Bruce Sterling
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By Hand & Brain
[On this time]
Most any creative “unique predicament” has about a seven-year lifespan. After that, you can keep working at it, but it won’t feel like an attractive predicament.
*Modernity hasn’t always felt like contemporary times feel now. I’d be guessing that the current period has a lot in common with the depressed, calm-before-the-storm feeling of the mid-1930s. The 1990s, by contrast, were quite like the Belle Epoque 1890s. Talking about historical sensibility is always fun, yet it rarely amounts to much. People who completely personify their times are period figures, too crabbed and antiquated to be of lasting interest.
[Corporations]
*I’d judge that corporations are fading legal nuisances, states are aggressive and annoying blinkered relics, and all the real trouble is coming out of ultra-rich, stateless mogul speculators…
Am I more concerned by Rolls Royce corporation, the Con-Dem coalition or the Murdoch family? I’d say the Murdochs are the worst by far. They are forces of darkness.
Alternatives are popping up, but I’m unclear on how we’re supposed to get by through the almighty power of pecha-kucha hackerspaces. I see zillions of those and they’re groovy, but they don’t reap wheat or change diapers; there’s something creepy and flimsy about them — “favela chic.”
[Craft]
A typical issue in my own line of work is: why is “steampunk” any different from the backward-looking arts and crafts revivalism that Ruskin was espousing a hundred and fifty years ago? The situation’s complicated by the fact that most “steampunks” are naive sci-fi fans who don’t know who John Ruskin was, and would probably try hard to imitate Ruskin if they did know him. However, since they’re postindustrial digital natives rather than high-industrial Victorian refuseniks like Ruskin, they can never become arts and crafts people. No.
It’s not really a “commonplace preoccupation” to wonder if the twisty vines and tendrils on William Morris wallpaper are different in basic kind from the twisty vines and tendrils generated by artsy programs in Processing. However, Spuybroek says they pretty much should be the same, philosophically speaking; while I’d opine that they’re very different because the means of production, distribution and valorization are all so different.
At this point, somebody barges in and says “what about the human element,” and I find that argument tiresome, because it’s old and doesn’t get anywhere. “Processing,” by stark contrast, actually is sorta getting somewhere. Add Processing to Arduino controller boards, and you’ve got an existent fact-on-the-ground that’s making a big difference to the work of creatives I know and respect.
Aristotle would tell you that it’s all about Aristotle, while the other guy is just a mute time-server who’s gonna perish like the beasts of the field. Do you believe that is so, or don’t you? If you weren’t in craft yourself, and you were, say, just a selfless nurse at a leprosarium, would you still think that craft was of particularly high value?
Philosophers are awful, but if you really wanna be a craft-philosopher, you gotta be ready to get down in their mud with them.
I’d say this “developed world” thing is way overblown nowadays. There are plenty of places where oppression and repression stalk the land and people can’t do much of anything — they’re not backward, they’re tyrannised. It’s not really about having lots of “developed world” phones and traffic lights, any more. In globalization that advantage has faded.
The most “developed” guys in the “developed” world are probably unemployed NASA Shuttle technicians*, and Higgs Boson-hunting European quark geeks in some giant cellar in the Alps. These are the outliers of what we’d commonly frame as advanced Western technology — physics and space flight. These guys can’t really help you. They’re in big trouble and can’t even help themselves.
I don’t want to get all meta here, but imagine that there are two ways for me to answer this query. In the first way, I’m really a superb cultural critic, because I’m just as erudite and concerned as you, but even more so. So, I say something really lyrical and simple and yet amazingly deep, so insightful and interesting that you have to immediately go tell everybody in your therapeutic collective.
*But in the second way, I don’t really have much skill or knowledge of what is going on, or much awareness of the context in which it is exercised. So I answer your question in a way that seems sensible and okay to me, such as, “I don’t really know much about crafting chairs, but my dad left me a chair, and I use it every day.
*So in the first answer, I’m really greatly skilled at what I do, which is obviously great, and in the second, I’m a philistine ignoramus, which is obviously lousy.
However, my responses can be read in another and more disturbing way. My first answer might mean that I just share your values, and the two of us are merely congratulating one another about that. And the second might mean, you know, that you and your intrusive highbrow craftiness really don’t have a whole lot of value, and you probably oughta get off my back.
By Bruce Sterling.
This is part of By Hand & Brain, an essay by 7 people.
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