Bruce Sterling

The Manifesto of January 3, 2000

The rapidly approaching millennium offers a unique cultural opportunity. After

many years of cut-and-paste, appropriation, detournement and neo-retro

ahistoricality, postmodernity is about to end. Immediately after the end of the

fin de siecle, there will be a sudden and intense demand for genuine novelty.

Any new year offers a chance for sweeping resolutions and brave efforts at self-

reform. But the end of a millennium offers a rare and vital opportunity to bury

all that is dead within us and issue proclamations of particular scope and

ambition.

I suspect that a group that can offer a coherent, thoughtful and novel cultural

manifesto on the target date of January 3, 2000 has a profound opportunity to

affect the zeitgeist. (On January 1, everyone will be too hung over to read

manifestos; on January 2, nobody's computers will work. So naturally the target

date must be January 3.) In this preliminary document, I would like to offer a

few thoughts on the possible contents of such a manifesto.

The central issue as the new millennium dawns is technocultural. There are of

course other, more traditional, better-developed issues for humankind. Cranky

fundamentalism festers here and there; the left is out of ideas while the right

is delusional; income disparities have become absurdly huge; these things are

obvious to all. However, the human race has repeatedly proven that we can

prosper cheerfully with ludicrous, corrupt and demeaning forms of religion,

politics and commerce. By stark contrast, no civilization can survive the

physical destruction of its resource base. It is very clear that the material

infrastructure of the twentieth century is not sustainable. This is the issue

at hand.

We have a worldwide environmental problem. This is a truism. But the

unprecedentedly severe and peculiar weather of the late 1990s makes it clear

that this problem is growing acute. Global warming has been a lively part of

scientific discussion since at least the 1960s, but global warming is a

quotidian reality now. Climate change is shrouding the globe in clouds of

burning rain forest and knocking points off the GNP of China. Everyone can

offer a weird weather anecdote now; for instance, I spent a week this summer

watching the sky turn gray with fumes from the blazing forests of Chiapas. The

situation has been visibly worsening, and will get worse yet, possibly very

much worse.

Society has simply been unable to summon the political or economic will to deal

successfully with this problem by using 20th century methods. That is because

CO2 emission is not centrally a political or economic problem. It is a design

and engineering problem. It is a cultural problem and a problem of artistic

sensibility.

New and radical approaches are in order. These approaches should be originated,

gathered, martialled into an across-the board cultural program, and publicly

declared -- on January 3rd.

Global warming is a profound opportunity for the 21st century culture industry.

National governments lack the power and the will to impose dirigiste solutions

to the emission of carbon dioxide. Dirigiste solutions would probably not work

anyway. It is unlikely that many of us could tolerate living in a carbon-

dioxide Ration State. It would mean that almost every conceivable human

activity would have to be licensed by energy commissars.

Industry will not reform its energy base. On the contrary, when it comes to CO2

legislation, industry will form pressure groups and throw as much sand as

possible into the fragile political wheels. Industry will use obscurantist

tactics that will mimic those of American right-wing anti-evolution forces --

we will be told that Global Warming is merely a "theory," even when our homes

are on fire. Industry is too stupid to see planetary survival as a profit

opportunity. But industry is more than clever enough to sabotage government

regulation, especially when globalized industry can play one government off

against the next.

The stark fact that our atmosphere is visibly declining is of no apparent

economic interest except to insurance firms, who will simply make up their lack

by gouging ratepayers and exporting externalized costs onto the general

population.

With business hopeless and government stymied, we are basically left with

cultural activism. The tools at hand are art, design, engineering, and basic

science: human artifice, cultural and technical innovation. Granted, these may

not seem particularly likely sources of a serious and successful effort to save

the world. This is largely because, during the twentieth century, government

and industry swelled to such tremendous high-modernist proportions that these

other enterprises exist mostly in shrunken subcultural niches.

However, this doesn't have to be the case. With government crippled and

industry brain-dead to any conceivable moral appeal, the future of decentered,

autonomous cultural networks looks very bright. There has never been an

opportunity to spread new ideas and new techniques with the alacrity that they

can spread now. Human energy must turn in some direction. People will run from

frustration and toward any apparent source of daylight. As the planet's levees

continue to break, people will run much faster and with considerably more

conviction.

Our cultural substance-abuse problem with CO2 may have very severe consequences

to human happiness, but the immediate physical problem is rather well

understood. Clever people, united and motivated, should be able to deal with

this. Carbon dioxide is not a time-honored philosophical dilemma or some

irreducible flaw in the human condition. Serious fossil-fuel consumption, as a

practice on the grand scale, is only about 200 years old. The most severe rise

in carbon emission occurred during the past fifty years. We're painfully

dependent on this practice, but it's not as if we've married it.

It's a question of tactics. Civil society does not respond at all well to

moralistic scolding. There are small minority groups here and there who are

perfectly aware that it is immoral to harm the lives of coming generations by

massive consumption now: deep Greens, Amish, people practicing voluntary

simplicity, Gandhian ashrams and so forth. These public-spirited voluntarists

are not the problem. But they're not the solution either, because most human

beings won't volunteer to live like they do. Nor can people be forced to live

that way through legal prescription, because those in command of society's

energy resources will immediately game and neutralize any system of legal

regulation.

However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks attractive,

glamorous and seductive.

The task at hand is therefore basically an act of social engineering. Society

must become Green, and it must be a variety of Green that society will eagerly

consume. What is required is not a natural Green, or a spiritual Green, or a

primitivist Green, or a blood-and-soil romantic Green.

These flavors of Green have been tried, and have proven to have insufficient

appeal. We can regret this failure if we like. If the semi-forgotten Energy

Crisis of the 1970s had provoked a wiser and more energetic response, we would

not now be facing a weather crisis. But the past's well-meaning attempts were

insufficient, and are now part of the legacy of a dying century.

The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. A

Viridian Green, if you will.

The best chance for progress is to convince the twenty-first century that the

twentieth century's industrial base was crass, gauche, and filthy. This

approach will work because it is based in the truth. The twentieth century

lived in filth. It was much like the eighteenth century before the advent of

germ theory, stricken by septic cankers whose origins were shrouded in

superstition and miasma. The truth about our physical existence must be shown

to people. It must be demonstrated repeatedly and everywhere.

People with networks, websites and sophisticated sensors should not find this

task very difficult.

The current industrial base is outmoded, crass and nasty, but this is not yet

entirely obvious. Scolding it and brandishing the stick is just part of the

approach. Proving it requires the construction of an alternative twenty-first

century industrial base which seems elegant, beautiful and refined. This effort

should not be portrayed as appropriate, frugal, and sensible, even if it is. It

must be perceived as glamorous and visionary. It will be very good if this new

industrial base actually functions, but it will work best if it is

spectacularly novel and beautiful. If it is accepted, it can be made to work;

if it is not accepted, it will never have a chance to work.

The central target for this social engineering effort must be the people who

are responsible for emitting the most CO2. The people we must strive to affect

are the ultrarich. The rentiers, the virtual class, the captains of industry;

and, to a lesser extent, the dwindling middle classes. The poor will continue

to suffer. There is clearly no pressing reason for most human beings to live as

badly and as squalidly as they do. But the poor do not emit much carbon

dioxide, so our efforts on their behalf can only be tangential.

Unlike the modernist art movements of the twentieth century, a Viridian culture-

industry movement cannot be concerned with challenging people's aesthetic

preconceptions. We do not have the 19th-century luxury of shocking the

bourgeoisie. That activity, enjoyable and time-honored though it is, will not

get that poison out of our air. We are attempting to survive by causing the

wealthy and the bourgeoisie to willingly live in a new way.

We cannot make them do it, but if we focussed our efforts, we would have every

prospect of luring them into it.

What is culturally required at the dawn of the new millennium is a genuine

avant-garde, in the sense of a cultural elite with an advanced sensibility not

yet shared by most people, who are creating a new awareness requiring a new

mode of life. The task of this avant-garde is to design a stable and

sustainable physical economy in which the wealthy and powerful will prefer to

live. Mao suits for the masses are not on the Viridian agenda. Couture is on

the agenda. We need a form of Green high fashion so appallingly seductive and

glamorous that it can literally save people's lives. We have to gratify

people's desires much better than the current system does. We have to reveal to

people the many desires they have that the current system is not fulfilling.

Rather than marshalling themselves for inhuman effort and grim sacrifice,

people have to sink into our twenty-first century with a sigh of profound

relief.

Allow me to speak hypothetically now, as if this avant-garde actually existed,

although, as we all know, it cannot possibly come into being until January 3,

2000. Let's discuss our tactics. I have a few cogent suggestions to offer.

We can increase our chances of success by rapidly developing and expanding the

postmodern culture industry. Genuine "Culture" has "art" and "thought," while

the Culture Industry merely peddles images and information.

I know this. I am fully aware of the many troubling drawbacks of this

situation, but on mature consideration, I think that the Culture Industry has

many profound advantages over the twentieth century's physically poisonous

smokestack industries. Also, as digital technologists, thinkers, writers,

designers, cultural critics, und so weiter, we Viridians suspect that the rise

of the Culture Industry is bound to increase our own immediate power and

influence vis-a-vis, say, coal mining executives. This may not be an entirely

good thing. However, we believe we will do the world less immediate damage than

they are doing.

We therefore loudly demand that the Culture Industry be favored as a suitably

twenty-first century industrial enterprise. Luckily the trend is already very

much with us here, but we must go further; we believe in Fordism in the Culture

Industry. This means, by necessity, leisure. Large amounts of leisure are

required to appreciate and consume cultural-industrial products such as movies,

software, semi-functional streaming media and so on. Time spent at more

traditional forms of work unfairly lures away the consumers of the Culture

Industry, and therefore poses a menace to our postindustrial economic

underpinnings.

"Work" requires that people's attention to be devoted to other, older, less

attractive industries. "Leisure" means they are paying attention and money to

us.

We therefore demand much more leisure for everyone. Leisure for the unemployed,

while copious, is not the kind of "leisure" that increases our profits. We

specifically demand intensive leisure for well-educated, well-heeled people.

These are the people who are best able to appreciate and consume truly capital-

intensive cultural products.

We Viridians suspect that it would require very little effort to make people

work much less. Entirely too much effort is being spent working. We very much

doubt that there is anything being done in metal-bending industry today that

can justify wrecking the atmosphere. We need to burn the planetary candle at

one end only (and, in daylight, not at all).

As much time as possible should be spent consuming immaterial products. A

global population where the vast majority spend their time sitting still and

staring into screens is a splendid society for our purposes. Their screens

should be beautifully designed and their surroundings energy-efficient. The

planet will benefit for everyone who clicks a mouse instead of shovelling coal

or taking an axe and a plow to a rain forest.

The tourist industry is now the number one industry on the planet. Tourists

consume large amounts of pre-packaged culture. We believe tourism to be a

profoundly healthy development. We feel we must strongly resist the retrograde

and unprofitable urge to make migrants and migration illegal.

Given the unstable condition of the environment, this practice may soon become

tantamount to genocide. It is also palpably absurd to live in a society where

capital can move faster and more easily than human beings. Capital exists for

the sake and convenience of human beings.

We believe that the movement of human beings across national boundaries and

under the aegis of foreign governments is basically a design problem. If guest

workers, refugees, pleasure travellers and so forth were all electronically

tracked via satellite or cell repeaters, the artificial division between jet

setters and refugees would soon cease to exist. Foreigners are feared not

merely because they are foreign, but because they are unknown, unidentified,

and apparently out of local social control.

In the next century, foreigners need be none of these things. Along with their

ubiquitous credit cards and passports, they could carry their entire personal

histories. They could carry devices establishing proof of their personal bona

fides that would be immediately obvious to anyone in any language. A better

designed society would accommodate this kind of human solidarity, rather than

pandering to the imagined security needs of land-based national regimes.

We believe that it should be a general new design principle to add information

to a problem, as opposed to countering it with physical resources (in the case

of migrants, steel bars and barbed wire). Electronic tracking seems a promising

example. While the threat to privacy and anonymity from electronic parole is

obviously severe, there is nothing quite so dreadful and threatening as a

septic refugee camp. We consider this a matter of some urgency. We believe it

to be very likely that massive evacuations will occur in the next few decades

as a matter of course, not merely in the disadvantaged Third World, but

possibly in areas such as a new American Dust Bowl. Wise investments in

electronic tourist management would be well repaid in stitching the fraying

fabric of a weather-disrupted civilization.

For instance, we would expect to see one of the first acts of 21st century

disaster management to be sowing an area with air-dropped and satellite-tracked

cellphones. We believe that such a tracking and display system could be

designed so that it would not be perceived as a threat, but rather as a jet-

setter's prestige item, something like a portable personal webpage. We believe

such devices should be designed first for the rich. The poor need them worse,

but if these devices were developed and given to the poor by socialist fiat,

this would be (probably correctly) suspected as being the first step toward

police roundup and a death camp.

Replacing natural resources with information is a natural area for twenty-first

century design, because it is an arena for human ingenuity that was technically

closed to all previous centuries. We see considerable promise in this approach.

It can be both cheap and glamorous.

Energy meters, for instance, should be ubiquitous. They should be present, not

in an obscure box outside the home, but enshrined within it. This is not a

frugal, money-saving effort. It should be presented as a luxury. It should be a

mark of class distinction. It should be considered a mark of stellar ignorance

to be unaware of the source of one's electric power. Solar and wind power

should be sold as premiums available to particularly affluent and savvy

consumers. It should be considered the stigma of the crass proletarian to foul

the air every time one turns on a light switch.

Environmental awareness is currently an annoying burden to the consumer, who

must spend his and her time gazing at plastic recycling labels, washing the

garbage and so on. Better information environments can make the invisible

visible, however, and this can lead to a swift re-evaluation of previously

invisible public ills.

If one had, for instance, a pair of computerized designer sunglasses that

revealed the unspeakable swirl of airborne combustion products over the typical

autobahn, it would be immediately obvious that clean air is a luxury.

Infrasound, ultrasound and sound pollution monitors would make silence a

luxury. Monitor taps with intelligent water analysis in real-time would make

pure water a luxury. Lack of mutagens in one's home would become a luxury.

Freedom from interruption and time to think is a luxury; personal attention is

luxury; genuine neighborhood security is also very much to be valued. Social

attitudes can and should be changed by the addition of cogent information to

situations where invisible costs have long been silently exported into the

environment. Make the invisible visible. Don't sell warnings. Sell awareness.

The fact that we are living in an unprecedently old society, a society top-

heavy with the aged, offers great opportunity. Long-term thinking is a useful

and worthwhile effort well suited to the proclivities of old people.

Clearly if our efforts do not work for old people (a large and growing fraction

of the G-7 populace) then they will not work at all. Old people tend to be

generous, they sometimes have time on their hands. Electronically connected,

garrulous oldsters might have a great deal to offer in the way of managing the

copious unpaid scutwork of electronic civil society. We like the idea of being

a radical art movement that specializes in recruiting the old.

Ignoring long-term consequences is something we all tend to do; but

promulgating dangerous falsehoods for short-term economic gain is exceedingly

wicked and stupid. If environmental catastrophe strikes because of CO2

emissions, then organizations like the anti-Green Global Climate Coalition will

be guilty of negligent genocide. Nobody has ever been guilty of this novel

crime before, but if it happens, it will certainly be a crime of very great

magnitude. At this moment, the GCC and their political and economic allies are,

at best, engaged in a risky gamble with the lives of billions. If the climate

spins out of control, the 21st century may become a very evil place indeed.

The consequences should be faced directly. If several million people starve to

death because, for instance, repeated El Nino events have disrupted major

global harvests for years on end, then there will be a catastrophe. There will

be enormous political and military pressures for justice and an accounting.

We surmise that the best solution in this scenario would be something like the

Czech lustration and the South African truth commissions. The groundwork for

this process should begin now. The alternatives are not promising: a Beirut

scenario of endless ulcerous and semi-contained social breakdown; a Yugoslav

scenario of climate-based ethnic cleansing and lebensraum; a Red Terror where

violent panic-stricken masses seek bloody vengeance against industrialism. Most

likely of all is a White Terror, where angry chaos in the climatically

disrupted Third World is ruthlessly put down by remote control by the G7's

cybernetic military. It is very likely under this last scenario that the West's

gluttonous consumption habits will be studiously overlooked, and the blame laid

entirely on the Third World's exploding populations. (The weather's savage

vagaries will presumably be blamed on some handy Lysenkoist scapegoat such as

Jews or unnatural homosexual activities.)

With the Czech lustration and the South African truth commissions, the late

20th century has given us a mechanism by which societies that have drifted into

dysfunctional madness can be put right. We expect no less for future

malefactors whose sly defense of an indefensible status quo may lead to the

deaths of millions of people, who derived little benefit from their actions and

were never given any voice in their decisions. We recommend that dossiers be

compiled now, for the sake of future international courts of justice. We think

this work should be done quite openly, in a spirit of civic duty. Those who are

risking the lives of others should be made aware that this is one particular

risk that will be focussed specifically and personally on them.

While it is politically helpful to have a polarized and personalized enemy

class, there is nothing particularly new about this political tactic.

Revanchist sentiment is all very well, but survival will require a much larger

vision. This must become the work of many people in many fields of labor,

ignoring traditional boundaries of discipline and ideology to unite in a single

practical goal: climate.

A brief sketch may help establish some parameters.

Here I conclude with a set of general cultural changes that a Viridian movement

would likely promulgate in specific sectors of society. For the sake of

brevity, these suggestions come in three parts. (Today) is the situation as it

exists now. (What We Want) is the situation as we would like to see it. (The

Trend) the way the situation will probably develop if it follows contemporary

trends without any intelligent intervention.

The Media

Today. Publishing and broadcasting cartels surrounded by a haze of poorly

financed subcultural microchannels.

What We Want. More bandwidth for civil society, multicultural variety, and

better-designed systems of popular many-to-many communication, in multiple

languages through multiple channels.

The Trend. A spy-heavy, commercial Internet. A Yankee entertainment complex

that entirely obliterates many non-Anglophone cultures.

The Military

Today. G-7 Hegemony backed by the American military.

What We Want. A wider and deeper majority hegemony with a military that can

deter adventurism, but specializes in meeting the immediate crises through

civil engineering, public health and disaster relief.

The Trend. Nuclear and biological proliferation among minor powers.

Business

Today. Currency traders rule banking system by fiat; extreme instability in

markets; capital flight but no labor mobility; unsustainable energy base

What We Want: Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure; vastly

increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and resources

The Trend: commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism, criminalized banking

systems, sweatshops

Industrial Design

Today: very rapid model obsolescence, intense effort in packaging; CAD/CAM

What We Want: intensely glamourous environmentally sound products; entirely new

objects of entirely new materials; replacing material substance with

information; a new relationship between the cybernetic and the material

The Trend: two design worlds for rich and poor comsumers; a varnish on

barbarism

Gender Issues

Today: more commercial work required of women; social problems exported into

family life as invisible costs

What We Want: declining birth rates, declining birth defects, less work for

anyone, lavish support for anyone willing to drop out of industry and consume

less

The Trend: more women in prison; fundamentalist and ethnic-separatist

ideologies that target women specifically

Entertainment

Today: large-scale American special-effects spectacle supported by huge casts

and multi-million-dollar tie-in enterprises

What We Want: glamour and drama; avant-garde adventurism; a borderless culture

industry bent on Green social engineering

The Trend: annihilation of serious culture except in a few non-Anglophone

societies

International Justice

Today: dysfunctional but gamely persistent War Crimes tribunals

What We Want: Environmental Crime tribunals

The Trend: justice for sale; intensified drug war

Employment

Today: MacJobs, burn-out track, massive structural unemployment in Europe

What We Want: Less work with no stigma; radically expanded leisure; compulsory

leisure for workaholics; guaranteed support for people consuming less

resources; new forms of survival entirely outside the conventional economy

The Trend: increased class division; massive income disparity; surplus flesh

and virtual class

Education

Today: failing public-supported schools

What We Want: intellectual freedom, instant cheap access to information, better

taste, a more advanced aesthetic, autonomous research collectives, lifelong

education, and dignity and pleasure for the very large segment of the human

population who are and will forever be basically illiterate and innumerate

The trend: children are raw blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery;

universities exist to supply middle-management

Public Health

Today: general success; worrying chronic trends in AIDS, tuberculosis,

antibiotic resistance; massive mortality in nonindustrial world

What We Want: unprecedently healthy old people; plagues exterminated worldwide;

sophisticated treatment of microbes; artificial food

The Trend: Massive dieback in Third World, septic poor quarantined from nervous

rich in G-7 countries, return of 19th century sepsis, world's fattest and most

substance-dependent populations

Science

Today: basic science sacrificed for immediate commercial gain; malaise in

academe; bureaucratic overhead in government support

What We Want: procedural rigor, intellectual honesty, reproducible results;

peer review, block grants, massively increased research funding, massively

reduced procedural overhead; genius grants; single-author papers; abandonment

of passive construction and the third person plural; "Science" reformed so as

to lose its Platonic and crypto-Christian elements as the "pure" pursuit of

disembodied male minds; armistice in Science wars

The Trend: "Big Science" dwindles into short-term industrial research or

military applications; "scientists" as a class forced to share imperilled,

marginal condition of English professors and French deconstructionists.

I would like to conclude by suggesting some specific areas for immediate

artistic work. I see these as crying public needs that should be met by bravura

displays of raw ingenuity.

But there isn't time for that. Not just yet.