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STERLING_DISTRACTED

                               February  9, 1999 - January 6, 2004
   
It is not the job of                   
someone like Bruce                  The people who *are* in    
Sterling to get                     positions like that get    
everything right.                   frozen by the need to be
                                    responsible.                
   Sterling at his best spews       
   a stream of pyrotechnic                                  
   ideas and insights; often                                  
   new, sometimes useful...     
                               Sterling is far better at this than
   He ranges widely            most, e.g consider Howard Reingold,
   through technical           a "futurist" who who appears to be 
   and social trends,          making a living with a throwaway   
   and unlike many an          idea from Sterling's novel         
   American thinks             "Distraction": the smart mob.      
   about things that                                              
   go on outside the US...
      

   But part of his self-image    
   is that he's the supreme    
   hustler, the master       
   manipulator, the ultimate    
   culture hacker.           
      
   He's the man who managed 
   to put "cyberpunk" over,                          
   with a one-page fanzine        
   and a handful of writers.                    
                                         GENESIS_OF_THE_CYBER-PUNKS           


Note that he often uses
huckster/diplomat
figures as main
characters in his        Schismatrix
novels.                  Distraction
                         Zeitgeist


      
   Since "cyberpunk",                                                       
   it seems he's been              Though, sometimes this 
   casting about, trying           "hustler" business can get out   
   to Use His Powers               of hand: for example, the story
   as a Force for Good.            introductions that he wrote for    
                                   the (excellent) _Mirrorshades_         
                                   anthology: hype so heavy-handed        
His writing on computer crime      that it's embarassing.                 
("The Hacker Crackdown")                                                 
seemed to be designed to blow                                            
sunshine up the skirt of the                      If it was meant as some   
feds, to try to get them to                       sort of ironic joke, a     
relax a bit, and stop busting                     satire of a shmoozy       
people at random.                                 hustler putting over a 
                                                  con-job of a literary  
                                                  movement... well, that 
                                                  wasn't obvious to me at
                                                  the time.              
                     
And now: The Viridian             
Design Movement...          (That's Electric
                            Green, get it?):
                     
   A personality cult to                 
   combat global warming.                Here's a silly      
                                         concept for an SF   
                                         story: Imagine a    
     The medium this time is             future dominated by 
     the moderated mailing               the fight between   
     list (for the cyberpunk             the Viridians, based
     literary movment, the               on Sterling's work, 
     medium was a little zine            and the Shining     
     called "Cheap Truth").              Path, a group based 
                                         on Gregory Benford's
                                         ideas for           
                                         amelioration.       
                         
   
As of 1999 I don't think he'd written any    
articles about the Viridians outside of    
his mailing list, as of yet, though the    
phrase "Viridian" had appeared in Wired's    
tired/wired list recently.  Since then    
there's been a number of things, including           
an entire issue of The Whole Earth Review            GREENISH-TINGE
dedicated to it.                          
                

Irrespective of your opinion about    
anthropogenic global warming, it really     
probably would not be such a bad idea to    
ease off on the carbon-emissions...               NUKE
                                   
                              
But I've always found the Viridian     
movement to be a bit disappointingly   
conventional for someone like Sterling      
to get involved with.  

All of a sudden, he's being Responsible.                    


   
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