fiction to do other kinds of writing: 
design fiction, architecture fiction, fiction for scientists,
mainstream fiction about situations that used to be technically
impossible in an earlier day...  it's making a virtue of the fact that
I've been writing fictional stuff that's just radically scattered,
truly all over the map.  Likely I've been reading too many weblogs.

Most of the privatized space-travel efforts seem to be made by
ultra-rich cybergeeks.  I rather suspect this is more their ditzy
attempt to recapture the dreams of lost youth than the nuts-and-bolts
construction of a private spaceflight industry.   It makes me wonder if
the moguls of tomorrow won't try to build themselves cool little
cyberspaces.  Maybe they'll drop their loose change on personal,
souped-up, two-man personal search engines, or private super World of
Warcraft personal Xanadus.  Because, you know, that's what impressed
them when they were nine and ten.
  

    


Frank Shannon writes:




Ok here you went a step too far:

Most of the privatized space-travel efforts seem to be made by
ultra-rich cybergeeks.  I rather suspect this is more their ditzy
attempt to recapture the dreams of lost youth than the nuts-and-bolts
construction of a private spaceflight industry.   It makes me wonder if
the moguls of tomorrow won't try to build themselves cool little
cyberspaces.  Maybe they'll drop their loose change on personal,
souped-up, two-man personal search engines, or private super World of
Warcraft personal Xanadus.  Because, you know, that's what impressed
them when they were nine and ten.

Burn the heretic!  Seriously I wonder if the 63 miles up that the current
private spacecraft can go is enough for anything usefull, dont you have to
get at least 100 miles up to get a stable orbit.  Not to mention angular
momentum.  But if we don't get into space we are all going to die here which
is just depressing.
  

    
Look, Frank, it might be just depressing that we can't die in WORLD OF
WARCRAFT heroically fighting orcs, but depression doesn't change the
laws of physics.

I'm as impressed as anybody that a top-end aviation engineer with a
geek's checkbook can burn rubber and nitrous oxide and go 63 miles due
up.  However, that's not an industry, that's a stunt.  I don't think
there's ever gonna be a rocket-based tourist industry, any more than
there's a hot-air balloon industry for tourist Atlantic crossings. 
That's not heresy; it's a realistic assessment of industrial
development.

On the plus side, given a whole lot of nanocarbon fiber, I'm starting
to think that a space elevator is physically doable.   Personal rockets
don't sound nuts though they are, while a space elevator sounds nuts
and it isn't; it's just unprecedented.  It's not personal, of course. 
It would take a major state power to build a space elevator.  It's
fantastic, but it's not delusional.  I suspect that the worst problem
with a space elevator is that it's hard to build small-scale models and
work out the kinks.

Of course, when and if a space elevator exists as a real-world working
object, like, say, a Hoover dam or a cheeseburger franchise, I kinda
doubt it's gonna relieve space-geeks of their unexamined existential
depressions.   If you think living in an airtight spacecraft is a swell
idea, you ought to talk to some Antarctic researchers or nuclear
submariners.  The technological sublime has got a short shelf life.
Once it's off the drawing board and you're living in it,  the adventure
and the charm fade fast. 

People born in a spacecraft would likely moan about how they can't die
on Earth and be properly buried in a real, authentic, rootsy, earthy
graveyard.
  

    
> Personal rockets don't sound nuts though they are.

haha. on slashdot the other day, they had a pointer to a finnish guy who is
nuts and brilliant. he strapped jet engines to his boots and then jumped off
a balloon at 7000 feet while wearing one of those wingsuits that make you
look like a flying squirrel. the propane and butane were stored in what
looked like hot water bottles stuff into his jump/wingsuit. there's video
at: http://www.bird-man.com/?n=windtunnel&nose=6

so there's a lot of renegade tech going on these days. seen any you think
portends larger good for us?
  

    


Frank Shannon writes:



Thanks for your kind reply Bruce.  Of course by us I meant the human race,
but beanstalks are a good idea.  I think we are going to have to use a lot of
rockets as crazy as they are since the only place it makes sense to start
serious work on tethers is in space.  I guess we could build the thing on the
ground and try to get it up by some other means but I'm not sure what.
  

    
Isn't movement into space less about technology or money, and more about will 
and innovative thinking? And a Mars trip in the next couple of decades would 
probably be no more daunting than an ocean voyage into the unknown in the 
1400s. Not that I see any hurry to colonize space when we have terrestrial 
issues galore.
  

    
"so there's a lot of renegade tech going on these days. seen any you
think portends larger good for us?"

*That depends what one means by "renegade" and "larger good."   I'm
pretty cool about today's tech hippies with solder-guns; I think MAKE
magazine has got a lot going for it, it's really brisk and
unpredictable.  The distributed-knowledge, web-autodidact thing is a
happening scene. Alpha geeks can make a dent in the tech scene, and
they don't have to sell out to VCs and ask permission first. I don't
underestimate this development; I've got an eye on those guys. 

*Discovery Channel has got almost a franchise on this wack tech stuff;
mythbusters, weird people with filthy jobs, huge unlikely gizmos...
there's a zillion home-repair shows all of a sudden. It's some kind of
popular groundswell.

*Open Source is kinda the ultimate version of the do-gooder angle,
that techie ethos of "watch me transform the world for the better from
my disheveled nonprofit garage".  Still, being "renegade" has a pretty
short shelf life, too.  If "renegade" tech has any economic potential,
then it gets noticed and commodified.  It's not "renegade" after that,
because it's become mainstream tech.  If it has no such mainstream
potential, then it's not really "renegade," either, because it won't
rock the status quo.  It's a private hobby, a lab curiosity, and it'll
never scale up for a mass market.  

*Then there's no-kidding criminal "renegade" tech, such as weapons,
IED bombs, crack labs, forged money, faked products...  There's
horrific amounts of this going on now.  Criminal underground tech has a
similar commodification problem.  Either you make black money and
become the pawn of global organized crime, or you don't make money and
nobody pays any attention to you; you're an evil James Bond genius, but
only in your own mind.

    

"Isn't movement into space less about technology or money, and more
about will and innovative thinking?"


*Why do we require rockets for 'will and innovative thinking?' The
track record is bad here.  Nazi Germany had rockets. And plenty of
will.  And rather a lot of innovation.  The Soviet Union committed huge
resources into space travel, to what end? Even Saddam tried to build a
space-cannon.  Did all their spacey will and innovation get 'em off
the hook?  

*The Iranians have a space effort now.  They also clutch their nukes
and scream for Israel to be wiped off the map. Are we happier because
their noble rocket effort gives Iran so much will and innovative
thinking?  

*There's stuff to do in space that's well worth doing: surveillance
sats, GPS, communications and astronomy.  The Indian space program
specializes in that: real-world space applications intended to directly
boost the well-being of the Indian general population.  I think you
could argue that the Indian space program has paid off and delivered
real infrastructural benefits.  That's probably because they've
resisted the urge to do Buck Rogers space-racing, and glamour
space-tourism -- efforts that must depend on raw sense-of-wonder for
their funding.  

    *Of course it's 'about technology and money.'  If we could hold
out breath and levitate into outer space, then it would be about sheer
transcendant will and cool, Tsiolkovsky-style visionary ruminations,
but that's not how it works.  Genuine, planetary-scale spacefaring
still requires huge, complex, ungainly technologies employing tens of
thousands of specialized employees. Even unmanned spacecraft are more
expensive per ounce than solid gold.  It's been like that since the
days of the V-2, sixty years ago.  As Tom Wolfe reported, "no bucks, no
Buck Rogers." It's an expensive, bureaucratic, complicated technology,
it's not cheap, easy and private.  I don't see how we gain much by
trying to elide this.
  

    
Two from the interweb:

bob anderson writes:


Hi Bruce,

How much did you connect with the fine art faculty at Art Center?  Mike
Kelly being one of the stellar artists there.

Where do you think the art world is going in this changing world?

BTW - I grew up in Pasadena and went to high school across the arroyo
from Art Center at John Muir.


And this:

Dear Bruce:

I've recently taken an interest in the idea that "appearance = truth",
specifically with the problems of identity and reality created by electronic
mediums.  I may be young enough to have been in diapers when cyberpunk was
taking off, but I still remember a time before news networks were "battling"
it
out on cable television.  In a world where what we see and hear through TV
and
the Internet is controlled by other people, most of which are constantly
trying
to argue that their version of the truth is more accurate than their
competitors, do you see an end to the constant information warfare that
claims
new minds everyday?  Will corporations eventually control all of our media
networks or do you think there will be a strong call for public ownership in
some form in the coming years?


Thanks,
Michael Black
English Major, Senior
Philosophy Minor
University of Louisville
michael.black@louisville.edu
  

    



Michael Black writes:



Dear Bruce:

I've recently taken an interest in the idea that "appearance = truth",
specifically with the problems of identity and reality created by electronic
mediums.  I may be young enough to have been in diapers when cyberpunk was
taking off, but I still remember a time before news networks were "battling"
it out on cable television.  In a world where what we see and hear through TV
and the Internet is controlled by other people, most of which are constantly
trying to argue that their version of the truth is more accurate than their
competitors, do you see an end to the constant information warfare that
claims new minds everyday?  Will corporations eventually control all of our
media networks or do you think there will be a strong call for public
ownership in some form in the coming years?


Thanks,
Michael Black
English Major, Senior
Philosophy Minor
University of Louisville
michael.black@louisville.edu
  

    
wrt China, Korea and ID:

This fall I'll start in the ID program at Carnegie Mellon after nearly
20 years as a computer geek of some sort or another.  I was told by
someone in the department that the freshman class in the ID program is
roughly %50 Korean nationals who are only in the US to learn design
before going back to their jobs at home.

Do you know of anyone that's collecting stats on or tracking the
national origin of ID students at schools in the US?   I'd love to see
the percentages plotted against year for Japan, Korea, China, etc.
  

    
There were a lot of Asians at Art Center, but there are a lot of
Asians everywhere.

I'm not a fine-arts guy by nature; I spent most of my time at Art
Center with
media design people, the illustration crowd, the occasional
product-design
and car-design guy, and my own students.  I fully appreciated the
lecturers
who came through from outside the school, too.  

It's a unique place, and 75 years old.  Art Center is
a stable strange-attractor; it's like watching the bubbles rise
in boiling oatmeal.

I miss the place in many ways, but I rather imagine they'll do fine
without me,
the way they did in those other 74 years.

As to where the art world's going, I suspect it's gonna be going into
little creative-class urban-entertainment culture centers.  In other
words,
it's gonna end up in "districts for creatives" that have been zoned
for
that kind of activity.  Places like that have existed for a long time,
but the process hasn't been spreadsheeted and rationalized.

A good example would be Navy Pier in Chicago, a place that
likely would be a junkie-infested eyesore if it hadn't been turned
into a weird, retrofitted culture-mall.  Fourth Street and Sixth
Street
in downtown Austin have that kind of vibe.  Even Las Vegas
is brandishing surprising amounts of top-end fine-art at
the customers who balk at their slot machines.   The art world
isn't a profit center -- but places that host the art world
become profit centers.  

I've even seen them try it in Singapore. There's a former
police station there, the picture of grimness, that's
been turned into a gaudy, rainbowed design boutique.
That dungeon is all plastic and skylights now.  I really wonder
how that's going to work out.
  

    
do you see an end to the constant information warfare that
claims new minds everyday?

No, I don't see an end to that, but I don't fret about it much.
I'm not a metaphysician.  If you want to approximate "truth"
I think you ought to embrace the scientific method.
Formulate a testable hypothesis, experiment, publish,
and see if you can get the findings replicated.  

If you approach "reality" in a humble spirit of inquiry
I think that Truth will unveil herself, whereas if you stomp
around emitting gospel and drinking your own public-relations
bathwater, you're gonna come to grief, sooner or later.
  

    
Truth with a capital T? As in absolute? Isn't truth, like beauty, more of an 
eye-of-the-beholder thang?
  

    
You know, John, really, I'm just not even going to go there.
All I can say is that, thanks to dogged investigation, the human
race has learned that there were many important, real-world
phenomena going on for 13.7 billion years before there
were any human eyes and any human beholders.  What's
that say about the next 13.7 billion years?  Probably that
running around trying to define ontological absolutes
is a little stupid.
  

    
Oh, absolutes don't exist beyond the end of Time and 100% Entropy?

Death to all fanatics! My mother's patience is infinite, but mine own
is not ;-)

Anyhow, was the Make Magazine that you refered to http://makezine.com/
?
  

    
"the human race has learned that there were many important, real-world
phenomena going on for 13.7 billion years before there were any human eyes
and any human beholders."

If you'd rather not go there, that's cool with me, but the existence of 
phenomena and the accumulation of facts aren't really the same as "truth." We 
can make decent assumptions about some aspects of reality, but our experience 
if reality is mediated by perception and cooked in the electrochemical stew 
that lives in our heads. We're crippled if we worry too much about the 
"truth" of reality beyond perception, granted, but there's a difference 
between acknowledgement of phenomena and the suggestion that there's some 
absolute truth that we can know. I just don't buy it.
  

    
>As to where the art world's going, I suspect it's gonna be going into
little creative-class urban-entertainment culture centers.  In other
words, it's gonna end up in "districts for creatives" that have been
zoned for that kind of activity.  Places like that have existed for a
long time, but the process hasn't been spreadsheeted and rationalized.<

The unrationalized versions of those were bohemias, and what seems to
happen nowadays is that young professionals buy up all the space and
any free energy gets sold to passive spectators before the artists
there can mature and become productive. The neighborhoods get eaten
before they get ripe.

Maybe rationally designed art incubators can replace bohemias, but
bohemias were also one of the few places where unclassified oddity was
tolerated. What replaces that? 

In 19th-century European one could emigrate to the colonies or light
out for the Territory. For about five minutes we thought we could head
out into space. We could always go into the fringe neighborhoods. But
now there does not seem to be even any place one can imagine going.
There is no margin left on the page. Everything wraps into everything
else. Where do we go now?
  

    
so bruce, it's a new year. for those of us trying to decide where to invest
our annual fear quotient, what do you think? bird flu? the weather? world
leaders wilding?
  

    
Weather, zorca.  Definitely.  It's the long-term fear portfolio.

Ckridge, I think your answer is that bohemia no longer goes to a
"where."
Asking for solid bohemian districts that are  somehow devoid of yuppie
scum -- 
that's the flipside of the Bush Administration promoting "Homeland
Security"  
in a globalized war-on-terror.  

"Globalization melts the map."  

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2005/08/

Globalization melts the map for everybody.  We're
not gonna get a world with international terrorists, multinational
business,
and local  gated communities for hipsters who have beards and bongos.

That day is over.  The new situation has got advantages as well as
deficits.  Otherwise I'd be ranting at you in some San Francisco coffee
bar, instead of posting on the WELL while packing for Milan.