Interview with Bruce Sterling

kpost writes "Reason magazine has an interview with Bruce Sterling." Fairly lengthy and entertaining interview for you bookworms out there. Covers a lot of different subjects.

Comments

I love this guy

[Tirel]

I particularly liked this Q&A:

reason: We're still seeing technological progress, at least in terms of tools. Some of us have DVD burners in our laptops, when not too long ago we couldn't imagine burning CDs. Content providers are freaking out about this because people are able to make their own product, or duplicate other people's product.

Sterling: I'm not really all that interested in what Hollywood does with its stuff. I mean, they're only the size of the porn industry. I think the real revolution is in industrial production. It's about manipulating factory processes, it's about mass customization, it's about a revolution in industry that gets the toxins out of the air and is more efficient by, say, a factor of four than what we had. When that happens we'll have a genuinely new world. Playing movies off handhelds, that's not really that big of a deal.

He is right to the point, it doesn't really matter what the RIAA, MPAA and their cronies do, they surely can't stop us, it might have worked in the past, but now we control the information paths and they can't do anything except scare those who haven't got access to the sources of information that we do.

I wish more people like him were in politics, that way maybe we'd be better off.

He's also one hell of a writer.

I know it's so terribly un/. of me, but

[argStyopa]

I keep reading Sterling hoping to see what all the rest of you are apparently seeing, but all I get it someone deeply, deeply in love with hearing his own clever ideas, usually couched in some nebulously sardonic comment that makes it oh-so-hip.

Some random snippets...
"Socially, policy makers have made a series of choices very similar to what preceded the collapse into World War I."
Huh? Like?

"we've really turned our backs on a world that could have been pleasant, delight-ful, peaceful, and technocratic. Now we face a world that is religious, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, and violent."
This is precisely the sort of vapid utopianism that begs so many questions it's meaningless. Really? How did "we" turn our backs on it Bruce?

"Sure, we hate Exxon because they're huge and they're everywhere." Personally, it seems a little L.Ron Hubbard-y to contrive a eco-social movement with designated hate subjects, if not downright Nineteenth Century. Wouldn't it be more intrinsically interesting to try to understand the reflexive envy in a society that's not all that zero-sum anymore? Doesn't Bruce feel some irony in poking at Ellison's "proper" enemies, when his own cachet cows look as stereotypically sacred as anyone elses?

I dunno. He's just got this 'end of history' thing cooking, looking for the McGuffin in a story that's just a stream-of-consciousness monologue. He keeps trying to refer to "the real story" or the very-much-italicized "truth", but I don't see how he manages it with a straight face. Maybe he's laughing all the way to the bank. I still cannot find the kernel of tangibility he seems to keep flourishing.

It's probably just me.

Re:I know it's so terribly un/. of me, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Sterling is a bit of an over the top hypester. He's typical of a lot of the Austin techno-hippy crowd, Jon Lebkowsky, Chip Rosenthal, David Nunez, that fucked up hippie artist Santos, that guy who makes metal g-strings, etc. I hope I'm pissing anyone off by lumping them all together.

However, there is a kernel of true insight that you seem to be missing in Sterling. There is something more to him than the 99 percent of SF which is pure pulp crap.

My advice is to just read his novels and short stories. His magazine articles and interviews are less compelling and contain more "oh shit I'm so happy to be a nerd in the 21st century" type stuff. I would recommend "Distraction" if you are only going to read one.

What is different about Sterling from other SF writers is that he is a real futurist, or at least doing a better job trying than anyone else. He is really trying to describe what the world will really be like in our lifetime. At his very best, you should feel like you are reading a cross between Wired Magazine and News of the Weird, but from 2050. The point being that Wired Magazine and News of the Weird are non-fiction, even it is an odd perspective. Immagine that those to publications were your only news from today's world, and that you were trying to puzzle out what was really happening from them; that is the limited portal to the future that I think Sterling provides. There are no real plot or characters in any of his work, so don't look for literary statisfaction. (With the possible exception of his character Leggy Starlitz.)

Re:I know it's so terribly un/. of me, but

[doom]

I keep reading Sterling hoping to see what all the rest of you are apparently seeing, but all I get it someone deeply, deeply in love with hearing his own clever ideas, usually couched in some nebulously sardonic comment that makes it oh-so-hip.

Look, the thing you need to get here is it is not particularly Sterling's job to get everything right, because the people who *are* in positions like that get frozen by the need to be responsible. When Sterling is at his best, what you get is a pyrotechnic spew of ideas and insights some of which you might not have heard before, and some of which you might even find useful.

Sterling is really good at this kind of thing, compared to much of the other people out there, e.g. Howard Reingold who appears to be making a living with a throwaway idea from Sterling's novel "Distraction".

I'm a big fan of the novel "Holy Fire", myself, which just might have something important to say about human identity and the best achieveable human society, though I would predict that you won't like it for cultural reasons. To enjoy this book you need to feel that there's something significant about young hipster artists spazzing around trying to get a grip on life, and you appear to be coming from what you might call a more culturally conservative position.

Anyway, things that are good about Sterling: he ranges pretty widely in what he pays attention to in technical and social trends, and unlike many an American thinks about things that go on outside the US. Things that are maybe not so good: part of his self-image is that he's good at cultural manipulation, e.g. he was the man who managed to put "cyberpunk" over. Note that he often uses huckster/diplomat figures as main characters in his novels.

My impression is that he's turned his sights on using these skills for a more Important Purpose of late: getting the word out on Global Warming, which he's attempting to do with his Viridian Design Movement. On the plus side, it really probably would not be such a bad idea to ease off on the carbon-emissions, irrespective of you're opinion about anthropogenic global warming... but in a way I've always found the Viridian movement to be a bit disappointingly conventional for someone like Sterling to get involved with. All of a sudden, he's being Responsible.

Mass customization

[wytcld]

... it's about mass customization ...

Work up this morning from a dream in which I was framing a /. submission on the question of why car manufacturers aren't aren't offering fully modularlized vehicles - sort of like you start with a front end option, add a drive-train option, add a rear option (so you get a lot of Ranchero-like hybrids). The best profits are in the vehicles people see more utility in (like pickup trucks) - this way you see more utility for you.

Maybe the carmakers are afraid that such modular creations wouldn't have as much brand identity, that the brand would effectively be more the individual customer than the manufacturer. But why should that matter if it sells? And think about the downstream revenue - get in a fender-bender, just replace that module - less work for repair shops, more orders to the factory.