The WELL: inkwell.vue.204: The 2004 Bruce Sterling State of the World Address

#131: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 16 Jan 04 20:10

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 20:10:00 PST

This has been a great little jam session; today's the day we end the conversation. Thanks to Bruce for exploding our heads for a couple of weeks and for doing this every year, like clockwork.

Onward! [Read entire topic]

#130: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 16 Jan 04 16:10

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 16:10:00 PST

Yannis Stefanopoulos from off-Well:

Bruce, do you believe that industrial design will continue to be a viable occupation into the middle-and-late-century

*The occupation may not call itself "industrial design," but yes.

or will some kind of electronically-mediated 'democratization'

*No way

/'mass-customization'

*Yes way

of the design & production process (as explored in the Tomorrow Now's "The Lover" chapter and certain of your Metropolis contributions) negate, somewhat, the traditional role of the professional designer?

*That "tradition" only dates back to the 1930s. And during that time, people calling themselves "designers" have been working themselves into most every possible nook and cranny in the industrial process. They've never yet managed to take over the whole shebang, because if they did, they wouldn't be called "designers," they'd be called things like "moguls," "eccentric millionaires," Steve Jobs or Richard Branson, maybe.

*There's already plenty of "electronic mediation." That might as well just be named the "Web Designer's Full Employment Act." It doesn't democratize the situation so that I the customer become the designer. It just means that I need some mediators for my mediators' mediators.

*Let me demonstrate this for you. For somebody who's not a graphic designer, I know a lot about graphic design. I know enough to go address the national meeting of AIGA. And I know so much about webloggers that I've had webloggers infesting my bathroom.

*Now go check out MY OWN weblog. It's full of little mass-customization buttons I can push to do stuff like stick insufferable cute icons onto my blog. The graphic design on this sucker are AWFUL. I know they are. I could probably fix them, even. Sort of. But I ain't gonna. Cause I don't wanna. I have no graphic design talent. I don't want to pretend I have talent. Anyone who expects my blog to manifest graphic design talent is living in a dreamworld.

*Do drop on by. Don't be a stranger!

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/ [Read entire topic]

#129: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 16 Jan 04 15:58

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 15:58:00 PST

Well, we're not on Mars or the Moon yet, but the swift obliteration of the NASA installed base has already begun.

Tough break about the Hubble. That thing was actually useful.

Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 13:18:05 -0800 (PST) From: Alex Filippenko <...@astron.berkeley.edu> To: Subject: horrible news: Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 4 and future cancelled.

Subject: SM4 Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2004 12:56:34 -0500 From: Steven Beckwith <...@stsci.edu> Reply-To: Steven Beckwith <...@stsci.edu> To:

Colleagues,

A few minutes ago, we concluded a meeting at which Sean O'Keefe, the NASA Administrator, announced his decision to cancel SM4, the next servicing mission to Hubble. It was his decision alone, and I will discuss the details with your personally. I will be holding a town-hall meeting in the auditorium at 3:00 pm today for everyone who is interested to answer your questions about the decision and talk about the future.

Steve

Just coincidentally, this arrived just moments before the Hubble message:

Mars Mission a Trojan Horse?

By Suneel Ratan Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61937,00.html

02:00 AM Jan. 16, 2004 PT

President Bush's plan to go to the moon and to Mars without much additional funding will force NASA and Congress to make hard choices -- particularly regarding the space shuttle and the hugely expensive International Space Station, observers said.

The Bush plan increases NASA's budget by just $1 billion over the next five years. That means the space agency has to figure out how to carry out the mission -- first a return to the moon and later a trip to Mars -- without a lot of additional money in its budget.

The first places to look for resources are the station and shuttle, which consume about a third of NASA's $15 billion budget. One question that's sure to arise -- assuming Bush's vision for the moon and Mars sticks -- is whether to kill the station and shuttle now, instead of in six to 12 years as the plan currently envisions, said Howard McCurdy, a space historian at American University in Washington. That would free up at least $25 billion over the next five years to go to the moon and Mars. [Read entire topic]

#128: Yannis Stefanopoulos writes to ask (bumbaugh) Fri 16 Jan 04 11:37

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 11:37:00 PST

Yannis Stefanopoulos from off-Well:

Bruce, do you believe that industrial design will continue to be a viable occupation into the middle-and-late-century, or will some kind of electronically-mediated 'democratization'/'mass-customization' of the design & production process (as explored in the Tomorrow Now's "The Lover" chapter and certain of your Metropolis contributions) negate, somewhat, the traditional role of the professional designer? [Read entire topic]

#127: turing testy (cascio) Fri 16 Jan 04 08:28

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 08:28:00 PST

Jon, Alex & I are happy that you're part of our team, too!

(Other active WorldChanging contributors are Dawn Danby in Toronto, Zaid Hassan in London, and Alan AtKisson in Stockholm.)

Thanks for your support of our work, Bruce. You've long been a real inspiration for me and for Alex.

About science fiction: SF books set in the 2060s are rare these days. How difficult has it been for you to write something set in the "readers may actually live to see this" future, given the pace of political/technological/social/weirdness churn at present? [Read entire topic]

#126: Coleman K. Ridge (ckridge) Fri 16 Jan 04 08:09

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 08:09:00 PST

It is hard to play the futurist game about AIDS in Africa. Africa does not effect the rest of the world as much as it is affected by it.

Will the AIDS epidemic in Africa have any long-term effects, taking the misery and death it causes to be short-term effects?

I can suggest one possibility. The huge number of AIDS orphans could give rise to a new kind of society in Africa, in which few people know how to be parents, because few have had one. [Read entire topic]

#125: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 16 Jan 04 07:42

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 07:42:00 PST

I wish I could have edited Whole Earth as a regular gig. But my opportunity costs were too high. I've never seen a magazine, even plump, glossy, commercial ones, where the staff and editors weren't busier than a family with newborn twins. I just don't have it in me to focus that hard. I would have to settle down on one enterprise and shoot off my thundering herd of hobbyhorses, and, well, I don't have the heart.

The "single biggest influence in my life and thought" has always been science fiction. I veer away from it sometimes, because I like to dabble and I don't much care to concentrate, but that was my formative milieu. It's a nice, loose, scatterbrained one. It really suits my proclivities.

The last three books I've written were an experimental fantasy novel, a nonfiction futurist book and a technothriller. Now, though, I'm at work on an SF book set in the 2060s. And man, that's like a holy cause. It's really got me gritting my teeth and hyperventilating. It's quite a taxing effort, but, well, it's what I'm best at. "The ever-popular tortured artist effect" -- it's kinda tedious, but, y'know, one takes pride in it.

This Mars cartoon is top o' the blog charts today. Man that guy is funny.

http://www.mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war30.html [Read entire topic]

#124: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 15 Jan 04 21:06

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 21:06:00 PST

I was happy as a clam to join the Worldchanging team - it's the closest thing we have to CoEvolution Quarterly aka Whole Earth Review, now more or less defunct (with the last issue, edited by Worldchanging's Alex Steffen, sadly unpublished).

I think CQ/WER (actually called Whole Earth Magazine in its final incarnation) was the single biggest influence on my life and thought. Bruce, you edited an issue and I know you read it for a while, did it get under your skin, too?

(Note to all: we end this tomorrow, so post 'em if you've got 'em.) [Read entire topic]

#123: an impressive spasm of competence (tinymonster) Thu 15 Jan 04 09:57

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 09:57:00 PST

^-- Hmm... I just may keep this one. Thanks, Bruce! [Read entire topic]

#122: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 15 Jan 04 08:48

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 08:48:00 PST

On the subject of Viridian Movement, I have to plug "Worldchanging."

http://www.worldchanging.com

Email, which was the substrate of Viridian List, is almost broken now by the deadly combination of spammers and Microsoft. Given that I have a daily weblog and a monthly magazine column, I don't have enough hours in the day to agitate as much as I would like. I'm not going to abandon the list, though. I derived a personal education in design from running that thing. Nowadays I do quite a lot of design writing. Running the list keeps me up to speed on the issues.

These Worldchanging guys, however, have much more of a "movement" thing going on. They are a genuine cadre. They met through Viridian List, they whipped this weblog together in an impressive spasm of competence, and they are just blogging that thing till the world looks level. I am really pleased with that website. Most everything they talk about or link to is of direct relevance to my interests, and it has just the cultural sensibility that I want to see widely promulgated.

I don't contribute much to "Worldchanging" myself, but I feel a real sense of accomplishment at becoming an eminence grise there, somewhere in the link-list. One throws one's bread on the waters and lo it returns ten-fold. [Read entire topic]