Distraction at 20: An Interview with Bruce Sterling
This piece is a companion to my article in Slate on Distraction at 20, which is my very favorite book and one that everyone should be reading. Bruce was nice enough to answer several questions about the book.
Michael Burnam-Fink
Science-fiction isn’t about predicting the future, in the sense of nailing down the causes and effects of major events, but science-fiction can provide a language for speaking about the future. One of the things I find most remarkable about Distraction is that it still feels current, while newer and more ostensibly serious science-fiction (thinking of Rainbow’s End and Oryx & Crake to name two novels) seem much more like a product of their moments. Thinking about why this is, Distraction opens with the Air Force using a bake sale as a pretense for shaking down motorists to keep a base running, a serious take on that bumper sticker slogan. This is the first and most prominent example of a worldbuilding technique of taking an absurdity or contradiction in 1998, and pushing at it until it breaks. What were you thinking about when writing Distraction, and does it still feel like the future to you?
Bruce Sterling
*Mostly I was thinking about the Clinton impeachment, and also reading the self-serving memoirs of American political campaign managers. It struck me that, as a class, these operatives had never been science-fictionalized. That seemed odd to me, because so much of their work was quite like science fiction — suspensions of disbelief, expanding Overton Windows, spearheads of cognition, making the unthinkable thinkable. They were visionary eccentrics constantly angling for a mass audience.
*The media techniques changed, the candidates and financial backers changed, but the razzle-dazzle of campaign theatrics were as old as the Stars and Stripes. That’s why the narrative in DISTRACTION feels so contemporary. The book’s subject-matter is old-fashioned.
*As for the bumper-sticker joke, that’s a technique I learned from the French satirical cartoonist Albert Robida. Robida was a better futurist than Jules Verne, mostly because Robida was trying to embarrass his audience.
*The future is often laughable, shabby, embarrassing, even blushingly shameful by the standards of the past. Abandoning previous ethical strictures is a major part of social change.It’s not that we people of the present day are decadent and have no ethics — on the contrary, we gave up the old ones, but we’re busy inventing many new ones that our successors will also abandon.
Michael Burnam-Fink
Distraction is not just a science-fiction novel, it’s a science-policy-fiction novel. The political dimensions concern the rupture between the Collaboratory’s scientists and the Federal government. It’s the end of the deal between the military-industrial complex and science, the deal that won World War II, the deal that is the base of the ongoing War on Cancer, and the ongoing rush to discover, commercialize, and scale-up everything at hand. Oscar builds a coalition between scientists and radical dissident nomads. What kind of energy do you see for forms of science not based on government or corporate support?
Bruce Sterling
*Distraction is a rare science fiction novel because it’s about scientists who are trying to proceed with science under changed social conditions. Scientists are not keen on history, futurism, or any of the humanities, so they’re never keen to see themselves as hapless mortal wretches who are firmly embedded in social change just like the rest of us. But they are.
*There are times when people in the sciences get a lot of breaks, like when they finished off World War II with an atom bomb, and other times when they’re treated with contempt as softheaded, chromedome nuisances, like, say, during the Trump Administration. If you’re trying to understand science as a social phenomenon, it helps to travel. Then you can see how “science,” meaning, a natural philosophy with an experimental method of verification, works out in, say, some minority-language nation in some odd corner of the world with just a couple of million people. Scientists laboring in those geopolitical conditions are still real scientists doing real science, they just lack massive budgets and continental scale. Then you can see the genuine kinship of science with philosophy. Philosophers do indeed matter, especially in the long run, but there’s always somebody else who is in immediate command of the hemlock for Socrates.
*There are some areas of science that are easy to technologize and commercialize, but a commercially profitable industrial research and development program is not the same as “science.” I do see cultural “energies” in science that are very different than those we that we valorize nowadays, but they’re old, deep, and mysterious, like Goethe’s elective-affinities.
*If you’re genuinely pro-science, you can’t wrap it up a shroud of contemporary wealth or power; you’d have to admit, even to declare, that a bright, methodical, but socially awkward young woman from Lithuania, who is burningly keen on naming, numbering and classifying trilobites, is a genuinely admirable human being. That she deserves society’s support as a professor of paleontology; that her intellectual work should be published and carefully preserved for future generations; that she deserves awards, medals, tenure; that her chosen way of life has genuine allure; that she’s even sexy, like a poetess, a politician, a film director; she loves dead bugs, but she’s a creative.
I can imagine a society that would have those genuinely pro-scientific values, but that’s not the society we’re living in. We’re so far from that kind of culture that the idea of such a life sounds satirical.
Michael Burnam-Fink
The Moderators and the Regulators nomad gangs are the most imaginative part of Distraction, and the central question of the book is how Oscar is going to incorporate them (and the scientists) into something resembling American life. You’re very clear that the nomads are complex. They’re the most vital section of American society, but they’re also scary; organized around cults of personality, mob violence ,obscure feuds, and deeply opposed to the status quo. What strikes me as most divergent about the nomads is that they’re actually citizens of their virtual communities. They have obligations to match the benefits that they receive. Most virtual communities that we have today are big corporate marketing engines. They don’t demand anything aside from attention and personal information, and they have no obligations, aside from suffering at the various abuses they enable. Digital mobs, doxxing, and exposure of user data. Can we get better virtual communities? And if we start feeling like citizens of networks, will we have wars between their members?
Bruce Sterling
*Well, before Texas statehood, the Eastern part of Texas had two huge, feuding militia gangs called the “Moderators” and the “Regulators.” They were both attempting to assert some law and order in the wilderness, but they didn’t agree with each other’s take on matters, and, being Texans, of course they shot each other. The whole thing’s been hushed-up since; you’ll never see that feuding episode in a civics class.
*Modern areas of state collapse tend to have armed militia gangs that rather resemble the Moderators and Regulators, except they’ve got better weapons, Telegram and video propaganda. I imagine that a lot of political scientists would say that the basic problem there is the lack of a monopoly on violence. And, yeah — if you can’t establish law and order somehow-or-other, then mere connectivity doesn’t make people peaceful. Mostly it enables them to compile better hit-lists.
*The Five-Star Movement is a non-party virtual community that is currently part of the power coalition in Italy, and they’re not shooting anybody. The Five-Star group are running the Italian nation-state because of their electoral successes. They’re an existence proof that you can start with a TV star and a weblog and end up seizing state power.
*At this point the question is probably, would anybody really notice that such a transition had happened? The UK is falling apart because of a populist referendum; Trump hates the government and the media and governs through Twitter; thing are very digitally weird now, but they’re not framed as weird. We got used to it fast, and odder things are coming. They’ll probably make my musings in DISTRACTION look pretty tame.
Michael Burnam-Fink
Distraction is set against backdrop of the collapse of American consumerism, in a way similar to how Soviet communism went belly up in 1991. 20 years on, consumerism seems even better at delivering glossy gadgets and services, while failing even more intensely at delivering basic goods like housing, education, healthcare, and clean food and water. Does consumerism have a future? And if not, what might we expect from the systems that replace it?
Bruce Sterling:
*I’ve seen it argued that “consumerism” has already vanished and consumers have been replaced by modern clients of surveillance marketing empires. Google doesn’t have any “consumers.” Uber doesn’t have “consumers” either. Exxon-Mobil has “consumers.”
*I don’t know much about the “systems that replace consumerism,” but it interests me a lot that Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft nexus might go head to head against Baidu-Alibaba-Tencent in areas like Southeast Asia. These disruptor outfits have never had to compete much. They’ve never had a shakedown where they have to decide what they’re really doing.
*Dubai used to be a shopper’s paradise that was oriented around importing foreign “consumers,” but they seem bored with having the world’s fanciest golden malls. The very idea of a consumer’s “mall” is archaic now. So the Dubai sheikdom has odd functionaries like the “Minister for Happiness” and the “Minister for Artificial Intelligence.” I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they think they’re doing in Dubai. They may not be tomorrow, but they’re very post-something.
