From: Michael M. Butler (butler@comp-lib.org)
Date: Sat Sep 22 2001 - 10:54:50 MDT
I think this deserves reposting in its entirety on this list.
Apologies for the waste of bandwidth for those of you who've
already got it.
MMB
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Viridian Note 00272: Au Revoir, Belle Epoque
Date: 22 Sep 2001 07:51:20 -0000
From: Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>
To: butler@comp-lib.org
Key concepts; Belle Epoque, warfare, Viridian tactics
Attention Conservation Notice: A lot of grim historical
analysis and no cool toys.
Links:
War and Rumors of War. For heaven's sake, don't cut and
paste me anything until you look at this first. One of
the uses of adversity is that it separates sensible people
from saps. People who send me lame urban legends are
saps.
http://www.snopes2.com/index.html
Our home page for all you newbies.
http://www.viridiandesign.org
*********************************************************
The sudden outbreak of unconventional warfare
has not escaped Viridian attention. In this Note,
I would like to make it clear how the Pope-Emperor
plans to adapt the Viridian Movement to our altered
social circumstances.
You have likely already seen a lot of earnest
commentary consigning the period 1989-2001 to history.
We are suddenly in a turbulent and violent time, and in a
burst of harsh martial virtue, our immediate past is being
written off as squalid, and overindulged, and pampered,
and fatally innocent, and possibly somewhat effeminate.
This is exactly what happened the last time a Belle Epoque
collapsed.
The death of the last Belle Epoque -- through terrorism
in glamorous Serbia, unfortunately -- was followed by the
gruesome mobilizations of August 1914, the War to End War.
There's still terrorism in the Balkans nowadays, one might
note. The War to End Terrorism at least has a different
slogan, though.
This event might be a passing nasty shock, like Aum
Shinri Kyo or Jonestown. More severely, it might rival or
surpass the Gulf War of 1991. The last such war was also a
very sweaty-palmed event, but it was followed by a
considerable boom. Wars do end, and if this one ends
quickly and well, we might well find ourselves with a New
World Order that's more than just talk, and a Long Boom
with some serious muscle behind it.
Or, it may be that Viridian Green, founded in 1998, is
past its sell-by date. We may be well on our way to that
much-forecasted next stage, Khaki Green, where pop culture
and commercialism lose all their charms and the heavy
lifting gets done by those long-time Viridian idols, cops
and the military.
Let me speak up now in firm defense of that Belle
Epoque. That ten-year-period was truly grand. We were
historically lucky to live through it. It began
beautifully and it perished, if anything, through too much
hope. It was not naive and foolishly innocent, it was
splendid, vital and profoundly creative. Those were the
best years of the 20th century, when at least some of its
beleagured inhabitants finally found a proper way to live,
a decent way that offered many great virtues.
Nutty bubble economies run by cheery visionaries are
much better for us than crass economies run by stolid
monopolist bores. Near-total employment is far better
than severe unemployment. R&D from peace dividends is
better than a pinched war economy. Booming tourism from
happy foreigners is better than empty hotels and airports.
Politicians bedevilled with colorful sex scandals are
better than fierce and resolute war leaders. And shucking
and jiving our way out of an ecological crisis by making
green design trendy was a much better method of
controlling CO2 emissions than empty skies, market panics,
and military hairshirts.
That was not a dumb, innocent epoch. *This* is a
dour and bitter epoch. We Viridians may have to wear some
hairshirt, we may not be given any choice there, but
ladies and gentlemen, we Viridians don't *do* hairshirt.
We're not going to pretend that hairshirt is better.
Belle Epoque is vastly better. This is worse.
We Viridian want more Belle Epoque. We will scheme
tirelessly to get it back, revive it, or fetch another
one. We do hope to live long enough to see one. If we
can't be its promoters, then we'll be its monks: we will
protect its relics and its memory, we will copy it, we
will distribute it, we will keep its lamps burning.
Still, the cultural circumstances are rapidly and
visibly changing, and our favorite tactics will clearly
be less effective for a while, not that they ever worked
all that well. They were not, in fact, the most effective
tactics possible. Making things cool, making ideas
trendy, were simply the tactics that we Viridians happened
to be particularly good at. They were things we enjoyed
doing. They were an efficient use of our limited talents
and resources. They were the sorts of things that a few
hundred people can do on the Internet without having to
incorporate or buy uniforms.
The most effective tactics for forcing huge numbers of
people to undergo sudden and radical social change are
done with bayonets. They're evil tactics, and
regrettable, and morally repulsive, but just look at what
has happened in two weeks.
You may notice that although coverage of the
Greenhouse Effect has vanished during the crisis, utterly
involuntary yet very powerful anti-Greenhouse measures
have taken place, to an extent previously unimaginable.
The sky was empty of aircraft == those great guzzlers of
fossil fuel. Americans, incredibly, are taking trains. No
one is buying big cars. Even the ads so loathed by
ADBUSTERS were busted off of the television.
In short order, the USA is very likely to have both
Arctic drilling *and* stiff conservation measures,
renewables *and* maybe even nuclear, along with the kind
of across the board belt-tightening that Greens never
succeed in promulgating == measures that only rage and
terror make worthwhile.
Furthermore, when the Kyoto carousel rolls around
again, the USA will not be balking on the sidelines, the
planet's lone prima donna, pretending that free enterprise
is more important than global security. Then there's that
nuclear nonproliferation treaty that the US Senate didn't
care about; that biological warfare thing that was too
complex and invasive to enforce; those numerous human
rights accords, dozens, that the USA considered too
restrictive and obnoxious; those UN dues the USA
deliberately refused to pay; the endless fight-picking
with Iran, Cuba and China; well, you can name your own.
Unfortunately, we Viridians are not the people to
take any kind of effective lead here. We are design
advocates, we're not spies, diplomats, cops or firemen,
and we are certainly not going to be so fatuous as to
become armchair soldiers.
We're a dot.org, not a dot.mil. Furthermore, we
Viridians are not even patriotic. Our core concern has
nothing to do with nationalities; it's by its very nature
global. A hard Greenhouse rain falls on the stockbroker
and the mujihadeen alike. We Viridians are one of those
slithering, highly dispersed, mobile, multinational,
network entities you've been hearing about. Our natural
environment, the place for which we were created, is the
Internet.
We Viridians can't and don't exist without the
network, but now, we should expect the Net to change. It
does that, you know: from military labs, to big science,
academia, the dotcom period, it's very ductile. I have
never seen such an outburst of black propaganda and psyops
on the Net as I have seen in these two weeks. It is a
kulturkampf battleground. I expect some Cold War-style
heavy manners in a realm that is this troubled with
imaginary Qaeda email, huge Microsoft worms, brand-new
ECHELON-style terrie-trackers from brand-new agencies,
self-appointed hacker vigilantes, and whole swarms of
nutcase script-kids. Any serious new hacker-crackdown
will pick up those little malefactors by the basketfull.
The Net looks bad. The status quo ante is not going
to cut it. Unless I miss my guess, the Net will be moving
away from the flaky amateurism and sordid tragedy-of-the-
commons that was its pride and joy, right past that
totally imaginary commercial nirvana, and straight into a
paramilitarized, ARPANET-friendly, Nervous System of the
Coalition phase. We Viridians may be rather squeezed for
room and oxygen in there. We may find ourselves asking
for your help, in backups, archiving, distribution, web
service and so forth. Feel free to volunteer. People of
good will need to be uniting to move this medium into a
disciplined, serious role as the backbone of a troubled
global civil society. If that effort fails, the Net is
going to go the way of CB radio. Or worse.
We Viridians may have a harder time of it. Money,
toys, and time may get tighter. We Viridians will no
longer look much like What Happens Next (because we're
not), and our abiding interests are likely to look a bit
flaky and antiquarian for a while, like some guy leafing
through Beardsley's YELLOW BOOK as the zeppelins hum
above the searchlights.
However: our core issue, the Greenhouse Effect, is
not going to forsake us. On the contrary: the USA is
about to undergo a military-entertainment dust-up with one
of the poorest and most stricken countries on Earth, a
place of incessant gunfire, poxed with landmines, that
hasn't had a decent rain in 3 solid years. People who can
live on naan bread and goat cheese are starving there from
bad weather. Is it an accident that a place like that
hides people of the Al Qaeda ilk? They're the New World
Disorder, and they've learned how to ship.
Look at the economic impact from the sudden loss of
two skyscrapers in New York City. It's colossal. That's
straight from the file we Viridians like to label "world
becoming uninsurable."
Now try to imagine New York hit by a Category 5
hurricane. Imagine the payout crisis around, say, 2050,
with all the coral dead and the seas rising along entire
continental coastlines. There are serious people in the
re-insurance industry who claim that weather damage in the
2050s will outmatch the planet's entire GNP. Smashing
skyscrapers with aircraft full of blazing fossil fuel --
that is by no means a Greenhouse disaster, it's just a
war crime. But that event is of the scope and scale of
the disasters that society is courting.
The only event that can match NYC 9.11 for sudden
loss of American civilian life is the Great Galveston
Hurricane of 1900. That's an event from which Galveston,
once the rival of New Orleans and the richest port in
Texas, never recovered. Now we have a modern model for a
major-league Greenhouse unnatural calamity. We now know
what that does to people, to their morale and confidence,
to the tenor of their society. We must not go there out of
bland incredulity and some dismissive notion that things
like that can never happen. And if we do go for there, for
some godforsaken reason, we need coherent plans to claw
our way back out.
However: we Viridians are not going to be doing that
clawing. That is frankly beyond our capacity. That is
the realm of Khaki Green, the realm of hardhats tearing
through rubble heaps 24/7, and if the Pope-Emperor gets
into that line of work, he is not going to be doing a lot
of whimsical email.
We Viridians are going to continue to promote cool
green gizmos == although we no longer expect to sell quite
as many. And we will watch weird weather. We may very
well change our list mechanics, those stars, the chevrons
and so forth; we may be moving into new alliances and new
areas of the Web.
Furthermore. Instead of being the cheering groupies
and advocates of our dear friends the designers, we are,
if necessary, going to *commiserate* with designers, we
are going to offer *solidarity* and *unfeigned moral
support* to designers, and to their critics, and their
teachers, and their stricken magazines and their stricken
retailers; we Viridians don't care if you noble souls are
at the top of Fortune's Wheel or suddenly considered the
excrescences of a decadent consumer society, we get it
about that business-cycle crap and we love you anyway, and
we Viridians are *with you people to our final Internet
packet.* What we can do for you, we're gonna. Don't be a
stranger.
In conclusion, I'm going to be travelling a lot.
Because the planes are empty and people are asking. I'm
accepting invitations from all over the place. I'm gonna
be laying on hands. There's not a lot of money around on
the circuit this quarter, but there is a hell of a lot to
talk about, and friends are rarely happier to see one
another than they are under these trying circumstances.
My next gig is the Renewable Energy Roundup in
Fredericksburg Texas, September 28-30. A very worthy
affair.
Link:
http://www.renewableenergyroundup.com
We will be running a display table, exhorting unto the
masses and selling magazines and T-shirts. By all means
come see us. It is next weekend. Be there or be square.
O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O
SO MUCH FOR THAT "END OF HISTORY" PITCH
O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O
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