"The New Aesthetic is an art movement obsessed with the otherness of computer vision and information processing. But Ian Bogost asks: why stop at the unfathomability of the computer's experience when there are airports, sandstone, koalas, climate, toaster pastries, kudzu, the International 505 racing dinghy, and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner to contemplate?"

[Nice selection of quotes chosen and comment by @litherland below]

Yes.

Rather than wondering if alien beings exist in the cosmos, let's assume that they are all around us, everywhere, at all scales.

Why should a new aesthetic [be] interested only in the relationship between humans and computers, when so many other relationships exist just as much? Why stop with the computer, like Marinetti foolishly did with the race car?

Being withdraws from access. There is always something left in reserve, in a thing.

Cf. Derrida, e.g., “L'annihilation des restes, les cendres peuvent parfois en témoigner, rappelle un pacte et fait acte de mémoire.”

"It’s not totally unreasonable to suppose that *something* is going on in nature, that its constituent objects have some kind of motivation, even if they’re composed of mere chemical gradients or pressure differentials or quantum states. The computer opens up a special case because we made it, and yet it manifests itself in all kinds of ways that seem like a nature—another nature—a little nature, perhaps. There is a strong sense that with computers and their networks, something is going on in there, something emergent and radically other, which nonetheless does begin to infiltrate our edges."

"I don’t think the New Aesthetic is heralding the approach of the Singularity’s event horizon, where computers will vault into consciousness and begin writing a sui-generis literature that drops fully formed from the brow of Stanislaw Lem. The New Aesthetic is making a much humbler move: pointing out these feral phenomena erupting into our midst and saying, but they move."

"process in which they’re working is a bit like a scientific process where you have a hypothesis & you try to experiment not knowing what the outcome is going to be."

"…how can I say anything which someone will be able to see in 20 years in the form in which it was created…serious…new contemporary problem, how do we make something work in a situation where the means of production are in a maelstrom or things are politically or financially falling apart? I don’t expect bookstores…libraries…Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Twitter…Microsoft to survive 20 years, I don’t expect NATO to survive. I don’t know about the EU. This is not like a gospel of despair or anything I just really think we could do something magnificent by just rising to the scale of the actual problem."

"Experience design is the first school of design that can actually encompass literature as a wing of itself."

"[I]t would be a shame if everything was virtual or written in a way that precludes the tangibility of things."

"The “New Aesthetic” is a native product of modern network culture. It’s from London, but it was born digital, on the Internet. The New Aesthetic is a “theory object” and a “shareable concept.”

The New Aesthetic is “collectively intelligent.” It’s diffuse, crowdsourcey, and made of many small pieces loosely joined. It is rhizomatic, as the people at Rhizome would likely tell you. It’s open-sourced, and triumph-of-amateurs. It’s like its logo, a bright cluster of balloons tied to some huge, dark and lethal weight.

There are some good aspects to this modern situation, and there are some not so good ones."

"That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one. That’s the case so far, anyhow. No reason that the New Aesthetic has to stop where it stands at this moment, after such a promising start. I rather imagine it’s bound to do otherwise. Somebody somewhere will, anyhow."

"Sophisticated clients such as Corning and others who commission this work should take note: despite the widespread attention given to videos like this, consumers see right through the special effects and glitzy production to the substance beneath. If there is no real substance beneath, it will come back to haunt you…

That said, we still need more video in futures work and more futures work in product design.  So instead of discouraging the use of video to engage and communicate, designers and futurists working on these projects should consider the follow criteria for making high-quality futures videos that are also profound and thoughtfully reflective of future change.

1. Don’t stare at your navel: …

2. Don’t extrapolate to infinity: …

3. Don't fetishize technology: …

4. Don't ignore what people care about: …

5. Don't dumb it down: …"

"Slate: So what is a design fiction?
Sterling: It’s the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change. That’s the best definition we’ve come up with. The important word there is diegetic. It means you’re thinking very seriously about potential objects and services and trying to get people to concentrate on those rather than entire worlds or political trends or geopolitical strategies. It’s not a kind of fiction. It’s a kind of design. It tells worlds rather than stories.

Slate: Can you give an example?
Sterling: I think the most effective design fictions to date have been videos. They’re not science-fiction films; they don’t have any Avatar-style heroics. They’re mostly vignettes of people interacting with objects and services. There’s some element of intellectual sex appeal that makes people forward them to other people. "

"The digital settles in as background. We remember less and query more. Our identity play would be considered schizophrenic in the last century. We have more friends than ever before yet know new frontiers of isolation. The quantification of our experience haunts us in the form of a persistent history. And we are distracted more than we ever knew possible. These circumstances are paradoxically a description of the near future and a diagnosis of the current state of affairs. The truly timeless is redefined – it has transcended that which is classic; it has become that which is never finished."

"In any case, what seems more provocative here, on the level of design, would be to appropriate this protective stance and reuse it in the design of future objects, but emphasizing the other end: to allow for the scanning of any object designed or manufactured, but to to insert, in the form of watermarks, small glitches that would only become visible upon reprinting.

We might call these object cancers: bulbous, oddly textured, and other dramatically misshapen errors that only appear in 3D-reprinted objects. Chairs with tumors, mutant silverware, misbegotten watches—as if the offspring of industrial reproducibility is a molten world of Dalí-like surrealism.

Put another way, the inadvertent side-effect of the attempted corporate control over objects would be an artistic potlatch of object errors: object cancers deliberately reprinted, shared, and collected for their monstrous and unexpected originality."

"This makes me feel like we're on the edge of something interesting; something Andy Huntington has called 'the GeoCities of Things' - the moment when it's as easy to make personal technology objects as it was to make a GeoCities page.

So I wonder whether the 'Internet With Things' is a more useful term than the 'Internet Of Things'. As Matt Jones has said "The network is as important to think about as the things" and the network has people in it. We're in there with the things. And people are looking for more than just sleek efficiency, they're after something else, something unexpected."

"And then, this morning, when struggling to think of a good ending to this, I heard a brilliant talk by George Dyson – describing the early history of computing unearthed from correspondence between Turing and Von Neumann. And I thought I heard him cite this quote from Turing. I wasn’t quite fast enough with my pen to be 100% sure and I can’t find it on Google, but I think this is what he said. And, if it is, it’s exactly what I mean and we can leave it at that. What I think he said is this: “being digital should be more interesting than just being electronic”. I’m sure that meant something slightly different in the middle of the last century but the words are useful and simple now, they’ll do for me as a tiny rallying cry; being digital should be more interesting than just being electronic."

"People are never scared by the commonplaces of daily life, no matter how risky they are; in 2031, people choose to be alarmed by exotic, eye-catching stuff, like rare diseases and psycho serial killers…

There are no political parties. They were entirely hollowed-out and disrupted by social networks. That happened fast.…

Suburbs are the new favelas, while the prosperous live cheek-by-jowl in repurposed downtowns. Architecture guts entire city blocks, preserving the historicized skins around flats packed to Hong Kong densities. Cars are rental-shared. Furniture is mobile. Most objects have IDs…

Nothing can be ‘innovative’ unless you are convinced that change makes a difference. Without the magic patter, the semantic context that sets expectations, a rabbit in a hat is not a wonder, it’s just a weird accident. A true network society cannot progress, because it reticulates; it’s all snakes and ladders, rockets and potholes, mash-ups and short circuits."

"Bruce Sterling’s “Last Viridian Note”…puts things into the following categories:

1. Beautiful things.
2. Emotionally important things.
3. Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
4. Everything else.

There are no numbers, no set rules for how much stuff you “must” own. I like the idea some have of only owning 100 things, or even just 50 things. But it’s only an idea. I couldn’t do it myself but I can, however, cut down on the stuff that I already own and don’t use.

DVDs go category 4…espresso machine in 3…couch, bed & chair in 3 as well…Half my clothes go in 4…& I need to buy after a pattern of 1 & 3 from now on.

…don’t think you can even buy after category 2 most of the time. That’s the kind of stuff that evolves over time…

Question yourself with everything you are about to buy; if there is a reasonable chance it will be placed in category 4 anytime soon, don’t buy it."

"About a decade ago – I saw Oliver Sacks speak at the Rockerfeller Institute in NYC, talk about his work.

A phrase from his address has always stuck with me since. He said of what he did – his studies and then the writing of books aimed at popular understanding of his studies that ‘…sometimes the stories are the science’.

Sometimes our film work is the design work.

Again this is a commercial act, and we are a commercial design studio.

But it’s also something that we hope unpacks the near-future – or at least the near-microfutures – into a public where we can all talk about them."

"We have always regaled ourselves with speculative stories of a day yet to come. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of tomorrow with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. Slipping suggestively between the real and the imagined these narratives offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios.

Thrilling Wonder Stories chronicles such tales in a sci fi storytelling jam with musical interludes, live demonstrations and illustrious speakers from the fields of science, art and technology presenting their visions of the near future. Join our ensemble of mad scientists, literary astronauts, design mystics, graphic cowboys, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries for an evening of wondrous possibilities and dark cautionary tales."

"[This is the intro/explanation/something to a new site I’m working on about my relationship with the objects around me.]"

"The network is as important to think about as the things.

The flows & the nodes. The systems & the surface. The means & the ends.

The phrase “Internet Of Things” will probably sound as silly to someone living in a spime-ridden future…

In that sense it is useful – as a provocation, and a stimulus to think new thoughts about the technology around us. It just doesn’t capture my imagination in the same way as the Spime did.

You don’t have to agree. I don’t have to be right. There’s a reason I’ve posted it here on my blog rather than that of my company. This is probably a rambling rant useless to all but myself. It’s a bit of summing-up and setting-aside and starting again for me. This is going to be really hard and it isn’t going to be done by blogging about it, it’s going to be done by doing.

This is just what I what I want to help do. Still.

Better shut-up and get on with it."

"First, we identify a suitable building: Something that appears neglected, and seems to have no immediate prospects for a future use. In short, we choose an unpopular place. Next we devise a hypothetical future for that structure. Specifically, we strive to make this future blatantly implausible: maybe provocative, maybe funny; above all engaging. Then an artist creates a rendering based on the imaginary concept. This is printed onto a 3' x 5' sign, modeled on those used by real developers. That sign, finally, goes onto the building."<br />
<br />
"Our neighborhood is the sort that people describe as "transitional," and some of the property…is vacant. On one nearby commercial structure…I noticed a sign…You've seen similar signs…It was a rendering of a development, a future, involving a small, empty building. It suddenly struck me that, given how long this sign has been here, what it depicted was, at best, a hypothetical future — and arguably a fictitious one."

"What happens when every object and space has a life of its own? That's the question taken up by The New Ecology of Things (NET). In an era of ubiquitous computing, The New Ecology of Things provides a framework for addressing the complex challenges of a world of networked, computational things. The call for interesting ideas in the realm of pervasive computing is frequently directed at designers. The New Ecology of Things answers that call by going beyond the limited vision of 'smart things that think for you' and moving toward the design of meaningful interactions that make the most of our very human experience in the world.

The New Ecology of Things is more than a book, however. It is the physical portal to a transmedia publication that includes essays, a glossary, forums, interactive works, video and a provocative story by postcyberpunk author Bruce Sterling."

"*Now that we’ve actually got a network society, we’re gonna see a lot of harrowing-critical-reassessment material of this kind. Mostly because we’re not happier for it and the general situation stinks.<br />
<br />
*Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen, these guys were like the first robins in spring. Note that this kind of criticism is NOT the same as those who opposed digitalization in the first place; this isn’t Luddism, it’s retrospective in tone. “Look what has been lost. We don’t think the same, our capacity to act is diminished, we are reduced to components and gadgets, those in power over us lack accountability,” etc etc. In Gothic High-Tech, awe at the sublime power of Moore’s Law machinery is replaced by a perception that public life is febrile, rotten, fraudulent and decadent."

[via: http://twitter.com/ballardian/status/60530562850492416 ]

"Remembrance of Things Fast: William Gibson interviewed by Richard Metzger"<br />
<br />
[via: http://twitter.com/ballardian/status/60530562850492416 ]

"Welcome to Drift Deck, a different sort of city guide. Think of it as a set of playing cards that help you playfully find your own, untouristy way through city streets. It's a set of simple cues, clues, actions, and provocations to see your way about the city, looking at it from a different angle. It will make you an active part of your own romp around.

Drift Deck will help you capture and share your discoveries. You'll be able to share your journey through the maps you make and the photos you take. Share your Drifts with others around the world! Be active, not passive. Enjoy."

"So what comes after the future? I asked Bruce Sterling at SXSW.<br />
<br />
But, for Bruce, the future is really the past. “I like narratives,” he told me, while explaining why the most “effective” futurists are good historians. So perhaps, using this logic, what comes after the future is history.<br />
<br />
And Bruce is certainly an effective futurist as well as a good historian. Which is why when I asked him about today’s Internet obsession with “the social,” he riffed with dark euphoria about the history of socialism as well as what it’s like to be a 15-year-old kid with no knowledge of the past.<br />
<br />
Check out yesterday’s interview with Bruce when he explains why hactivism isn’t compatible with democracy and what the difference is between gothic high tech and favela chic."

"Hence, it could be argued that design fiction aims to express and implant metaphysical ideas that cannot be expressed in words.  Thus, design fiction is effectively expressed in a medium of experience. It is expressed as a combined series of moments designed to create a new actuality or at least new assumptions.<br />
<br />
Andrew and Sitraka have been exploring the playful space between fact and fiction. They have recently put together a presentation for the agency and also submitted a proposal to the science gallery in Dublin to further explore the implication of design fiction."

"The Future of Play will explore the concept of play as transformative, in terms of four key aspects: Social Play (including community and communication); Action Play (sports, gaming, etc.); Mental and Emotional Play (including exploration, adventure and imagination); and Sound Play."

"we attempt to invent things and create culture. It’s not just enough to invent something and see it once, you have to change the world around you, get underneath it, interfere with it somehow, because otherwise you’re just problem solving. And I wont say that design has an exclusive hold over this – you can invent things and change culture with art, music, business practices, ethnography, market research; all of these are valid too – design just happens to be the way we do it…our things should be hopeful, and not just functional…beautiful, inventive and mainstream…you could see our work as experimental, or science-fiction, or futuristic…our design is essentially a political act. We design ‘normative’ products, normative being that you design for the world as it should be. Invention is always for the world as it should be, and not for the world you are in…Design these products and you’ll move the world just slightly in that direction."

"You don’t have to be a citizen of this wracked & threadbare superpower in order to sense the pervasive melancholy of an empire in decline…<br />
<br />
Well…every once in a while, a situation that’s one-in-a-thousand is met by a guy who is one in a million. It may be that Assange is, somehow, up to this situation. Maybe he’s gonna grow in stature by the massive trouble he has caused. Saints, martyrs, dissidents & freaks are always wild-cards, but sometimes they’re the only ones who can clear the general air. Sometimes they become the catalyst for historical events that somehow had to happen. They don’t have to be nice guys; that’s not the point. Julian Assange did this; he direly wanted it to happen. He planned it in nitpicky, obsessive detail. Here it is; a planetary hack.<br />
<br />
I don’t have a lot of cheery hope to offer about his all-too-compelling gesture, but I dare to hope he’s everything he thinks he is, & much, much, more.

"I wonder how long it will take Flipboard to realize that people don’t want to read content generated by their own social network. Because obviously it would make vastly more sense to read the content generated by someone else’s social network, some aspirational figure whom you aspire to become, like, say, Steve Jobs or Lady Gaga.<br />
<br />
*Why not send me her Flipboard? Why not sell me that? By subscription. Then it’s magazines all over again. What fun! Of course, you destabilized the publishing industry totally and put everybody out of work, but what the heck, they were just hanging out mooching on Facebook and Freecycle anyway… Think of it as a giant and involuntary retraining class."

"Contemporary writing is loaded with strange little details of erudition that used to be expensive and difficult to research. For instance, let's consider an obscure, dusty figure like, say, Massimo d'Azeglio. Or rather, [bunch of facts about him]… No American should properly know anything about this man. It took me 57 seconds to research that on Google, and that included cutting and pasting the text here.

The peril comes in thinking, as a modern writer, that you can truly understand something about Massimo Taparelli in just 57 seconds. No, you can't. To access facts is not to understand them. The Marquis d'Azeglio was an intelligent, creative and cultivated 19th century aristocrat. He was deep and broad and subtle and human, and very alien to us moderns. Modern writers may fail to understand him in this sudden electronic blizzard of bland facts about him. We may know less of him because we seem to know more of him."

Transcriptions from the event: 14, 15, 16 November 2002 in Amsterdam

"Trillions of embedded systems are being unleashed into the world. What are the implications of a world filled with all these sensors and actuators? Some of the world’s most insightful designers, thinkers and entrepreneurs will address these questions, with you, at Doors of Perception 7 in Amsterdam on 14, 15, 16 November 2002. The theme is Flow: the design challenge of pervasive computing."

"In “Design Fiction Studio,” we will focus on experimental ways to combine science fiction story telling w/ new forms of media production. The students will be asked to write a short science-fiction story & expected to illustrate it in an experimental book. We will explore ways to combine alternative materials–such as very basic electronic elements, conductive inks, phase-&color-changing materials– w/ new kinds of fabrication & production techniques to learn both about materials & way they can be used in different kinds of fictional products.

"The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don't seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It's in your time most, it's in your space most. It is "where it is at," & it is "what is going on."

[I must have this bookmarked in some other way or with some other URL, but doing so again doesn't hurt. Update: Yup. Here it is: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/18/viridianisms-last-no.html ]

"While Bruce Sterling & Cory Doctorow & Vernor Vinge fantasize about Singularity or augmented reality or 3D printers that can reproduce themselves (which, incidentally, all appeal heavily to juvenile power fantasies), Sloan is writing a fiction that speaks to a world in which we find ourselves not exactly emancipated by technology but simply hyper-connected by it, our identities as people redefined by the media we share, media which we embrace & deeply care about even when it leaves us bewildered, co-opted, & reduced in a thousand ways to algorithms. It isn't "hard" Science Fiction, not by a long shot, but most "hard" SF long ago stopped being able to figure out how to be relevant to most readers (as can be seen by their sales figures), with its greatest practitioners, William Gibson & Neal Stephenson, turning instead to the present day, on the one hand, & history & alternate history, on the other. Sloan, however, has found an entirely different & exciting avenue of attack."

"This post was a riff on Bruce Sterling's notion of atemporality. My purpose here was to elaborate his claim by demonstrating possible ways in which to articulate a history and a theory of atemporality. The point was not to claim that Sterling's view about history not being a science or that his desire to locate atemporality in contemporary network culture are evidence of ahistoricity. I would like to think that this post, though rooted in ideas about history and art history, to a certain extent aspires to be atemporal. Can we go ahead and claim that our current existence is one predicated on atemporality? Are we currently engaged in daily practices that amounts to "serene skepticism about ... historical narratives?" Whether or not you buy into the idea of atemporality, let me suggest that it is something that we do all the time."

"If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media. The second conference session is being introduced with Bruce Sterling's Keynote on Atemporality." [transcript here: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/02/atemporality-for-the-creative-artist/]

"Somebody recently said that cars are the new cigarettes. There’s probably a statistical treatment somewhere that explains how many elderly die in heat waves because of your new car."

"*Gosh, the time-honored Atlantic is an interesting venue for a discussion of the Arduino.

"“The slow movement imagines itself to belong by rights to the cultural layer”—a slow-moving layer of society—“but it’s still in the layer of fashionable activism,” he says. “An earthquake is rapid and shocking, it seems, but the underlying forces are geologically slow. So it’s actually our perception of pacing that’s odd, not pacing itself.”"

"you've treated your future as an "unpredictable lurching thing" & now you're all morose about that...your generation CREATED that situation! Ever heard of "disruptive innovation," "disintermediation," "offshoring," "small pieces loosely joined," "de-monetization," "plug & play," "the network as a platform"?...Guys w/ stacks of gold bars & working oil wells don't have stability! Much less guys like you...want some security? Demand government housing subsidies & guaranteed minimum income! They bailed out every broke mogul...might as well bail out civil population...You're Canadian always in Cali married to Briton always in Japan...you're not gonna "end up" anywhere. Forget about that...you have made your mobile bed...lie in it."..."coherent picture of your future."...imagine you're 3yo. You want to give your Dad, back in 1974, a coherent picture of 2010...something very actionable, lucid & practical...tell me what you oughta tell him about 2010, back in 1974. Use words of 1 syllable"

"Henceforth I shall dwell in the densest cluster of interaction-design talent in Europe. My new abode is rugged, bracing, confrontational: the seductiveness of masculine red brick walls, the bull’s-blood hue of rivet-stained Edwardian girders! I take courage in the brisk removal of my building’s entire second floor. Even the structure’s splinters and splashes of Blitz shrapnel have a surprising delicacy and charm.

"Google did the revolutionary work of ADBUSTERS, & we now exist in a post-advertising, post-consumer society. How will people indulge in conspicuous consumption when the means of valorizing products as status objects no longer exists? Does anybody nowadays ever buy a car because a magazine ad says that it’s cool?...That was a great idea when everybody agreed, through mainstream media, that this behavior made you look sensible & respectable. But w/out this kind of manufactured social consensus — through a huge colossus of advertising & mainstream media — one has to wonder if consumer culture can possibly survive. If SUVS are toxic assets & suburban homes are toxic assets, what’s left that ISN’T? None of those things were “toxic” as long as we were energetically persuaded that they were worth something & that was the role of NY mainstream publishing & promotion. Even if we decide to live that way again, there’s nobody left to do it for us & no paying infrastructure that can support it."

"Now you can view all the videos from the first icon minds. Watch Farshid Moussavi, Charles Jencks and Marjan Colletti discuss the return of ornament; Dunne & Raby and Bruce Sterling talk about design fiction; Joseph Grima and Julien de Smedt on the pressures of running a young and successful architecture practice; and Ronan Bouroullec in conversation with icon's editor Justin McGuirk. All the talks are available in short or long versions."

When he was still running the Viridian Movement, Bruce Sterling introduced the idea of involuntary parks. Spaces in the world that have become so polluted or otherwise unusable by humans, that they’ve been left to nature (or, at least, savagery).

"look at this amazing artifact out of BERG...I’d like to call this “the greatest design-fiction writing I’ve ever seen,” but (a) it’s not about design, (b) it’s not fictional & (c) it’s not even writing. This is new. The web has broken a lot of silos btwn the disciplines in past 10 years, but this is a new thing that is visibly rising out of that rubble. It’s contemporary creative work which pops on the screen like a web page, but feels like it wants to be art history, a comic book, an embedded video, a special FX anime movie…It even wants to plan a utopian city...BERG has become a new Archigram...same size...in the same place...think the same way. That’s some really good news...This piece is doing the same futuristic thing that Archigram did decades ago...in our idiom, w/ our techniques. It’s far-out, edgy, visionary...truly violative of the given norm & yet there’s nothing merely cheap & sensational here...Io9 calls itself a scifi blog & they’re glowing like a little furnace today."

"*...I don’t understand why these online educationaly enterprises even need to *pretend* to be a “college.” If we’re really looking at Clayton Christensen style “disruption,” we ought to be abandoning the whole idea of “education,” of degrees, schooling, grades, papers, publishing, theses, doctorates, any of that. *You just get on line and you start messing with stuff. At some point, the other practitioners notice you and start linking to you. And they buy stuff from you, or they praise you for what you are doing. And then you know that you know it. And that’s an end to it. *Maybe somebody could invent some formal tests for you, if they were all worried about it. Otherwise, what the heck: bring on the rocket-science and the brain surgery! Got all the instructables you can eat! *...we’re not “formally educated,” but...who cares about that? You can’t *make us* care. You are Main Stream Education and you are so over."

"I did a big reset one year ago moving from New York to New Zealand, and was surprised by the euphoria of liberation from so much stuff I thought I loved. Below are a few tools and resources that were awesome for virtualizing, storing data and getting rid of my stuff – perhaps they may help when it’s your turn."

[more on Sterling's talk here: http://www.zylstra.org/blog/archives/2009/07/reboot_11_the_n.html ]

[transcript of the talk here: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/02/transcript-of-reboot-11-speech-by-bruce-sterling-25-6-2009/ ]

"Reboot in power. Gen Xers running things. Cultural sentiment: “Dark euphoria.” Things are falling apart, everything is possible, but you never realized you would have to dread it so much...a) Top end: Gothic high-tech...b) low-end: Favela chic...practical advice on bright green geek environmentalism...“Stop acting dead.” You’ve been trained that way; it’s the default for your generation...How do you know...test: Would your dead great grandfather do a better job of what you’re intending to do...Think of objects in terms of hours of time & volumes of space. It’s a good design approach...possessions are really embodied social relationships: made, designed, sold by people...Relationships that happen to have material form...monarch among objects are everyday objects...you’re eager to tell someone about its beauty or meaning. Tools: Don’t make do with broken stuff. You’re not experimenting with it if you’re not publishing the results in a falsifiable form."

[video: http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07/video-from-reboot-11/ AND http://video.reboot.dk/video/486788/bruce-sterling-reboot-11 AND interview: http://video.reboot.dk/video/485250/bruce-sterling ]

[transcript: http://wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/02/transcript-of-reboot-11-speech-by-bruce-sterling-25-6-2009/ ]

"Now let me explain how you can go about doing this, and it really is a different material way of life than any in the twentieth century. It’s a geek-friendly approach to consumption.…

What you need to do is re-assess the objects in your space and time. And I’m going to explain to you how to do this. 00:32:30-6

The king of objects, the monarch among objects are not fancy objects. They’re not high-tech objects, they’re not organic objects, they’re not biological objects, they’re everyday objects. Things that you’re with every day…

Common everyday objects. You need to have the best possible common everyday objects. 00:33:11-4…

Get rid of it. Get rid of it, if you don’t use it! If you haven’t touched it in a year, get rid of it immediately. Sell it, buy real things you really use. 00:35:08-7

Now, you’re going to have a lot fewer things, but the actual quality of your life will skyrocket!…

I’m going to explain to you how you do this…

First you need to make lists. Hackers love lists. A chart. You can make a flowchart. Flowchart it if it makes you any happier.

Four variety of items: Beautiful things; emotionally important things; tools, devices and appliances that efficiently perform some useful function; and category four, everything else…

It’s not that beautiful? It’s not beautiful! Gotta go!…

And everything else. Category four, everything else. Virtualize it, store the data, get rid of it…

It’s not going to hurt you to lose all these things. You don’t need them. After you go through this particular discipline, you will look different, you will act differently. You will become much more what you already are."

"*We’ve long had a term of art for old buildings that are ruined...“ruins.” *However, we lack a term of art for “ruins” that are actually buildings never completed. Sometimes they’re completed buildings that are never sold...start falling over before they were ever inhabited...*Another version is the abandoned, incomplete high-rise...In Brazil a skeleton framework of this kind is called a “squelette.” *Occasionally squatters move into “squelettes” & bring in some breeze-block, corrugated tin and plastic hoses, transforming squelettes into high-rise favelas. This doesn’t work very well because it’s tough to manage the utilities, especially the water...*It bothers me to use clumsy circumlocutions like “unfinished ruins” or “partially built, yet abandoned structures” or “stillborn highrises” for a phenomenon that is so common and so obvious to billions of urban people, so henceforth I am going to call them “squelettes.” They don’t have to be Brazilian, French, or 80 stories tall, either."

"I’m thinking we need a different model here, a social-good model. If we really want to spend all our time socializing on networks, and we don’t want to spend any money doing that, and it isn’t a profit center for anybody, and it only lasts five years tops, no matter how big it gets and how popular it gets… Then, really, these oughta be public services of some kind. And probably not American services. because the Americans are methodically destroying more wealth than most of the planet has ever seen, and American public services are lousy and tend to kill off the consumers."

"Remember those high exit costs? Friedman wondered: What if you could

"Assuming the world does end up flooding, thanks to defrosted polar regions, then we’re unlikely to be taking to the seas. We’re more likely to just cluster along the new coastlines, dealing with the flooding and building our new homes around it. Bruce Sterling looks at such things happening right now in this Serbian documentary, where people living on uninsurable land, or regularly flooded sections of the Danube. They are building piecemeal dwellings that either float, or are on stilts, and repurpose and reuse materials from other dwellings."

"…is the title of a talk I gave at Frontiers of Interaction V in Rome yesterday, primarily about the territory of “the Internet of Things” moving from one of academic and technological investigation to one of commercial design practice, and what that might mean for designers working therein."

"Design (verb) is often blamed or cited as to why a product is unsatisfying. Design (noun) is where that process manifests, but it’s rarely the process which has failed. It’s almost always something else. ... I’m personally most excited when I’m involved with something I’m literate in, but technically unfamiliar, when I’m in pursuit of something culturally new or playful. When there’s a sense of discovery or itchyness about newness, that’s when I’m happiest. ... No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say. ... You get the work you do. If you want to do something else start doing it. ... Talking about your work does not directly improve the actual quality of your work. Ultimately design happens in the world and in your hands, and not in your mouth. ... Design is about risk. We all fear authentic public response to our work, but we have to be brave enough to overcome."

"Bruce Sterling ... proposed ... the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype & texting. ... “Poor folk love their cellphones!” had the ring of one of those haughty but unforgettable expressions of condescension, like the Middle Eastern gem “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.” “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard."

"We're a global couple in a world of nations, so we don't expect that our private situation will ever be permanently resolved. It is our duty to bear the consequences of being who we are, and to offer solidarity to those who share our mode of being in the world.

"When “DIY” attains to its logical zenith, fake becomes the new real. I actually can’t wait for this to happen. The pinnacle of knowledge circulation in the networked age. How-to, tutorials, maker culture, sharing of knowledge (or maybe just descriptions and step-by-step procedures) all coming together so that people make their own stuff, from new materials that do not have to be tuned for epic scale levels of manufacturing. You need something, make one or two rather than having 100,000 of them made offshore someplace and shipped at great expense and with enormous carbon footprint. Natural experimentation with alternative materials, features, etc."

"*Here I am, publicly exercising some of my critical issues about generative art. I now understand these issues somewhat better than I did at the time of these Fabrica lectures -- but I wouldn't say I understand them very well.

"Ever wonder where the authors of science fiction get their ideas? Judge the process for yourself in the MIRRORSHADES Postmodern Archive on the WELL. It's a mix of weblog, archive, and commonplace book, plucked out of Bruce Sterling's email and from websites worldwide. Currently tracking: art, science, design, environmental catastrophe, crime, virtual war, rip-off cybercreeps, dead media, anarchy, spooks, sickening outrages and cheering developments.

"I am not an industrialist. But it's up to me to talk about the loss. The future is obsolescence in reverse. And obsolescence is a big part of maturity. To understand that things happen you have to understand that things vanish. A lot of it deserves to be gone forever, but not all of it. I am especially worried that things disappear in thoughtless fashion."

"he is worried that his novel-writing days may soon be at an end. "I am not sure I am going to be allowed to do it. American publishing is in distress. The book stores are going, the big centralised publishers are very heavily indebted and they are small sections of the centralised American media apparatus that have lost social credibility." He adds: "People don't pay attention to novels. The socially important parts of American communication are not taking part in novels. You can write them but they are not changing public discourse. "You can also say that everybody in society has moved up a notch and everybody just wants the executive summary.""

"You are likely getting useful, provocative insights from people who were never your colleagues in the past. These are people with thought-processes somewhat orthogonal to your own, who nevertheless show up repeatedly on your search engines as you perform your own work. ... I think this situation is a fact-on-the-ground for a densely-networked, digitized society. I also think the pace of this phenomenon is accelerating. I don't believe we will get a choice about it. If it's inevitable, then we should exploit the inevitability. Now, my larger suspicion here -- let's call it a hypothesis -- is that there is some grand unified theory for speculative cultural activity. In other worlds, "speculative culture" is not a crazy-quilt, it is a nexus. Every creative discipline has methods to shake up its preconceptions and think inventively. I want to catalog, compare and contrast those methods. I surmise that they have some inner unity, a consilience."

"But you know, I'm not scared by any of this. I regret the suffering, I know it’s big trouble -- but it promises massive change and a massive change was inevitable. The way we ran the world was wrong.

"We're in the midst of a period where people are questioning business models. It's in these downturned times that new innovative businesses and ideas spring up. Recessions are a good time to "prototype". Decisions get made quicker. New ideas don't get bogged down in process. People take risks. Recessions have happened before, of course, but this time we have a whole generation of people who are used to making new stuff happen fast on the web. Have an idea, go home, bash out the code and launch to the world. We are living in a world where people are used to prototyping quickly and cheaply."

"The year to come is best approached as a learning opportunity. It offers a golden chance to bury our dead prejudices and learn how to properly feed the living. Once we stop shaking all over and scolding Americans, we will recognize the tremendous potential this new century offers the people of the world. The sun still shines, the grass still grows, we are still human. If we stopped pretending to be puppets of an invisible hand, we would not fret over the loss of the 20th century's strings. We might see that life is sweet."

"So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly blows one's brains out for no sane reason."

"So I've been thinking about how I can continue to projectise this product. And how this bag can have a 10-year + story. So I'm trying to add spimeiness to it and to use internet stuff as a memory aid for this thing. So, I've created a unique URL for it at thinglink, in the spirit of the skuwiki idea. And I've built a tumblblog for it at HMDbag.tumblr.com. That tumblr extracts things from flickr and delicious that I've tagged appropriately, so it's sort of self-generating. I imagine telling the story of the life of the bag that way, keeping it as a project not a product.

"You know, Europe is full of towns that were bombed to pieces by huge shiny aircraft made in Detroit, and nowadays those towns generally look pretty perky. Perkier than Detroit, anyhow. Sometimes you really have to wonder about mankind." points here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,599988,00.html

"Certainly neither of these American visions look anything like what

See some of the comments like: "He wants to help the environment, yet his lifestyle involves numerous airplane flights. If his location on the planet is completely arbitrary, why doesn't he pick one place and stay put? It's obvious that Sterling's philosophy is still determined by his personal preferences, rather than an objective philosophy." AND "This sounds a lot like 'Consume as much as you like, just don't keep the evidence.' I don't mind it as an aesthetic but I don't think it's a useful way to live if you are trying to address or even helpfully acknowledge global warming. You're kidding yourself.

Also, encouraging people to live globally - as in, actually physically moving between countries frequently - is crazy consumptive and isn't going to be a sustainable activity any time soon. Don't pretend you aren't vastly over consuming your share of our natural resources."

"The Drift Deck (Analog Edition) is an algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets. A deck of cards is used as instructions that guide you as you drift about the city. Each card contains an object or situation, followed by a simple action. For example, a situation might be — you see a fire hydrant, or you come across a pigeon lady. The action is meant to be performed when the object is seen, or when you come across the described situation. For example — take a photograph, or make the next right turn. The cards also contain writerly extras, quotes and inspired words meant to supplement your wandering about the city."

"We are envisioning a new world where today’s aging, less useful and even dangerous financial systems are replaced by disruptive innovations with new user experiences. Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s financial resources. Maybe you’re a refugee or stateless. Yet you still have your handset and laptop and Internet and a broadband cellphone connection…."

"The postmillennial version of a Leather­man is the Apple iPhone. Like all digital technologies, the iPhone has yet to achieve the hard-grained, Spartan elegancies of the steely Leatherman. It makes up for this with its cannibal appetite for other tools. Leathermans will disappear—I commonly give mine away—but iPhones devour other tools, digesting them into virtualized application services: phone, camera, e-mail, Web browser, text-messaging, music and video players, whole planet-girdling sets of urban Google maps, house keys, pedometer, TV remote, seismometer, Breathalyzer, alarm clock, video games, radio, bar-code scanner … the target list grows by the day.

"Part of me hopes the crash is real because a meltdown would deflate an economy which will otherwise eat the biosphere alive. But a crash would also cause enormous hardship, including to one's own nearest and dearest. Besides, rooting for collapse puts you on the same side as the loony-tune end-days crowd - and that's not a club I want to join. It's all very complicated. A healthier response, I'm sure, is to get out of the house and look for positive things to do."

"And that’s why they ambush you and they beat on you. They’re not exactly your enemies, but they’re deeply alien to your chosen paradigm. So they have a kind of control over your destiny that you do not allow yourselves to have." ... and ... "Someday the computer entertainment industry would be big. Big enough, and stodgy enough, that it actually WOULD employ towel designers. There would be oceans of money and huge budgets on an industrial scale. There would be room for armies of creative guys who actually did create towels."

"Eight years ago Long Now had a conference...how to build a 10,000 year library....Bruce Sterling delivered....rant...hilarious and biting. It holds up amazingly well" "main benefit I derive from reading Ruskin is the spectacle of someone very bright, very dedicated, very perceptive, very historically aware, a prophet really, a futurist seer == who is mired armpit deep in his own parochiality. And so are we...I want to describe how we might succeed where John Ruskin failed"

"Globalization was built on cheap oil. As that era draws to a close, so will the current phase of global integration, whether Thomas Friedman, Wal-Mart, and all those involved in intercontinental trade like it or not."..."(((It's gonna be an amazing world if you have to grow your own food next door, and you commute to work on a bicycle, but your best friends are still Long Tail anime fanatics from Buenos Aires that you met on Facebook.)))"

"Creatives living like mice in the unsustainable ruins of 20th century industrialism. But maybe mice is the wrong metaphor. There's so much *green* here that it's starting to look like giant strangler-figs rising and cracking the sidewalks. The natives of Detroit and Torino have already been through the grinding hell of decline that's awaiting your city, which is why I consider them natives of the future. Living in the rubble of Henry Ford the way Italians live in the rubble of the Roman Empire."