The computer revolution is running out of steam

An interview with Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling talks about the next big thing, cultural differences between the US and Europe, Wired and the Californian ideology as well as the business of selling the future.

Bruce, you are known for having coined the term cyberpunk together with William Gibson. How did you get together and when did this literary movement actually start?

Bruce Sterling: I have published a couple of novels before the term cyberpunk was even mentioned. When I was 27, I've been hanging out with William Gibson, Lewis Shiner, Rudi Rucker, and John Shirley. We did not really meet that often, but we were on the Internet and discussed many things via email. We were all very interested in word processing at that time, in its literary potential and its theoretical meaning. And we found out pretty soon, that the computer does have a very profound effect on writing. All that went into "The Difference Engine", that I have co-written with Gibson in 1990. It took us 3 years, actually. When we started, we thought that by using the word processor it would take us simply half the time as usually, but it turned out that we needed the double amount of time.

Did the term cyberpunk help you building a reputation as a science fiction writer?

Bruce Sterling: Cyberpunk was a label for us, it brought us some attention at the time we wrote our manifesto "Mirrorshades" in 1986. And this was just the time when we needed this attention for writing our new way of science fiction. Now such a label sticks with you, and you sometimes feel like it keeps you from getting your real work done. But I am still fairly pleased with the certain amount of propaganda that we got from it in the early days. Today I am writing the 1998 version of cyberpunk, although I consider myself actually more as a middle aged professian.

Your last novel, Holy Fire, is dealing with questions like ubiquitous surveillance, the coming dictatorship of database companies, the crisis of human identity, etc. Is the critical factor getting more important for your writing? And why is the story taking place in Europe?

Bruce Sterling: Well, I try not to be parochial. But of course I want to show the Americans, that the rest of the world exists and that it will not go away. I think that Europe is particularly interesting, at least since 1989. There's been so much going on in the last decade, so many revolutions, civil wars, dictators being shot on Christmas Day, people storming embassies, and so on. And I've been watching all that with interest. It's been really unbelievable. There were the most important political events, there is a big freak and art scene. There is really something going on.

That's why I have chosen Europe as a setting for some of my science fiction. And this was all the more challenging to me, because the Americans have a very fixed notion of Europe. They see it as a pure museum's economy, when they visit the Rhine castles and Neuschwanstein. But behind that facade there is extremely weird stuff going on. In eastern Europe, for example, you can see the 1920s still alive. It's like in a textbook for cultural studies, and such a mixing of postmodern enterprises and modern culture is hard to find anywhere else in the world.

You particularly write about the health insurance business, and a lot of what you mention seems to be pretty close to reality, if you consider all the threats to people's privacy that comes with the connection of databases over the Internet. Is science fiction becoming science fact?

Bruce Sterling: The reality is not exactly like that. If I could really predict what is going to happen, I wouldn't be a science fiction writer. I would be a wizard, some kind of super-natural power. And I would probably be burned at the stake. I mean, if you would have a writer that publishes a book in 1972 saying that in 1990 there would be all this talk about this thing called the Internet. And there would be all these guys with these things called modems. And by the way, there is no more communism in Russia, and Germany would have reunited. You just would have to get to find this guy and kill him. That is simply too much.

I mean, of course there is a point in all the talk about medical records. But take all these guys that are in the privacy business - I sometimes wonder, if they are living in a dreamworld. It's ones and zeros, they can't protect it. What if they just turned it inside out? What if all medical records were published on purpose? What kind of society would you have? Well, you would have a society with brutal competition for medical services, you would have a world in which people are living 120 years, but have to be really popped up. It would be a medical gerontocratic meritocracy. The more obsessed you are with your health, the more will we reward you with services. If you don't take care of yourself properly, we just shovel you off into a ghetto, and that's your problem.

So isn't there a lot of reality in this vision?

Bruce Sterling: That's true, unless we don't actually know what people's health services are. If poor people in the US really understood how much better medical services rich people get in this country, it would be like a proletarian revolution. People would start to recognize: "Hey, you're stealing ten or twelve years of our life span!" And this is going to intensify. In a way, you know, medical privacy defends the class interests of the rich in the US. And to show these contradictions is what I consider part of my work. As far as I know of this things, I try to turn the assumptions upside down and make a plausible, alternative notion out of it. That's something where I am good at and it's a lot of fun to do. And so I just keep on doing it until I die.

Let's stay in the US for a moment. What about California - is it really that important for the development of the Web? And is there something like a Californian ideology that pops out of every issue of Wired magazine?

Bruce Sterling: I think, all this talk about Wired and the Californian ideology that Richard Barbrook brought up is really peculiar, because I know Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe pretty well. They are actually that European as Americans usually never get. I mean, they lived the whole 1980s in Amsterdam - they are like Dutch immigrants. I met them before they started Wired, and they came to me saying something like: "Oh, you're a cyberpunk science fiction writer. We're gonna start a non fictional magazine and we want you to do some writing for us." "So what, some stories?" "No, no, we want you to be a reporter." I said O.K. - and was looking at them at the same time like at a real pair of hippies. I asked them, what they've been doing over there. "You know, we've been living above a hash bar in Amsterdam for about ten years, until it started to get bad." And I thought, "wait a minute, this really is a weird couple," and that they could probably do some damage if someone would give them some million dollars.

So, it really is a weird thing. I mean, most of those libertarian aspects of Wired that Barbrook finds most objectionable don't sound very Californian to me, they sound a lot more Dutch. Therefore it should have been called the Dutch ideology because it is all about Mediamatic, the Dutch Electronics Art Festival, or the Dutch squatter movement. These guys all look like as if they would go out on the street in the next second and beat up some cops. I mean, Dutch anarchic people are very tricky dogs. And I see that this is very much a countercultural like thing.

I think, Barbrook got carried away from the economic aspects and did not realize where it all came from. It's kind of a British thing: Everybody, who is making tons of money has to be brain dead. But in an American context that does not really come across. In US popculture circles it is very easy to become incredibly wealthy by accident. It's just like you're not allowed to refuse the money, and there is no easy way around it. And nobody starts accusing you that you are selling out the working class. I think, there is definitely an ideology there. But it's a kind of multivalent ideology. There is that Dutch thing that Louis is into, and there is this truly crispy emergency-out-of-control-ethos that Kevin Kelly is into. And Kelly actually is a far deeper thinker than anyone else at Wired. This is a guy who is the closest thing the US has to a genuine no-kidding visionary. He is really out there. He is probably wrong about a lot of stuff, but he is bringing up aspects of reality that nobody else touches. He is, you know, a genuine down-and-dirty-Californian guru.

How does this mix of Dutch anarchy and Silicon Valley out-of-control mania connect to the Global Business Network, in which Kelly and many other Wired writers are members? You are a member of this group of digerati as well, aren't you?

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, I am a big time GBN guy. It's an ad-hocracy, really. I mean, there is not really a name for what it is. It's like a masonic group. It is a lot like the masons, but free masons. There are about 300 to 400 people in it, the "GBN remarkable persons". A lot of the Wired brain trust writers are in the GBN. But it is not, that they require you to do anything in particular. They don't have any real political ideology. Basically, they are a corporate futurist's and freelancer's union, you could say. What they generally do, in order to earn their money and to set up a sort of revenue stream for the GBN, is building scenarios. They create corporate scenarios, like Royal/Dutch Shell used to do. They were - inspired by the futuristic thinking of Alvin Toffler or Napier Collins - a kind of the big pioneers for futuristic scenario-building back in the 70s. We get people together, and they are studying a particular problem and try to imagine how it might play out given a certain set of variables. What you want to really do, is to put a kind of narrative story in the people's heads, that will allow them to get a grip of what is going on.

Isn't there a manipulative side effect in this scenario building? Isn't it taking people away from reality? Just take this recent Wired story about the long, worldwide boom

Bruce Sterling: To me, it's all like the Wall Street monitors that visualize the stream of money. That is very much what it is like. What they are saying is: "Imagine, if this were so. What would be the consequences and what kind of decisions would you make along the line?" So yes, it is manipulative in the sense like telling somebody a story about the future is manipulative. Like when I would write a science fiction novel and declare that men now would have run out of steam, and women from now on will have all the creative power.

The Long Boom is a story. It is a scenario and it claims to be a scenario. It's not like Das Kapital which says what history is like, and this will happen, and that will happen, and then the dictatorship of the proletarians will appear, and the state will wither away. It's just giving people a way to think about the consequences of the problems they have today. You know, these guys do it as an enterprise, so they want to make money. They go to a group of business men and say: "Look, you're stuck in the market of general dynamic corporations here. We will bring Brian Eno, and he will help you think about it. We guarantee you, there will show up a cool dressed guy, and he will tell you how to run your business. You will hear a lot of things, you've never heard before, not even close." They are just selling Brian Eno. And he will go and do it because he might even learn something interesting.

The reason you do things in GBN is that you're going to learn something about some trends. As a science fiction writer this is very professional and useful for me. They are often coming up with things that I have never seen before. They are mentioning some kind of trend the general public is not aware of, and they distribute a lot of thoughts about it. A lot of other things don't really come out later. But if you're going to try to start thinking seriously about the future, you really have to do it professionally and get the best information you can from the widest number of sources you can find.

You are writing a lot for Wired magazine. Do you feel comfortable with this role?

Bruce Sterling: It's a pretty common thing in our business to be a popular science writer as well as a novelist. Nonfiction writing is kind of a side product of my work and research. It actually leverages my research. And I do travel a lot and so why shouldn't I write about these experiences? I am learning a lot by traveling, and right now I am into art criticism pretty much. Spending a lot of time with the art culture scene in Saint Petersburg for example was a good cultural lesson. We walked around the museums and they explained me the neo-academic art work. They also showed me how they use computers in their work and how the computer keeps changing their work. Maybe you can compare it to what the invention of the camera meant for painting. And I think there is a wonderful art scene in Europe, not just in Saint Petersburg, but also in Linz at the Ars Electronica or in Amsterdam.

You don't see nothing comparable in the United States?

Bruce Sterling: Oh, in the U.S. it is all so wrapped up in Hollywood. Anybody who shows any kind of inclination to art work is immediately sucked into the Hollywood scene. They are just spending 200 million dollars to rebuilt the Titanic literally rivet by rivet, and that's kind of interesting, but to me that's not art, that's the culture industry. This is like an army, marching under orders. It's good for selling T-shirts, stickers and CDs, but not to find out what something really means. And if I write a novel, I fortunately don't need a 250 million god-damn dollars! And I don't want something behind me like 5 writers and an editorial board, and I don't want to go to a Venture Capitalist to get my own art work done. All I need is a pencil. So I have a kindlier feeling about the individual vision in the digital milieu.

Do you see a shift of the cyberspace movement from the US to Europe, at least in the art scene?

Bruce Sterling: Well, I am really surprised how international these guys are. It's a funny thing, it's like answering the question I get asked very often: "You're Texan, right? What is so Texan about your Science Fiction?" The answer is: not pretty much. On the other side I can't help - or I don't mind - that I am quite proud of my regional authenticity.

So take these Saint Petersburg people. If you ask them, what they are doing, they say: "I've been reading Deleuze and Guattari and I've been thinking a lot about their capitalistic theory. I am really into this." "So is this where you get your inspiration from, late 1970s Paris?" "No, I get my inspiration when I make my way down these dark stairs and see all this trash in the courtyard. Or when I see Yeltsin on TV selling out the country." And because they are net-savvy and net-aware, they are not generously regional artists. They are more like regional artists in a global community of people who are dressed in black, wearing designer glasses, and have slightly modish hair cuts. They are a lot more like as for example Arthur Kroker, the English speaking guy from Quebec. They are like a kind of gallerists or museum's curators in their own home town. And I actually find that quite attractive. I think, it's a good cultural advantage at this point of time. I think that these people have proudly something to offer us and our society. They have a good chance of coming up with something that will really mean something to people and define our zeitgeist in some way.

We're heading towards a global society?

Bruce Sterling: I mean, you can say that. People do say it. But I don't think, it's true to say that everybody is on the Internet on an equal level, because the Internet is very, very prejudiced towards anglophile people. There really isn't something like a Korean Internet for example. And if you had one, you would not be able to leverage the incredible amount of knowledge already present in the rest of the Internet, because English is the language of science, the language of technology, and the accepted language of mediation. English is what Koreans use to speak to Vietnamese.

Take my latest Internet project which started in Brazil just a couple of months ago. We started a mailinglist which is a little bit like nettime. A kind of a virtual meeting of our contemporary power-literaria, an attempt to get science fiction writers from non-English speaking countries to communicate to one another over the Internet. We want to make something like a lateral move and connect the Koreans with the Mexicans and the Czech with the Algerians, all the people that just ignore the anglophile market entirely. It seems to me that there is a small chance that this could work out. It's definitely worth the effort, because every time I go and talk to these people they have the same complaint, that goes like this: "Well, we really enjoy science fiction, especially yours." - they are always polite - "The problem is, we're trying to write it, too. We want to write some Finnish science fiction and it has to be authentic. Science fiction with authentic national Finnish content, you know." And the other guys says: "I wanna read some good science fiction, but it has to be Mexican. It has to be set in a Mexican city, otherwise it's no good."

So, I started thinking something like: "If you say the same thing about Finland, but are not willing to make any efforts to help the Mexicans, how the hell are you expecting to be getting anywhere. Of course the Americans, and the English, and the Australians gonna crush you under their feet because they don't give a shit. They're not gonna say: 'We wanna write some science fiction, but is has to be American.' They just gonna do that as a matter of fact. They have no choice." So I keep telling them, "if you are going to make an effort and are willing to establish something like a barter system, something like: 'we will endure some of your Mexican science fiction, if you're gonna pay us something for our Finnish,' you might come out with some sort of international kind of writing." As a means of literature they have a lot to offer people, especially people whose cultures are undergoing really rapid technical transitions. I think, it can give people really a sense of coherence and means by which to think. But if you're just get on importing a lot of American science fiction, it really is cultural imperialism. So the question is, do you do nothing in sort of continuing to lobby your culture minister to give you two minutes out of every hour on your own god damn network broadcasting unit. Or do you just try to step right inside the whole problem and try to contact the people who share your difficulties - and see if something is going to work out across the board.

How should this exchange of content be working? With English still as the lingua franca?

Bruce Sterling: Well, of course English must be the common language for all of the writers. Let's say, you write something in Finnish, someone translates it into English and someone else from English into Spanish, and so you can publish a Finnish story in Spanish without ever publishing it in English. You're not going to find many people who, let's say, speak Finnish and Chinese. But it is not very difficult to push it through that language barrier. And the cost of transmission has collapsed. It used to be pretty hard to put the thing in a nice brown bundle and get it through the customs from Finland to Mexico. Now you can do it maybe in 45 minutes or so. That should be exploited in my opinion. But of course it's another question, if it will work out.

What do you think about European science fiction. What about Stanislaw Lem, for example?

Bruce Sterling: I happen to be quite a Lem fan. He is a harassable character. I never met him, but I read a lot of his manifestos and talked to a lot of people who know him to get an idea about him. He seems to be a difficult man to get along with, he is a very fright-right writer. I went to the Polish national science fiction convention once and shouted something out there like: "Well this is the country of Stanislaw Lem. You guys must be mighty proud of him!" They immediately began to poison my mind about all this tale bearing when it gets to Lem, that he has messed the country, had a yellow Mercedes, and that he is just too rich and too famous. A lot of that was just small minded. I didn't hear a single kind word about him.

So you think that he is an influential writer?

Bruce Sterling: Actually, I wrote a Lem parody once, "Our Neural Chernobyl." And it's written in a kind of a fake book review like Lem wrote a number of these as fake introductions to an imaginary books. It's very Lem organized. Well, yes, he is writing pretty good literature. This guy has really covered hell a lot of ground. He has written about everything. Giant super-computers, microbiology, telepathic things, about how to set up and assemble robots, about weird aliens, totalitarian socialistic heredity, he is like a map for everybody who is into science fiction.

What does fascinate you about technology? And what role does technology take in your work?

Bruce Sterling: I am still pretty much interested in technology, but today more in an intimate way. I know now what Web technology means, and I think the time is over in which I got fascinated by gadgets just for their own sake, just because they were new. Now I try to ask myself, what does this technology mean? Well, I definitely have to know what a technology does and how it feels, since I am a science reporter and a popular writer as well as a novelist.

What do you think about biotechnology. Is it going to be the next big thing?

Bruce Sterling: It's getting pretty clear to me that the computer revolution and the cyberspace thing are visibly running out of steam. I mean, Apple is finished, the catch up game between the PC and the Macintosh is over. And a lot of this glory notions of electronic commerce will never come to path. Is has nothing to do with anything real. There will never be 500 channels on cable TV or set-top boxes. I mean, the computer revolution is going to change people's lives a lot, but the changes are being socially matched in a very rapid way. People are getting used to it, grandmothers are on the Internet - it's becoming part of our everyday life like clocks, radios, laptops. This is a natural course of development in a post-industrialized society. It's not surprising to me at all.

And now everybody is going into biotechnology. This sheep, the clone, Richard Seed, the human genome project - it smells a lot like Silicon Valley did. But it's definitely a profoundly more dangerous technology than laptops. If you have a system crash here, no big deal. But if you hardwire some teens with the genome of corn or something like that, you can have a biotechnological catastrophe that could last as long as the eye can see! Well, plutonium is pretty bad, but at least it does not replicate by itself. It's gonna be stormy weather for the next thirty years. And at the far end of it, I think there's gonna be a cognitive revolution. People are going to combine the computation thing and the genetic biological thing and are going to start actually tinkering with people's thought processes in an industrial fashion. And if you thought LSD was a lot of fun, wait until this really works. "Take this pill and you'll see god! Or buy this one for three dollars and learn Japanese in a week." And people will be buying these things like today ecstasy in a night club. "Give me the love drug," you know!

Bruce Sterling's homepage with some of his texts.