GOTHIC HI-TECH

Dick Pountain/19 August 2010 10:54/Idealog 194

I'd fully planned for this column to be an uber-techie prophecy about spintronics research, since a team at Ohio Uni just created an organic semiconductor based memory cell that manipulates electron spins to store data. However while researching it online I fatally stumbled across a speech delivered by cyberpunk sci-fi author Bruce Sterling to a futurology conference called Reboot 11 in Copenhagen last year (http://video.reboot.dk/video/486788/bruce-sterling-reboot-11). Sterling's bleakly dystopian view of our prospects for the next 10 years is hugely entertaining, delivered in his deadpan, geek/Eeyore style, but it's so eminently plausible that it completely unmanned me for the task of burbling optimistically about the joy-giving potential of bendy plastic computers...

Perhaps unusually for someone in this tech-nerdy profession I'm not really a sci-fi fan so I've never actually read the novels of Bruce Sterling, nor his co-punk William Gibson. Actually I did enjoy sci-fi in my teens (particularly classic anthologies edited by Groff Conklin) but during the hippy sixties I read all the sci-fi classics until I sickened myself of the whole genre. After that only J.G. Ballard and Bill Burrough's "Nova Express" were sufficiently pointed to penetrate my horny carapace of ennui. But Sterling's Reboot speech got to me through his intense realism, coupled to a laconic refusal to over-dramatise.

Sterling starts with some deceptively mild observations about Fiat's new Cinquecento (a car I think is really cute). He asked a Fiat designer whether, having revived this 1957 model to huge commercial success, they planned to follow chronologically with succeeding models, but the designer said of course not - they would just watch how people customise the new 500 and develop new models based on that. They don't intend to recapitulate history, merely to plunder it for exploitable images. 

Sterling's vision of the near future is not one of apocalypse but of a steady and deeply disruptive decline as energy and food prices rocket, economic inequality grows ever more grotesque, weather becomes more hostile and numerous low-intensity wars are precipitated by drought, famine and mass migration. But rather than a return to the Middle Ages (or even the Stone Age) he sees this as all taking place within the context of a continually-expanding electronic technology sector and online consumer culture. As he pithily describes our prospects "...we're moving into a situation with Generation-Xers in power, in a Depression, where people are afraid of the sky", "the future is an old paradigm", "it's neither progress nor conservatism because there's nothing left to conserve and no direction in which to progress".

As a professional futurologist of course Sterling is honour-bound to invent some sexy neologisms to spice up all this gloom, and he delivers magnificently through concepts like "Dark Euphoria", "Gothic Hi-Tech" and "Favela Chic". His first illustration of Gothic Hi-Tech is harsh: "You're Steve Jobs, you've built the iPhone, which is a brilliant technical innovation, but you've also had to sneak off to Tennessee to get a liver transplant". His putting the boot into Nicholas Sarkozy displays the same languid malice, as a politician who is "brilliant, poly-ethnic, but with no ideology or alternative...", someone who has "sucked all the air out of the political room..." so that "if you debate him you make him stronger, if you ignore him he simply steals your clothes". Favela Chic, named after the notorious slums of Brazil, is the condition of owning nothing but still keeping up a cool public facade. For Sterling, FaceBook is a kind of virtual favela: millions of tiny rooms that advertise their occupants' ego through encrustation with gaudy detritus (like the shells of hermit crabs).

It's in the later part of his address that Sterling gets really serious as he attacks those ascetics in the Green movement who counsel a return to pre-industrial, agrarian societies. Though he never uses the term, he's sufficient of a Keynesian to understand that we're obliged to keep making stuff and buying stuff in order to provide jobs and livings for the huge population of this planet. He would just like us to insist on far better-designed stuff, and to learn to live with far less of it. His final remarks proffer a Zen-like prospectus for examining all the stuff in your life and dividing it into four categories: beautiful objects; emotionally-important objects; useful objects and tools; and all the rest. Having thus evaluated them all, give most of them away (after digitising their images if you insist, for future reference).

Bruce Sterling and I come at things from different generations, different politics and vastly different cultural references (apart from a shared fascination with computer technology) but what grabbed me in his speech was a clear awareness that in the recent banking crisis we've missed, fumbled and dropped, a once-in-a-century opportunity to reform our out-of-control economic system in a more sensible direction, and that a consequence will be the sort of squalid decline he so cruelly sketches here. We lost that chance not only through the devious and tenacious rapacity of the banking classes and the credit-addled myopia of the voting masses, but through the enfeebled quality of our politicians (not excluding the once-promising Obama). Sterling witheringly describes these as "people who position themselves in the narrative rather than building any permanent infrastructure", that is "they're cheerleaders, they're not leaders".