<nettime> The Manifesto of January 3, 2000

[Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>]

Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.com
http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades/

IDEOLOGICAL FREEWARE: DISTRIBUTE AT WILL

The Manifesto of January 3, 2000

    In 1914, the lamps went out all over Europe.  
Life  during the rest of the twentieth century was
like crouching under a rock.  

      But human life is not required to be like the 
twentieth century.   That wasn't fate, it was merely
a historical  circumstance.   In this new Belle Epoque, 
this delightful era, we are experiencing a prolonged break
in the last century's even tenor of mayhem.  The time has
come to step out of those shadows into a different 
cultural reality.

       We  need a sense of revived possibility, of genuine 
creative potential, of unfeigned joie de vivre.  We have a 
new economy, but we have no new  intelligentsia.  We have 
massive flows of information and capital, but we have a 
grave scarcity of meaning.  We know what we can buy, but 
we don't know what we want.

     The twentieth century featured any number of -isms.
They were fatally based on the delusion that philosophy 
trumps engineering.   It doesn't.  In a world fully 
competent to command its material basis, ideology is 
inherently flimsy.   "Technology" in its broad sense:  
the ability to transform resources, the speed at which new
possibilities can be opened and exploited, the multiple 
and various forms of command-and-control  -- technology, 
not ideology, is the twentieth century's lasting legacy.
Technology broke the gridlock of the five-decade Cold War.
It made a new era thinkable.  And, finally, technology 
made a new era obvious.  

     But too many twentieth-century technologies
are very  like twentieth-century ideologies:  rigid,
monolithic, poisonous and non-sustainable.

      We need clean, supple, healthy means of support for
a crowded world.   We need recyclable technologies, 
industries that don't take themselves with that
Stalinesque seriousness that demands the brutal sacrifice 
of millions.  In order to make flimsy, supple technologies 
thinkable, and then achievable, then finally obvious, we 
need an ideology that embraces  its own obsolescence.

      The immediate future won't be a period suitable for 
building monuments, establishing thousand-year regimes, 
creating new-model citizens, or asserting leaden 
certainties about anything whatsoever.   The immediate 
future is about picking and choosing among previously 
unforeseen technical potentials.

     Our time calls for intelligent fads.  Our time calls 
for a self-aware, highly temporary array of broad social 
experiments, whose effects are localized, non-lethal and 
reversible -- yet transparent, and visible to all parties 
who might be persuaded to look.

     The Internet is the natural test-bed for this 
fast-moving, fast-vanishing, start-up society.  Because 
the  native technology of the coming years is not the 19th 
century "machine" or the 20th century "product."   It is 
the 21st century "gizmo."  

     A gizmo is a device with so  many features and so 
many promises that it can never be  mastered within its 
own useful lifetime. A gizmo is  flimsy, cheap, colorful, 
friendly, intriguing, easily  disposable, and unlikely to 
harm the user.   The gizmo's  purpose is not to 
efficiently perform some function or  effectively provide 
some service.  A gizmo exists to snag  the user's 
attention, and to engage the user in a vast 
unfolding nexus of interlinked experience.  

     The gizmo in its manifold aspects is the beau ideal 
for contemporary design and engineering. Because that is 
what our culture will be like, at its heart, in its bones, 
in its organs.  A gizmo culture.  We will go in so many 
directions at once that most of them will never see 
fulfillment.  And then they will be gone.

    This is confusing and seems lacking in moral 
seriousness -- but only only by the  rigid standards of 
the past century, bitterly obsessed  with  ultimate 
efficiencies and malignant final solutions.    We need 
opportunities now, not efficiencies.   We need inspired 
improvisation, not solutions. Technology can no  longer 
bind us in a vast tonnage of iron, barbed wire and brick. 
We will stop heaving balky machines  uphill. Instead, we 



#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net