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Bruce Sterling's Manifesto for January 3, 2000
StefanJ writes "SF writer and techno journalist Bruce Sterling has released the definitive version of "The Manifesto of January 3, 2000."
Unlike the version released last year, this one isn't directly tied to the Viridian ecodesign movement; rather, it is a passionate and bold call for a new movement in technology and art. One that promotes something like the Open Source movement, and hints at the coming of a posthuman age and an abundance of wonderful and terrible things. "
"We need clean, supple, healthy means of support..." etc...
A list of generic 'the world should be like this and this' is fairly useless. They are hearwarming and we can all agree that clean + healthy = good. The real problems are with implementation.
"We need clean, supple, healthy means of support..." etc...
Who could disagree with that? But some people propose banning cars as solution or fluoridating our water supply to address these issues. Bruce's Manifesto doesn't have anything useful to say regarding these or any other issue.
I suppose this sounds like a bitter rant, but I find most SF material presents politics as a field with correct answers that satisfy everyone. In reality there are no right answers for the difficult problems and the only anwsers that exist will leave some section of the population unsatisfied (ex. fluoridation, or even abortion).
As a member of secret society slashdotoi, I believe memory is.. uh... I forget.. but information wants to be free too. I think this crypto stuff is gonna change the world. Oh wait, e-commerce? Yeah, that sucks, they didn't do it righti. I'm a member of a secret elite community that knows everything, didn'tcha now? Of course not, you don't know everything! blah blah blah, I'll just throw i,e, and X at the end of some words... boy I'm cool... hey look, my server got slashdotted. Dooooh...
-- That was humor, but you already knew that 'cuz you're a member of the slashdoti right?
Intelligentsia...
I don't really consider computer hackers as the intelligentsia, and I don't know that many would. That is not to say that a fair number would be out of place among them, but lumping the whole group together like that can only get you in trouble. (This hobbit guy, say)
Remembering that software developers really are overglorified engineers (unpopular opinion around here, no doubt), we must notice that the definition of intelligentsia actually makes reference to its members being well educated. A provost at some university is without doubt a member of the intelligentsia, while the people who authored say, ICQ, are not. Again, they may be very intelligent people or they may not. I really don't know. However, a member of the intellectual elite would generally not spend their free time writing software. They would spend every last minute of it learning newer things.
Programming is a new thing. It's fairly handy to learn. Looking at it as anything more than a tool though, is IMNSHO foolish.
As I find myself too short of time to write a long diatribe on this, I'll finish by mentioning that Voltaire was probably the greatest (known) mind of the millennium, and that I doubt you could find a better example than he of the intelligentsia, please put the name forward.
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If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
Now Society has about 400 years of data in it, and if we patch the goddamn thing again, we'll have to start over. We can't patch sex.c with the system up...
What, then, is the Slashdot community?
It's a handful of funny trolls and a handful of informative coders, sitting atop a vast shitheap of yammering idiots.
Are the various forums and communities that exist all over the Internet totally devoid of intelligentsia?
Well . . . yes. They are. I spent some time subscribed to the Thomas Pynchon listserv this Fall. What a waste of bandwidth. And the net goes downhill from there, the only exceptions being Suck and McSweeney's. Feed has its moments too, I guess. But none of those is a "community" in any sense at all. Hey, wait, there's Neal Stephenson, too; IMHO he's ahead even of the Sucksters in the "internet intellectual" game. He's a thoughtful, intelligent person who groks the damn subject well enough to illuminate it. Jon Katz is endlessly amusing and I think he's a perfect fit for Slashdot, but he's not thoughtful, he's not intelligent, and he sure as hell doesn't grok anything, least of all technology.
I was under the impression that before this 'new economy' came a whole new brand of intelligentsia - the self-teaching, self-enhancing swag of techno-brutes that have been lifting themselves out of the muck of obscurity with the tools of the Internet and creating whole new social spheres, which subsequently resulted in entirely different modes of online economy.
They teach themselves Perl and enhance their t-shirt collections. This has nothing to do with an "intelligentsia". I'm hoping that you're using "economy" in some figurative sense, 'cause if you're not, you've missed the point more thoroughly than I care to contemplate. It's really not about making a quick buck at all. Crack dealers do that. BFD. If you're coming from a hard-core libertarian perspective, that would explain a lot: That viewpoint is fundamentally hostile to intellectualism, and answers all questions with the word "money". Hey, it's a free country, YMMV, it takes all kinds, etc. No problem. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just a very profoundly different thing.
am I missing something here or is Bruce waxing poetic and I'm just being too literal?
Yer waxin' a bit poetic there yourself, my friend
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
RE: Most nations and peoples in the world were far worse at the 20th century's end than at the beginning.
Care to give some specific examples on this?
Also, as for "the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer", I'd like to see some examples of that as well. I suspect what you really mean is the rich got richer to a greater extent than the poor did, which I believe has happened in some cases, at least here in North America. However, the poor are not worse off. A person here (Canada) can go on social assistance (or whatever they call it these days so as not to hurt the feelings of the recipients) forever and have a higher standard of living than a wealthy person 100 years ago (warm, clean accomodations, refrigerated fresh food, cable TV, free medical care, etc etc). Worst case they have to go out and panhandle a few hours a month to make ends meet.
If you can point to a case of a group being worse off, check the political climate in the time and place it happened and it might give you a hint as to why they're worse off.
You know (for example), it seems some people would rather go without running water if it means that their neighbour who invented economical running water will be running his into a gold-plated tub.
If you have an open mind and would care to read about the actual progress we have made in the last 100 years (as opposed to popular opinion and what you read in the newspapers), try picking up The Ultimate Resource 2 by Julian Simon. It won't change your mind, but it does make you feel a lot better about the future of our world.
What, then, is the Slashdot community? Are the various forums and communities that exist all over the Internet totally devoid of intelligentsia?
My definition of an intelligentsia is a small group of intellectuals committed to the free exchange of ideas and an active engagement in politics and social issues.
I think the Slashdot community is neither small enough nor, on average, intelligent enough to qualify as an intelligentsia. If you browse with your threshold at 3 or 4, Slashdot only approaches the quality of a middlebrow professional magazine like Salon or Newsweek.
Furthermore, there seems to be an aversion to open, friendly political debate in the Slashdot community. As in many other online forums, there's a strong right-wing libertarian faction that all-too-often shouts down all other views [0]. More importantly, there's a widespread hackish idea that politics is cheap talk, and that a person's opinions are worth no more than the code (s)he writes--a fact that prominent programmers in the community often use to dismiss political debate or criticism ("Shut up and show me the code.").
There may very well be an intelligentsia on the Internet. But I think that the subscribers of nettime-list or its cousins come much closer than Slashdot.
I'm sure I'll get thoroughly flamed for writing this. That's okay; my karma's high enough to take a few hits.
~k.lee
[0] If you're a libertarian, then please pause a moment before you flame me. I'm not saying that all libertarians are narrow-minded and rude; of course that's not true. I am saying that the fervor of some fundamentalist libertarians online often has a negative impact on the free exchange of political ideas, and that the large proportion of right-wing libertarians online makes pro-libertarian flame-fests a frequent occurrence.
(remove nospam for email)
. . this new Belle Epoque, this delightful era .
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. . Technology can no longer bind us in a vast tonnage of iron, barbed wire and brick. .
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. . and the Internet has made a new intelligentsia possible. .
. . the human race will begin to obtain what it really wants. .
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and last but not least...we have yet another y2kism:
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.
It reads like a Captan Kirk log on crack!
Now bruce, you know everyone loves ya, and it's with that shining love that I point out that you've gotten a little to excited about a new millenium. Time and tehnology move forward, and we are too.
Let's not reformat now. We've come to far.
_________________________
My understanding of the intellegensia(sp) is that they are usually people associated with philosophy and humanist persuits. This usually included philosophers and painters and some of the less scientific realms of social science like maybe sociology or history/historic preservation.
Perhaps the biggest person in the American and modern time was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was able to gain a great deal of knowledge and practal experience which eventually lead him to create some very great ideas which were important for ideas sake. Much as Voltaire was able to use the power of satire and political analysis to look at how people were actually interrelating to each other and to their leaders.
Perhaps Machivelli would rank up there due to his illustration on how power could be maintained and kept in the hands of one man with cunning skill. Add to the same category Doystoyevsky(sp) who gave us the idea of the Grand inquisitor and George Orwell whol both influenced the concept of the way we create power structures. These three similar and intersecting philosophies are at the height of what could be called power/control concepts of populations and government. It basically says that if the poeple are not willing or if they do not matter that perhaps you can rule them.
What differentiates this from Franklin and Jefferson is that Franklin and Jefferson were people that wanted to think of people as equals and to be interacted with as such. Thsi also creates possibility that eventually the government will eventually be abolished or reformed when the people need something different.
So what we have in the present (and what will still plague people in the future is the need to balance these forces) is more of the same dramas that these first minds came up with. The next leap will come when we have something that could ammount to an organized form of democracy (or close to anarchy)( where people create webs of experts or systems or even layers of expertice. Such a system could be had through better computers and hish speed internet connections with ease.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Let's _embrace_ fads and disposable technology. Yeah, that's a real great use of our Earth's precious resources. If there is one thing that will be America's downfall, it is the ugly and rampant consumerism that has gripped us in the past few years. Yes, we have money to burn, but we should not burn it on palm pilots and mp3 players. The manifesto implies that these "gizmos" will be short-lived and numerous. In other words, they are worthless junk. There are so many things that money can buy that are _real_ and _valuable_. Sure, buy art. Art is good. But don't buy a palm V because your palm iii (which replaced the palm pro) is now "passe" (avec accent ague). We have to move _away_ from gizmoism (ism!), not towards it.
Bruce Sterling is an imaginative and competent wordsmith. He has to be, because otherwise it would be more obvious that this piece of nonsense is just that -- nonsense. It's very nice-sounding nonsense, very quotable nonsense, very trendy (by design!) nonsense. But he still is missing the point of where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.
Here is where he goes off-track:
The problem with this is twofold:
This notion that we need to abandon philosophy and ideology in favor of "pragmatic" or "engineering" solutions -- well, let me phrase it this way. "Because many of our troubles this century have been due to poor philosophy, let us give up on trying to have better philosophy." Forget worrying about what is right and wrong, let's all amuse ourselves with gizmos!
Instead, this is precisely the moment when we ought to be analyzing what was right and what was wrong with the "-isms" of the 20th century. As G. K. Chesterton put it nearer the beginning of the century:
The second faulty assumption here is that we are "fully competant." Clearly, we are not, nor are we likely to be so anytime in the forseeable future. Take global climate -- it's pretty clear at this point that (a) we have the power to muck it up pretty badly, to our own pain and sorrow, and (b) we don't understand completely how it works. Most ecological issues exhibit this same dynamic -- we have the power to destroy, but not the knowledge to understand, and certainly not the wisdom and will to forbear from destroying. When American agriculture produces more bushels of soil erosion than bushels of crops, can it be any more obvious that we are incompetant?
The Amish, in many ways, exemplify Sterling's "clean, supple, healthy means of support for a crowded world." And yet, they achieve this by adhering to a strict ideology, subordinating technological innovation to their chosen vision of a way of life. Meanwhile, all the hip post-modernists, "free" from "-isms", seem caught on the iron treadmill of "rigid, monolithic, poisonous and non-sustainable" techno-determinism proceeding "with that Stalinesque seriousness that demands the brutal sacrifice of millions."
There's more wrong -- for example,
might be true in the Bay Area, but will no doubt come as a great surprise to the people of Kosovo, Iraq, and East Timor. But hey, they're not so "wired," so why worry about them?Ah, well. I would hope that the foolishness of advocating the "demystification" of Gizmos, while at the same time placing our hope of earthly deliverance in them, would be obvious, even through the clever wording ...