Published January 7th, 2010 by Future Atlas
Bruce Sterling’s State of the World
Author Bruce Sterling offered his “State of the World 2010” on The Well this week. A few excerpts follow.
As a result of “an emergent, market-driven global financial system that was all about a faith-based market fundamentalism,” he says,
we’ve ended up with our current “It’s a Wonderful Life” Pottersville, where Rupert Murdoch plays our Mr Potter. …. Societies that are top-heavy in this way are just not gonna have major prosperity. Too much of the civil population has been fenced off from the trough. The wealth-generating capacity of the society has been short-circuited. There’s zero political will to socialize the entire planet and re-channel its currency flows, so that’s not gonna happen. Basically, the political class is waiting for the civil population to come back to the church of the free market and get over the fact that its cardinals walk in public with no clothes on.
So you’re just not gonna see a lively, vibrant scene in Pottersville. You can have a Japanese Pottersville, where everybody’s getting older and they’re building huge concrete bridges to nowhere. Or a Managed Democracy Putin-Pottersville, where everybody agrees not to say anything much about the many Potemkin aspects. You could even get some Rio de Janeiro Pottersville full of armed, dropout-ethnic shantytowns where everybody’s high on medical marijuana. But not prosperity.
He notes that the pessimistic mood that a lot of Americans are in is not universal. India, Brazil, and China are clearly doing better than in the past. Especially China: “The Chinese world is better. China’s like flying-car and personal-robot better, compared to China in 1969.”
On the direction of the United States,
As for America somehow becoming like Sweden, that’s about as likely as Mexico becoming like Sweden. We might conceivably become rather more like New England and less like the Confederacy. We’re a whole lot like the Confederacy now, and it hasn’t been good for us.
Sterling has doubts about geoengineering in the face of climate change: “On the subject of geo-engineering, I think it’s a crock. We’ll never get there. They’re all techie fantasies, far-out sci-fi notions, Star Wars physics-style.”
He suggests that there are simpler methods: “The cheapest and most effective method of geo-engineering is to cut the world’s population in half.”
You don’t have to put on a fascist armband and start ranting for the public’s blood; an effort like that could be quite subtle and covert, the very opposite of showboat geo-engineering. …. Nobody’s gonna sit around watching Copenhagen delegates debating giant phony orbital solar mirrors if the windmills in Copenhagen harbor are blowing over. When and if it becomes obvious that we truly need massive, ultra-costly geo-engineering interventions, that we have no other choice, then somebody — likely some traumatized veterans of weather havoc who are full of Al Qaeda self-righteousness — they’re gonna cut emissions in half by cutting people in half. Mankind wouldn’t lack for means, motive, opportunity and eager volunteers.
Sterling sees structural vulnerabilities in our evolving information system as well:
I see no reason why a weird system of small-pieces-loosely-joined couldn’t drift into fungal lunacy just like the financial system did. Maybe harder, faster, and less retrievably. They’re children of the same era. They’re built with the same logic. … After all — who’s minding the store there? To what end? It’s all about whatever seemed to work — moguls, monopolies, offshoring… Works great technically (sometimes), might create utter social mayhem (somebody else’s problem)
(Image courtesy John LeGear, Flickr)