Bruce Sterling on Tue, 4 Jan 2000 10:17:29 +0100 (CET)


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<nettime> Complete Manifesto



Let's try that again, shall we?  Bill Gates's notorious
program "Microsoft Outlook" truncated the earlier manifesto.
MO does not allow the word "begin" to be used with two spaces
following; it interprets the rest of the ascii text as some
nonfunctional attachment.  Alas, when it comes to Microsoft product,
we are still pushing balky machines uphill. *8-/
bruces

From: Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>
Subject: The Manifesto of January 3, 2000
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.

     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.



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