I really should take much greater pains to make sure I’m at South By
Southwest Interactive Festival next year. Once again, I missed Bruce Sterling’s usual
excellent keynote, followed by his equally excellent party. Cory took
notes, and here are some snippets:
My next book is a technothriller called Zenith Angle,
near future — it’s an sf novel, but not set in the future. Gibson’s
doing this too. It’s a trend among aging cyberpunks. It’s not cyberpunk, it’s not steampunk, it’s NOWpunk.
You’ve gotta be tired, weary and grey to set your sf in the present day.
This is a genius administration for inspiring angry rhetoric. It’s got
a nice, interesting consistency. I like Rumsfeld, I dig his poetry. Job
one in the Bush Admin is to get it spun: they’re an
info-war-centric outfit. If you get it spun, you don’t need to get it
done.
Controlling the message is more important to them than controlling the
underlying reality. It’s a blatant part of their ideology. Their global
climate change policy is in defiance of the laws of physics, it’s Lysenkoism. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a page documenting the Bushies’ Lysenkoism from climate change to on.
It’s popular to freak out over Indian offshoring, but that’s shortsighted. If you really want 1BB people to remain ignorant and
backward forever, why not embrace it at home? Were we more prosperous
during the century when the American South was backwards and ignorant?
Indians are opposed to this, too! There’s a spinning wheel on the
Indian flag — Ghandi’s wheel, with which he made his own clothes to
frustrate multinational English clothes corporations. Not only was he
relentlessly against offshoring, but in order to effect change, he spun
his own fibres. Always! He was always making his own clothes with his
own hands all the damn time: he made that simple cruddy loincloth with
his own hands.
The Spanish PM lost his job for bullshitting, for spinning the train attack as Basques when it was obviously Al Quaeda. In Spain
they’re tired of bullshit. They followed the PM to the poll and booed
him: Put down that ballot, you lying son of a bitch. They were sick of
the deceit. It wasn’t the war, it was the policy of spin and feeding
lies. It’s the dismal business.
Coming up: Martin Rees, a UK scientist thinks that the chances of our
civilization surviving the 21st century are 50-50. I’ve met him, he’s
got his facts straight.
I’m cheered up by that! 50-50! Those are great damned odds. This year
was the 50th anniversary of the Bikini Atoll test, since the
crust-busting bomb was invented, and we haven’t blown ourselves up.
We’re up to 50-50!
I watch sustainability — the 20th Century isn’t do-able. We need to
work on this. Austin’s a good city to watch people try to solve things.
Austin’s a happy place, and imperiled, but doing the right thing. I
take comfort in Havel’s statement about hope: “This isn’t a facile
expectation that things will turn out well, but the conviction that
what you’re doing makes sense no matter how things turn out.” And
that’s what Austin is up to.
Once again, Cory’s full notes are here.
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Check out Heath Row's amazing coverage of sxsw on the FastCompany blog at http://blog.fastcompany.com/ , including the Sterling talk
Heath's conference blogging is nearly transcriptive--I don't know how he does it, but I'm awfully glad he does.