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Tommorow Now by Bruce Sterling

book | McLuhan | future | rear view mirror | medium is the message

Tomorrow Now:
Envisioning the Next Fifty Years by Bruce Sterling [blog]

Science fiction writer turned futurist, Bruce Sterling, has written an excellentbook about Now. Actually, I think this is probably the best anyone can do becauseof the "rear view mirror" effect. McLuhan would say the people lookat the future through a review mirror - they are actually talking about the past.

"Tomorrow Now" mostly avoids the extrapolation of trends to predict specific events. Instead, the book reads more like science fiction, which you would expect given the author's past books. There's a chapter each on the seven stages of humanity. Let me briefly tell you what I took from each.

Seven Stages of Humanity

Birth School Love War Politics Business Old Age

Infant. "Cloning human babies does not have much future." Because
the first super baby cannot be the best superbaby." Each following generation
is not different, but better. So where does that leave the inferior, early version
superbaby.

Student. "Nobody is likely to teach the works of Kevin Kelly, authorof "New Rules of the New Economy" (wired article). His theses is that digital networks are opportunity-generatingand novel generating machines that will permeate the entire constructed world creating a permanent disequilibrium that is best understood as organic behavior in a technical matrix." Whew! This is the tomorrow my kids live in now.

Lover. The term blobject is introduced from Karim Rashid's book "I Want to Change the World" (Amazon). They tend to be" fleshy, pseudo-alive and seduction: rubbery, grippy, flexy, squeezy, pettable and cuddly" like the OralB toothbrush. They have "tragically short life spans." Compare the sturdy, mass produced (90 million), Bell Model 500 phone to any popular cell phone. The life spans are different, instructional manuals are vastly different. The cell phone functionality is greatly enhanced. It is almost free because it is the relationship to the network that is important.

Soldier. Serbia, Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan wars all involved men who were veterans of several. Financed by off shore money, in a foreign country, living off oil smuggling, these are New World Disorder soldiers. "Civilized states require some criminal services ... narcotics, refugee labor, red-light districts, money laundries, and so forth." Three amazing stories about Basaer, Baznatovic and Catli. Have we exported the Wild West?

Justice. "The grand global trend is crafted political blandness with swift, unpredictable outbursts of weirdness and scandal." However, the real action is with non-governmental organizations. The second moral panic - "pornography doesn't topple empires or cause nations to collapse."

Pantaloon. "Because there really is a new economy - not necessarily better but one's that new in character." An information economy has different technical infrastructure and new methods of generating (and losing) wealth." Thus, bohemian, college, government towns are now tech centers. Stewart Brand: "Information wants to be free; information also wants to be expensive."

Mere Oblivion. Humans have an incredible record as 'intelligent predators.' "So let's be entirely clear: human beings ore the Sixth Great Extinction." "There are more humans around now, about a hundred million tons of living human flesh. We humans outweigh all wild mammals in the world ten times over."

"Tomorrow Now" is necessarily a product of its time. Bruce Sterling does an incredible job of pasting together seven subjects that normally get little coverage. But here's the world we live in which is the "history of the future." It is a great mosaic to read.

p. 289 "A taboo is a very mild and weak barrier to technological change,
compared with the very stiff barrier of not being able to do it. Once you're
able to do it, then you can become persuasive. You can go for the enhancement
of the techno sublime, rephrase the argument, and redefine the paradigm. You
can make the taboo corny, another shibboleth of the dead epoch. Even the most
fiercely held moral beliefs can and do yield to this treatment... Law and
philosophy can't trump engineering. In a world fully competent to command
its material basis, ideology is weak."

In other words, "the medium is the message."

posted by Ray @ Thursday, March 13, 2003