inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#0 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Mon 01 Jan '01 (07:03 PM)

This is our second "state of the future" discussion with author Bruce Sterling, who began last year's discussion with this description of his work: "I decided some time back my core competency was in being 'an artist whose theme is the impact of technology on society.' This is a good definition because it allows me to meddle in a lot of stuff with a clear conscience. "But my business card says 'Author / Journalist.' Author because you can be one without being much of anything in particular. Journalist because you get to ask lots of questions and nobody finds that peculiar." So Bruce wears two hats, or perhaps two heads: he's a prolific author of "hard" science fiction, and a brilliant gonzo journalist focusing on themes of science, technology, and society. But there's more: he's a professional futurist whose speculative imaginings are contained by his finely-tuned bullshit detector. He's a public speaker popular for his wit in delivering rants structured around razor-sharp insights about the subject du jour. And he's an effective online activist, mostly through his Viridian Design Movement. The Viridian goal is to raise consciousness about environmental degradation and global warming through ad hoc distributed development of stylized design strategies, as opposed to the drab doctrinaire approach of your average tree-hugging work-shirt environmentalist. Bruce recently published his latest novel, _Zeitgeist_, a fiction about the state of the human narrative in 1999, with the chaotic end of the second millennium approaching. We're beyond that now; the millennium has just turned, and the world is almost too strange for words. But that never stopped us before, so we're game for more discussion: the state of the world and the known universe, circa 2001, according to the Viridian pope-emperor Bruce Sterling. Reference sites: http://www.well.com/~mirrorshades The web site for the WELL's Mirrorshades conference, which is a kind of post-cyberpunk log of high weirdness. http://www.viridiandesign.org The official web site of the Viridian Design Movement.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#1 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Mon 01 Jan '01 (07:08 PM)

It's 2001, and I'm still waiting for that PanAm flight to the moon! How do you think the Clarke/Kubrick vision has panned out, and what does that say about science fiction, futurism, and the art of prediction?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#2 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Tue 02 Jan '01 (04:12 PM)

Personally, I think that one buffer year for the 21st century is plenty. I'm ready to treat 2001 as 2002 and get on with it. The movie 2001 could turn into an interesting contemporary film if you subtracted the Monolith. The Monolith of course is the mystical sci-fi McGuffin, it's been sitting buried in the Moon for four million years, never needs oiling, never gets moldy or mildewed. That's because it's made out of 100 percent nonbiodegradable sense- of-wonder sci-fi baloney. With the Monolith shoved off the stage, a lot of "2001" really does look impressively prescient. Without the Monolith, you don't need the Jupiter Mission. HAL doesn't have to appear in the movie. HAL has got his hands full just being an overworked, broken-down Internet router or something.... There's no astronauts, no super-aliens, no psychedelic posthuman transformations. Instead, you'd have a film in which the year 2001's business and government people were the central figures. Dr Heywood Floyd would look just fine in the WTO or ICANN. Personally, I'd pay good money to see a movie about what those Pan Am stews are up to in their downtime. I'm figuring they're in Ibiza at a rave, eating sleek little pastel pills and avoiding casual sex with dodgy Eurotrash. Everything about space in "2001" is breathless, wide-eyed and silly. In the 1960s, Outer Space was always treated as an all-purpose signifier: it meant the frontier, religion, apocalypse, utopia, evolution, the Thousand Year Reich and the Immanent Will, whatever. That's contrasted to the sensible way that contemporary people feel about Outer Space, ie, that it's a very large, useless, empty area where there's no workable business model. But, space excepted, the future's daily life is handled in a very offhand, matter-of-fact way by Kubrick, and it's still really good, effective cinema. His imaginary, made-up 21st century life feels more authentic than his carefully researched 18th century life in "Barry Lyndon." Seen today, the sharp suits and the sets in 2001 have a very cool kind of Retro Moderne interior-design thing going on. If you walked into a contemporary dotcom office that was got up in those 2001 white plastic pedestal sofas, you wouldn't think it was phoney, past-it, or out of place. You'd just think "Wow, how archly self-aware of them." It's a remarkably good movie, especially considering that it's all about American cultural dominance and it was made by a couple of British guys. Plus, it was made in 1968 and it still matters. Quite an achievement. People who waste their breath dissing "2001" in 2001 have no idea how incredibly stupid and short-sighted they themselves will look in 2032.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#3 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Tue 02 Jan '01 (05:46 PM)

Having reached the transitional year 2000, you released a book (_Zeitgeist_) set in 1999. How did you come to write speculative fiction about the past?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#4 of 48: Steven Solomon (ssol) Wed 03 Jan '01 (12:56 PM)

I went into the theater to see 2001 as a depressed, timid 13 year old. I came out, not really comprehending what I experienced, but still a changed individual. It really was a pivotal moment in my young life. Over the years, I've seen it again and again, and even in its simplicity and (naturally) predictibility, it still blows me away and inspires me, both in the story itself, and the making of the film.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#5 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Wed 03 Jan '01 (03:45 PM)

I've come to the conclusion that there's something wrong with "the future." Western concepts of future time and future history have been conflated with old Judeao-Christian and Platonic folk ideas. Just because something hasn't happened yet, and you don't know what's going to happen, and nobody knows what's going to happen -- well, that may make the future mysterious, but that mystery doesn't make it divine. The future isn't a stage set. The future is history that hasn't happened yet. Many cultures have a hard time dealing with concepts of time: origins, gotterdammerungs, eternal cyclicity, infinity, divine fate, predestination, periods before your birth and after your death when you cannot be an eyewitness and a social actor -- it's hard to settle down and get cozy with this. It took writers a surprisingly long time to figure out that it was possible to write fiction set in a future time. This didn't happen until the 17th century, and even then it was very rarely and mostly by accident. Even Jules Verne had a hard time building a nice solid futuristic milieu that contemporary readers were willing to swallow in a fictional format. His best effort, PARIS IN THE 2OTH CENTURY, was unpublishable, and he had to debut with a thriller book about hot-air balloons. Most of Verne's books were technothrillers, ie, basically contemporary works set in "the year 186-", an imaginary time that is not quite the future, nor is it now. Tom Clancy does the same thing. He writes books which are basically military hard-SF, but he doesn't have to put his audience through any native sci-fi version of the suspension of disbelief. We're just suddenly in a time where nuclear superterrorists can plausibly blow up the SuperBowl; Presidents and Prime Ministers have different names and backgrounds, stuff on the Pentagon's drawing board is workable, that sort of thing Once I got my head around this idea that "the future" was bogus, I was able to mess around with a lot of the invisible assumptions in science fiction. I found that my science fiction got a lot more effective and spooky when it was set in places like Chattanooga rather than the rings of Saturn. Not that there might not someday be people around the rings of Saturn; it's just that the rings of Saturn won't really be settled until they've somehowe become a place rather like Chattanooga. A place with a sense of native locale, an embedded history, a workable zeitgeist and genius locus, a functional society and economy, that sort of thing. Complicated, boring things. History. Once you make this realization, you can turn the full power of science fictional thinking onto pretty much *any* time and *any* place. You don't have to wrap the year 2001 up in mylar to make it seem exotic. Believe me, by the standards of the year 1851, we are radically exotic. We are really out there. We're mindblowing. An issue of today's New York Times wafting onto the desk of, say, President Franklin Pierce, and attracting the attention of the learned minds of the day... It would *really hurt them.* They might not survive it.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#6 of 48: Gail Williams (gail) Wed 03 Jan '01 (04:30 PM)

Whew... ...yeah.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#7 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 03 Jan '01 (04:41 PM)

1) So how do you define science-fictional thinking, if you disregard the the usual furnishings (the future, space travel, etc.)? _Zeitgeist_ definitely feels like science fiction, because it has none of those things. 2) There's a self-reflexive quality to the book's focus on "the narrative," and the sense of reality as a story we're telling, and the prescience of one who goes meta, peeks outside the narrative to see the possible paths it might take, the possible "futures." Is that quality of Leggy Starlitz something that you see in yourself?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#8 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 04 Jan '01 (03:21 PM)

"1) So how do you define science-fictional thinking, if you disregard the the usual furnishings (the future, space travel, etc.)? _Zeitgeist_ definitely feels like science fiction, because it has none of those things." If SF has a grand theme, it's the disparity between what we know and how we feel about it. There's a lot of terms for this: "Sense of wonder" -- "cognitive estrangement -- "ecstasy and dread" -- Lovecraft liked to call it "cosmic fear". The thing that distinguishes SF from fantasy and horror fiction is the extrapolative element. Let's imagine that we've got a kraken, a giant legendary squid-monster from the depths of the sea. If a kraken shows up in a fictional narrative and the kraken is your secret magic friend, that's a fantasy. The kraken is entering the narrative to assuage deep and prerational feelings in the reader that can't be dealt with in realist fiction. If the kraken rends and devours you and then vanishes from human ken, it's horror. It's important that the kraken never be fully understood, and that it should vanish, because a horror that is permanent and in broad daylight is not a "horror" -- that's just a way of life. But if we somehow find out how much the kraken weighs, plus a string of weird, intriguing facts about its natural history, culminating in a plot twist that allows us to defeat or maybe even domesticate the kraken, then we're in a science fictional narrative. We're not merely parading a kraken because it's a Big Weird Object. We're trying to come to some kind of coherent intellectual grip with its krakenness. Not just in a dry labcoat fashion, either, but in a more immediate, hungry way, maybe the way a hick from 1880s North Dakota might scratch his head over a brand-new Sears Roebuck catalog. The genre's "usual furnishings" -- time travel machines, rocketships, robots that look like your Mom -- those are neither here nor there. Societies at certain times find some of these notions more exciting than others, so they attract more ink, but they're not what it's about, any more than Hong Kong cinema is about trampolines or swords with red tassels. The truth is that SF doesn't have to be about anything; it's the SF approach that carries all the power, while the signifiers are more or less arbitrary. If your head is big enough around, absolutely anything can be a kraken. If SF has a real lesson, any truly profound insight to offer, it's that reality truly is weird. Any structure imposed on it by human intellect is bound to be merely provisional and parochial. There's a kraken in every grain of sand. But if the world has anything to teach science fiction, it's that the sense of wonder is a very frail and temporary feeling. Even a genuine, truly terrific kraken-monster, like Tyrannosaurus Rex the Tyrant King of Lizards, can be turned into a plush little purple bore like Barney the Dinosaur, with his smooth white teeth like a clerical collar. Every wonder contains the seeds of its own banality. '2) There's a self-reflexive quality to the book's focus on "the narrative," and the sense of reality as a story we're telling, and the prescience of one who goes meta, peeks outside the narrative to see the possible paths it might take, the possible "futures." Is that quality of Leggy Starlitz something that you see in yourself?' Aw, that's not a conventional science fiction book; I took pains to mess with that. ZEITGEIST is a fantasy technothriller. I'm a big fan of postmodern deconstructionist theory; it's like a dark brother to science, because it makes really radical, nuttily poetic assertions that are never subjected to experimental proof. A lot like science fiction does. The attraction is mutual, really. Pomo people are really interested in science fiction because they consider it a kind of folk-response to technosocial stress; SF is really easy to deconstruct, because it tends to be written by people who are imaginative and inventive but rather poorly socialized. Whereas pomo people consider themselves genuinely sophisticated, not to be taken in by mere Eurocentric hokum like "laws of nature" or "the human condition" or "common sense." On the other hand, SF is a lot older than pomo theory, has a much bigger audience, and is going to outlive it, probably by many decades. So who is patronizing whom? I considered it frankly hilarious to write a fantasy work set in 1999 in which postmodernism is the fantasy element. In ZEITGEIST, pomo theory is a working system of magic. It allows theory- adepts to do incredible things that are frankly supernatural. One of the greatest and most exhilirating things about reading guys like Jean Baudrillard or Arthur Kroker is that they can make anything seem like anything just by talking about it. There's a marvelous wizardry to their rhetoric. It's a very science-fictional thrill really; it's like that sudden petrifying moment in really good SF when you think, "wait a minute, I never thought of it *that* way -- Oh my God, what if it's *really like that*?" That book is formally inventive. It took a lot of nerve to write a pop novel in which characters cite Foucault the way guys in a space opera might cite Einstein. People have told me that they think it'll fly right over the heads of the readership, but (a) it won't and it hasn't, and (b) who cares? If anybody's got a license to fly over people's heads, it's a science fiction writer.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#9 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 04 Jan '01 (04:19 PM)

I really liked the conversation near the end between Leggy and Zeta, where she says he's "totally provisional and completely without morality. You can personify the trends of your day, but you *never get ahead of trends*." And she says "the twentieth century is already over in my heart," then goes off to do good. That's almost like jettisoning the pomo ambivalence and making a commitment to some kind of meaning. It's like she jumps out of the narrative. Are you going to write more fiction? Isn't there a Viridian Design book in the pipe?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#10 of 48: Linda Castellani (castle) Thu 04 Jan '01 (06:52 PM)

And what about the Viridian Design shooting gallery project? Will that actually be produced or will there just be a prototype?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#11 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 05 Jan '01 (09:26 AM)

'I really liked the conversation near the end between Leggy and Zeta, where she says he's "totally provisional and completely without morality. You can personify the trends of your day, but you *never get ahead of trends*." And she says "the twentieth century is already over in my heart," then goes off to do good. That's almost like jettisoning the pomo ambivalence and making a commitment to some kind of meaning. It's like she jumps out of the narrative.' *Well, she certainly jumps out of *his* narrative. I'd guess that's part of a genuine generation gap; not that you do something different than your parents, but that you do something that truly and irretrievably baffles them. *I'm not worried much about the pomo "ambivalence" part. It takes incredible amounts of commitment to hang out in the pomo scene long enough to become the kind of guy who gets Frequently Cited. Besides, if you make a commitment to just one system of providing meaning, that doesn't mean that you are "truthful" or "faithful" or anything at all worthwhile. Basically, it means that you are a dangerous hick. You are going to spend your whole life cruelly exploited by the first televangelist guru who figures out how to push your one big red button. Are you going to write more fiction? Isn't there a Viridian Design book in the pipe? *Yeah, I got a nonfiction futurist book coming out from Random House. It's called TOMORROW NOW. It's rather like Arthur Clarke's PROFILES OF THE FUTURE, my take on what the big trends are, and what the early 21st century is likely to look and smell like. It has a lot of Viridian thinking in it, but it goes beyond my pressing concerns with the Greenhouse Effect. As for fiction, sure I'm writing fiction. I got some brand-new science fiction out right now. http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/ "And what about the Viridian Design shooting gallery project? Will that actually be produced or will there just be a prototype?" *Well, it's not up to me to produce that piece of vaporware. It's up to Dr. Jeremijenko at the New York ACT Lab. I know that she's perfectly capable of doing it, but I can't tell you if she actually will, or when, or how. *I really have to watch it with this Viridian stuff; it's real easy to slide into a situation where I start design production. Making and selling things, in other words. But I'm no industrial designer and certainly no engineer. As for becoming a retailer, that is a hellish nightmare to be avoided at all costs. *Even if it turned out to be a lot of fun for me to (for instance) hook up air rifles to voice recognition chips, there are big opportunity costs in my amusing myself in that way. If I'm doing design and production, I can't find time and attention to write about it, and when it comes to amusing hobbies, I've already got one: running an Internet list about cybergreen design. I'm better off devoting my energy to becoming a better design critic. I'm no use at design work, but I'm getting better and better at talking about it.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#12 of 48: James Howard (howardjp) Fri 05 Jan '01 (09:32 AM)

Slightly off topic, I wanted to say "User-Centric" hit way too close to home. I think I work with those people. :)

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#13 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 05 Jan '01 (02:25 PM)

You just edited a Time Digital 'flip' issue for January/February 2026. Could you say a little about how you got the gig, how you put the issue together? (For our readers, the issue's at http://www.time.com/time/digital/reports/future/index.html

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#14 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 05 Jan '01 (10:24 PM)

"You just edited a Time Digital 'flip' issue for January/February 2026. Could you say a little about how you got the gig, how you put the issue together? (For our readers, the issue's at" http://www.time.com/time/digital/reports/future/index.html *Well, a gig's a gig, y'know. The editor, Joshua Quittner, whom I happened to know, asked me if I was up for it, and I said I'd do it. A lot of work followed, but it was as simple as that, really. It's both a portrait of an imaginary 2026, and a very close parody of TIME DIGITAL. I got a few friends and Viridian running buddies to join in on the fun, especially a guy named David Rice who runs a parody web-humor site called futurefeedforward. He's kind of a web-centric cross between science fiction, the Onion, and Mark Leyner. As far as I can figure it, he's never been published in the science fiction press or, in fact, anywhere on paper, but the stuff he does is very inventive. http://www.futurefeedforward.com * I have to give the guys at Time Digital a lot of credit, especially Lev Grossman. He took stuff that I turned in that was provocative and crazy, and he made it sound exactly like the cheerful, approachable, upbeat prose we always expect from the AOL Time Warner empire. This when we're talking about topics like cannibalism and spy robots lurking in the sewers -- *cheerfully,* mind you, and in a relentlessly *affirmative, consumer- friendly way.* I have to consider this one of the weirdest cyberpunk stunts I ever pulled off. I love the idea of this demented material hitting people who are completely unable to expect it. I can only imagine guys leafing through the mag in the dentist's office, trying to find the specs on a digital camera, and stumbling across our 2026 list of hot products. That was a grand finale to a really satisfying year for me.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#15 of 48: Life in the big (doctorow) Fri 05 Jan '01 (11:42 PM)

Bruce, futurefeedforward is the best new site I've read in I don't know how long. I'm in awe. I've nominated the "Amazon.com Runs for Washington Senate Seat" story for a Nebula.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#16 of 48: happy I'm nappy (reid) Sat 06 Jan '01 (07:44 AM)

Bruce, what are your thoughts on the convergence of ubicomp and distributed computing? Do you see any sort of technological singularity lurking in the future, behind these forces? Speaking of technological singularity, I've been wondering about this cutout-snaptogether design movement that seems to be all the rage these days. It seems like all the examples of output from these personal fabricators are banal GPS handhelds and cel-phones which equals boring. Does this represent a lack of imagination on the part of the designers, or does it represent a future that is just too strange to imagine?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#17 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sun 07 Jan '01 (09:05 AM)

'Bruce, futurefeedforward is the best new site I've read in I don't know how long. I'm in awe. I've nominated the "Amazon.com Runs for Washington Senate Seat" story for a Nebula.' *Well Cory, I'm with you all the way there, brother. David Rice has a lot of talent, and he is cooking this stuff up and posting it for nothing. *I have high hopes for science fiction after the dotcom crash. The two best SF writers of the 90s were Neal Stephenson and Greg Egan, and they're both former programmers who couldn't make a living in The Industry. With The Industry on its knees now, we may see some great science fiction from people we've never heard of. *I was happy to give David Rice a paycheck for that work in TIME DIGITAL. I kinda worry about him running out of creative steam before some publisher figures out he's a genius. "Bruce, what are your thoughts on the convergence of ubicomp and distributed computing? Do you see any sort of technological singularity lurking in the future, behind these forces?" *Well, I'm a major ubicomp fan, but the thing I like best about ubicomp is that (unlike AI and VR) it's non-Singularity like. The Singularity is a very cool idea, and I give Vernor Vinge every credit for thinking that up, but there's something very detached and mathematics-professor about that way of thinking. The Singularity is a kissing cousin of the Turing Test; it's a metaphysical idea which is meant to finesse a real-world design problem. It's onw of those scientific theorist-vs-experimentalist wars, and those rarely end well for theorists. "You can't possibly build one of those because there's a logical absurdity there." "To hell with your logical absurdity; look at the cool breakthrough gizmo I've got in this box!" "Speaking of technological singularity, I've been wondering about this cutout-snaptogether design movement that seems to be all the rage these days. It seems like all the examples of output from these personal fabricators are banal GPS handhelds and cel-phones which equals boring. Does this represent a lack of imagination on the part of the designers, or does it represent a future that is just too strange to imagine?" *It represents a lack of imagination. The future's strangeness can take care of itself. This reminds me of something Bill Gibson used to say in the early days of virtual reality: by now, they ought to have something where you just attach it to your face and start screaming in total mindblown amazement. Why didn't that happen? The answer can be found in something that the Situationists once said about Surrealism: "The imagination of the unconscious is impoverished." With total creative freedom, with nothing left to wrestle with, to push forward or push against, you're left treading air. *People are still looking for the grain in the fabricator medium. And in other digital media, too. Why is synth music so banal, why is sampler music so derivative, why are computer graphics so corny? The potential seems total -- you can put any kind of noise into MIDI, you can put any color of pixel anywhere on a screen. It's as if a novelist had been told that he could type any combination of letters on the screen and it would become a word, a sentence, a book. But that's not how art happens. Explain to me how great cinema is suddenly coming out of Iran. *Iran?!* But it is! .

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#18 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Sun 07 Jan '01 (09:28 AM)

But is this really a problem with the media? They way I see it is that computers facilitate the creation attempted art by the artless, and the distribution of the crap that results so that it reaches an audience unfiltered by the traditional crap-detectors & filters employed by editors, publishers, etc. With disintermediation we get a lot more junk. But we still have the potential for creative people, those who have real imagination and craft, to create compelling computer-mediated art and design, no?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#19 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sun 07 Jan '01 (09:45 PM)

I don't think a lack of crap-detectors is the problem. Techno-art has a whole slew of difficulties. Personally, I like to think that there's always *some* kind of "potential for creative people," even if your laborinjg away in your prison cell with a pencil stub.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#20 of 48: Thomas Armagost (silly) Mon 08 Jan '01 (01:11 AM)

John Clute reviewed _Zeitgeist_ in the Washington Post. His review is like Cliff Notes. Don't read it until after you've read the book. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24418-2000Dec18.html> Er, carry on.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#21 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Mon 08 Jan '01 (05:33 AM)

Back in response 11, you said "when it comes to amusing hobbies, I've already got one: running an Internet list about cybergreen design." How did this come about? How did you connect the idea of a design movement to a concern about global warming?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#22 of 48: Life in the big (doctorow) Wed 10 Jan '01 (07:57 AM)

Hey, Bruce, remember that stuff in Distraction where every meeting is preceeded by secretive mutual search-engine research on all the participants? It's here, except it's being used by date-hungry singles: http://www.observer.com/pages/world.asp

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#23 of 48: Farooq Khan (farooq) Thu 11 Jan '01 (02:15 PM)

With what purpose does one write about the future? Is it with a serious attempt to explore what lies ahead for the human race? Or is fiction the product of a capitalist culture which centres itself on the principle of utility, where utility for many means some form of mind escape, due to the extremeties of life? How does one appraise SF work? is it based upon the genius of ideas that are explored or the very real possibilities it offers the human race? Which is more valued, a clever imagination where the story is far removed from the human condition and our reality? Or where the story explores a very real future, alternative futures where thinking is provoked to politically act, act to attend things in the present that will stop disaster in the future or to encourage things so that we build a better future? Or is fiction simply there to entertain? and if so is that not to the detrement of the human condition?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#24 of 48: Gail Williams (gail) Thu 11 Jan '01 (02:38 PM)

In some ways, those read as very personal and individual questions.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#25 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 11 Jan '01 (06:45 PM)

Science fiction is necessarily pretty close to a major future trend like the Greenhouse Effect. My getting involved in postindustrial design... basically, it means that I'm taking a step out of SF and toward a practical response to a menace that is getting much less theoretical. After design, that comes an involvement in engineering. Then, emergency services. Then, military psychological operations. Finally I end up stacking sandbags under blackened, roaring skies, if I still have enough strength to get out of my wheelchair.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#26 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Thu 11 Jan '01 (06:55 PM)

With what purpose does one write about the future? *With what purpose does one write about anything? Is it with a serious attempt to explore what lies ahead for the human race? *Why restrict yourself to the human race? Try Olaf Stapledon's LAST AND FIRST MEN. Now that's science fiction, boyo! Or is fiction the product of a capitalist culture which centres itself on the principle of utility, where utility for many means some form of mind escape, due to the extremeties of life? *Oh yeah. I'm totally into the Card-Carrying Agent of American Cultural Imperialism thing. But people don't read books to escape capitalist culture. Mostly they do sex, drugs and rock and roll. How does one appraise SF work? is it based upon the genius of ideas that are explored or the very real possibilities it offers the human race? *I'd have to say that it's mostly about the raw appeal of intellectual sexiness, as opposed to, say, corny anticapitalist utopian schemes. Which is more valued, a clever imagination where the story is far removed from the human condition and our reality? Or where the story explores a very real future, alternative futures where thinking is provoked to politically act, act to attend things in the present that will stop disaster in the future or to encourage things so that we build a better future? *This distinction is finessed a lot more easily than one might think. Learning how to disguise tracts with pop appeal is pretty much lesson number one in the sci-fi trade. Or is fiction simply there to entertain? and if so is that not to the detrement of the human condition? *Trot me out some humans who never get entertained and let's have a look at them. Kind of a sorry lot, aren't they? If we dropped the lot of these sorry zealots into a compulsory hot tub with 24 hour cable porn, the human condition would improve radically overnight.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#27 of 48: Linda Castellani (castle) Thu 11 Jan '01 (06:56 PM)

That sounds pretty bleak. Is that truly your vision for the future?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#28 of 48: Linda Castellani (castle) Thu 11 Jan '01 (06:56 PM)

bruces slipped! My #27 was in response to bruces' #25.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#29 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Thu 11 Jan '01 (10:36 PM)

We had a pretty weird set of visions tonight. We'd seen "Red Planet," which is a decent sci-fi film with Viridian overtones, and as we got home in the dark a herd of deer came down the street and went leaping - huge fluid leaps - across our yard. As they gathered on one end of he yard and nibbled grass, a huge meteor with a green aura shot past overhead. I cocked my ear and listened for the apocalypse. Bruce, if you had the power to make whatever changes you thought would prevent the environmental chaos that appears to be brewing, what steps would you take, before sandbagging?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#30 of 48: Farooq Khan (farooq) Fri 12 Jan '01 (11:39 AM)

>Oh yeah. I'm totally into the Card-Carrying Agent of American Cultural Imperialism thing. But people don't read books to escape capitalist culture. Mostly they do sex, drugs and rock and roll< One cannot separate their ideological concepts from their writing since it is these concepts, which define who we are. What we perceive to be right and wrong, pretty and ugly. Our methods in writing could not have been formed were it not for these concepts. Otherwise there would be no distinction between communist cinema or cinema that is made in Hollywood, or theatre that has been constructed by Brecht or Stanislavsky. Granted people take many forms of escape but fiction books are simply another means. I’m not attacking fiction I am simply making a point that the very concepts that define a society will inevitably transcend into what we find pleasurable and abhorrent. Which will inevitably influence how we write and the subject matter that is tackled by writers.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#31 of 48: Gail Williams (gail) Fri 12 Jan '01 (02:07 PM)

And then the contrarians will wade in and muck up the cause and effect, and the jokers will inject their irony and satire, and the literalists will bounce off of that level. How the culture "talks to itself" and changes is about as simple as global weather patterns.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#32 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Fri 12 Jan '01 (03:05 PM)

Well Farooq, you can go right along defining yourself by your ideological concepts, and I'll go right along being a middle-aged mammalian primate. Hope you're enjoying yourself. Well Linda, I'm not all freaked out about it, but there's no doubt in my mind that if something practical isn't done about the Greenhouse Effect, it's gonna come and get me. It was 112 degrees in my front yard this summer. If it's 118 degrees in my front yard, I'm not gonna be left here in splendid isolation typing sci-fi novels. It's a chronic problem now, but if it becomes a major public emergency, I'm not going to be immune just because I saw it coming. What to do about it? Burn less stuff, man! It's all about burning stuff. We're digging coal with our return keys right now.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#33 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 12 Jan '01 (03:31 PM)

This is the last 'official' day for this interview, but I figure we'll just keep talkin'... Thanks, Bruce! This has been pretty great...

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#34 of 48: Gail Williams (gail) Fri 12 Jan '01 (03:50 PM)

Fun indeed.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#35 of 48: Linda Castellani (castle) Fri 12 Jan '01 (06:35 PM)

You are welcome to keep talking as long as you like. As always, Bruce, a pleasure to read your words. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with us. If you want to keep talking, it would be of great interest to me to address the topic of today's Viridian message about the energy crisis in California, which, as it happens, hits home for me at the same time as it doesn't. What I mean by that is that my SO is a 22-year employee of PG&E so each day's account of the sturm and drang at ground zero has been played out against a nearly-non-stop barrage of media reports showing on the TV powered by our municipal power company, not subject to shortages or blackouts.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#36 of 48: Farooq Khan (farooq) Sat 13 Jan '01 (02:30 AM)

I was simply trying to figure out some answers, hoping I may get your insight and help. As I too once aspired to be a writer but became disillusioned with certain things. You have answered my questions, thank you.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#37 of 48: 'Got To! (freeform) Sat 13 Jan '01 (10:08 AM)

Well, almost Linda. Muni's aren't subject to the PG&E rolling black-out process, but in a Stage 3 emergency, the ISO can boot anyone off the grid.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#38 of 48: Gail Williams (gail) Sat 13 Jan '01 (11:08 AM)

Another face of the deregulation/grid adventures: Family members of mine in northern california have had a storm outage (maybe a tree down on one of the rural raods) for over 14 hours. Food is spoiling, neighbor who is on oxygen is at risk, some can't heat due to electric thermostats. This happens in wooded areas, but usually you can report the situation and crews show up within a day. Calling it in yields a notice that there are "known outages." The area was not taken out as a rotating block with notice and restoral schedule. However, since 1000 PG&E workers were laid of Thursday and keeping rural/remote suburban areas offline helps financially, my sister is discouraged about getting deadline writing done for the course she is teaching, feeding the kid and about my mom's house being heated at all. Thank goodness for camping equipment. I know this is WAY off topic but it does have the flavor of Earth Abides and all those early 1960s post nuke disaster fantasies. Adventure travel without leaving the house...

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#39 of 48: Gail Williams (gail) Sat 13 Jan '01 (11:44 AM)

And of course when I post about it it is simultaneously fixed at the 15 hour point.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#40 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sat 13 Jan '01 (06:23 PM)

Oh, I'd have to say that's just the beginning. Things are pretty lively. I'm a busy guy. If -- for some weird reason -- you find yourself starved for Sterling verbiage, I'd suggest signing up for Viridian List. We're fighting global warming, and we're just warming up. http://www.viridiandesign.org It doesn't cost a dime! We now return you to your regular programming. bruces@well

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#41 of 48: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Sun 14 Jan '01 (07:46 AM)

Hey, you *are* our regular programming! If someone wanted to go viridian on a fast track, what five books would you recommend to bring 'em up to speed?

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#42 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sun 14 Jan '01 (09:32 AM)

Books hell. Go buy an Aeron chair and an IDEO Oral-B toothbrush. I gotta go, folks. I gotta deadline waiting over at DWELL magazine. WELL to DWELL, story o' my life. Just because you don't hear from me doesn't mean I'm not typing. Ha ha ha! Adios!

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#43 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sun 14 Jan '01 (09:37 AM)

Subject: Viridian Note 00218: California Crisis Part I Key concepts: California electrical power, energy crisis, storm damage Attention Conservation Notice: Pitiless analysis of the Golden State's pathetic energy debacle. Should cause no end of chuckling schadenfreude among dirigiste EuroViridians. Part One of Three. ******************************************************* New to Viridian List? Get up to speed with our ongoing obsessions on our lovely, text-crammed website! http://www.viridiandesign.org ******************************************************* (((As readers from the previous century know, it hasn't escaped Viridian notice that California is having an energy crisis. The situation is chronic. It has finally becoming intense and dramatic as bills come due and California utilities face bankruptcy. This pits California consumers against Wall Street financiers. Since they can't get directly to grips with one another (in fact, they're often the very same people), a merry search is on for scapegoats. Losing lots of money always wakes people up. We're looking at something in the neighborhood of forty billion dollars gone. (((This situation is an ugly, multifaceted mess. It's amazing that such a debacle should strike a locale which prides itself on being technically aware. Unfortunately "technology" is best-defined as "stuff invented recently." So even though there's nothing more profoundly "technological" than a vast, hugely expensive, coal- gobbling, sky-wrecking energy network, it's been allowed to slip into fetid neglect and denial. (((What we Viridians would like to find now is a one stop, web-based California Crisis Watch. We need a clean, well-designed place where we can pull up a Leap Chair, munch our popcorn, and watch the state's physical, electrical, digital, legal, financial, and political infrastructure brown-out from the comfort of our own homes and offices. It's too much to ask that we Viridians should supply this ourselves, since we are way too detached, cerebral, theory-centric, global and multinationalist and, uhh, lazy. Besides, why should we Viridians figure out what's going on when California's entire political and industrial establishment is blinkered, losing their heads, and loudly blaming it on anybody but themselves? (((Somewhere on the web there must be a well-informed hobbyist pundit with a sardonic taste for whimsy who is keeping track of all this. We'll give a lovely Viridian star <*> to the person who can find us the most entertaining spot on the web in which to follow the California debacle. (((In the meantime, let's compile a few cogent quotes from various sources that illustrate the extent and nature of the trouble. First off the bat: the link between blackouts and weather violence.))) Source: David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle January 11, 2001 "The California Independent System Operator has downgraded Thursday's Stage Three power emergency to a Stage Two emergency, ending the threat of rolling blackouts across the Bay Area. (...) (((They escaped another blackout bullet == for now. But winter is supposed to be the easy season for California utilities.))) "Earlier Thursday, an underground explosion triggered a power outage that is affecting traffic signals and about 4,000 customers in northern San Francisco. (...) Motorists are reminded to treat broken signals as a four-way stop sign." (((Californians need a lot of reminders about everyday Third World conditions. Maybe a nice paper manual, in big print, for candle-light.))) "Cal ISO issued a warning today that rolling power blackouts could affect the entire state until 8 p.m." Link: Current system conditions at the California ISO. This website shows California's power hunger in real-time. Note the direct relevance of weather conditions. http://www.caiso.com/SystemStatus.html "Kellan Fluckiger, the ISO's chief operating officer, said blackouts this evening could affect as many as 2 million homes. "'We are working with neighboring states to access all possible megawatts,' he said. 'We're asking for all the megawatts we can get.' (((Nice slogan, Kellan. Maybe you should print T-shirts.))) "Fluckiger blamed today's shortage on mechanical difficulties at a number of plants, as well as on bottlenecks in transmission lines." (((These are *infrastructure* problems. They have nothing to do with the political problems of deregulation, or the economic problems of price spikes in natural gas. Californian power demand has outgrown California's physical network. And the real devil here is climate disruption. Nobody built that network to operate under well-nigh constant storms and heat spikes.))) "He also said high seas affected intake of cooling water at some coastal plants, including PG&E's Diablo Canyon nuclear power station. Kelp and debris became entangled in valves, causing generators to be turned off." (((A remarkable weather-related nuclear-power dysfunction here.))) "If rolling blackouts are called for, PG&E has divided its 4.5 million customers into blocks; each block would be darkened for about an hour at a time. " (((It should prove interesting to live in blackout checkerboards like that. What might life be like if that went on for months?))) Source: Don Thompson, Associated Press Thursday,JJanuary 11, 2001 "(01-11) 12:54 PST SACRAMENTO (AP) == California faced the threat of rolling blackouts Thursday as a storm and maintenance needs hampered key power plants, cutting generation one-third in the already energy-strapped state. (((More storms, more maintenance.))) "California's power production fell more than 15,000 megawatts == or one-third of the state's generating capacity == in part due to a storm carrying high winds and heavy rain, Dorinson said. One megawatt is enough to power 1,000 homes for an hour. "Key plants hit by the storm included the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo along the Pacific north of Los Angeles, which was hampered by high surf that blew sea kelp into its intake valves. "Storm-tossed waves that could rise as high as 28 feet forced Diablo Canyon to cut to just 20 percent of normal output. Each of the station's two 1,100-megawatt generators provide enough electricity to serve about a million people." (((On a positive note, surf's up.))) O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O NO PLUG, NO PLAY, SURFER BOY O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#44 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sun 14 Jan '01 (09:40 AM)

Subject: Viridian Note 00219: California Crisis Part 2 Key concepts: California energy crisis, policy aspects, boredom as policy Attention Conservation Notice: So intensely boring that even California's politicians lost track. Part Two of Three. Source: Christian Berthelsen, San Francisco Chronicle Sunday,JDecember 31, 2000 "Genesis Of State's Energy Fiasco "String of bad decisions on deregulation could end up costing consumers $40 billion "Next month, about 10 million Californians may begin paying as much as 30 percent more for electricity, in a maddening coda to one of the most costly public policy mistakes ever made. "When the state's leaders started moving the energy system toward deregulation six years ago, they envisioned a brand new day in which utility companies' long-standing monopoly would be broken and rates would decline by as much as 25 percent. "Instead, when it is over, it may cost customers of the state's investor-owned utilities $40 billion, perhaps more. In the coming year, it could harm the world's sixth- largest economy and send a ripple effect throughout the globe for those dependent on California's continued prosperity. (((Nice move with the emotional blackmail there, fella. What about *California's* dependence on *everybody else's* prosperity? Who's going to bail you out of this mess? Iowa, Wisconsin.... If there's a federal bailout, California will be dependent on everybody else's generosity.))) "This is the story of what went wrong with deregulation, and how planning lapses, serious policy blunders == and warnings that came too late == set California's two main utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison, toward a train wreck. "Power plant construction lagged while demand expanded. Leaders misjudged how much competition there would be to supply California with juice. And flawed deregulation laws left utilities and their customers at the mercy of power companies, extracting the highest price for electricity. (...) "In the early 1990s, businesses were fleeing the state amid the worst economic times since the Great Depression. Energy rates were 50 percent higher than they were on average across the nation, because of commitments to more expensive, environmentally friendly power and cost overruns for nuclear power plant construction. (((Electrical utilities are dirty and lack sexiness, but they don't go away just because they're boring.))) (((Here is the crux of the political problem with deregulation. It was so boring that the California legislature couldn't stand it. So they forfeited the control of their destiny to the one guy among them who was willing to do the grunt work. His name was Steve Peace, and he wasn't as bright as he thought he was. Unfortunately, since State Senator Peace couldn't get his colleagues to concentrate, he had to railroad the bill through with oleaginous assurances that everything would turn out just fine if they just crossed their fingers and held their breath. "Leap, and the Net will appear!" Every single one of them voted yes.))) "Months passed while the discussion meandered and faltered, and at one point it even appeared that no law would be passed. "That's when state Sen. Steve Peace took the reins and tried to make something happen. "The San Diego legislator already had won the respect of his colleagues for his work on another complex piece of legislation, reform of the workers' compensation system. "During a hurried two-week conference in August == dubbed the 'Steve Peace death march' for his propensity to keep negotiators at the table late into the night == the fine points of the energy law were hashed out. "Legislators entrusted their judgment to Peace and the few colleagues who worked on the bill. There was an abiding sense by a number of participants that few members of either house knew what was in the bill or even understood it. (((The dotcom approach to governance.))) It was passed by both houses of the Legislature unanimously and signed into law the following month. 'People were grateful to Peace and (former Sen. Diane) Martinez for taking it on,' said Debra Bowen, D-Los Angeles, the current chair of the Senate energy committee. 'Historically, utilities were a pretty boring topic, and I think term limits factored into it.' (((This is really funny, isn't it? It's chucklesome thing, very human. The authorities ceded any real understanding of their genuine predicament, tried to handwave their way out it, and death-marched the population straight off a cliff in a haze of inattention. But it's not entirely funny == because that's exactly what we're doing to ourselves with the Greenhouse Effect.))) O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O THE BOREDOM DEATH MARCH O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#45 of 48: Bruce Sterling (bruces) Sun 14 Jan '01 (09:51 AM)

Subject: Viridian Note 00220: California Crisis Part 3 Key concepts: California energy crisis, economics, finance, corruption, missing voltage Attention Conservation Notice: Following the money hither and yon. Over 2,600 words Links: http://www.pge.com/003_save_energy/003a_res/index.shtml Energy-saving tips from the hideously stricken Pacific Gas & Electric. Source: David Lazarus, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday,JDecember 29, 2000 "The lights stayed on in 2000, but just barely. "This was the year Californians stopped taking energy for granted. The state's failed attempt to deregulate the electricity market resulted in a surge in wholesale power prices, a tripling of some consumers' bills and financial devastation for the two biggest utilities. "But until the supply of electricity can meet the state's rapidly growing demand == something that will not happen for years == it seems clear that California's energy crisis will get worse before it gets better. (((He said "years," folks. Wow.))) "'Every possible thing that could go wrong has happened,' said Michael Worms, an energy-industry analyst with Gerard Klauer Mattison in New York. 'It's actually pretty amazing.' (((It's definitely amazing, but energy problems can get a lot worse than this. If this systemic failure happened in a state without a Mediterranean climate, the people would die in droves.))) (...) "'This is the ghost of summers future,' Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers' Action Network, predicted at the time. (((Great soundbite, Michael! This aptly-named Shames guy has got a nice California Crisis website. Kind of a nice, crunchy, homemade ripped-off consumer design look- and-feel there.))) Link: http://www.ucan.org (((On his unfortunately garish website, Michael Shames also offers a fabulously boring 20-page document that explains in painful detail why California ran out of energy, and why it can't get any merely by being politically correct. Here it is:))) http://www.ucan.org/law_policy/energydocs/Whathappened.htm (((I'll summarize this document later. In the meantime, it's back to feeling California's pain via the SF Chronicle and reporter David Lazarus.))) "At this point, California's energy crisis split into two separate but related issues. "On the one hand, chronic power shortages threatened to derail the state's red-hot economic expansion. (((Net infrastructure goes broke.))) "On the other, the leading utilities were warning of possible bankruptcy if they were left holding the bag for billions in extra expenses. (((Power infrastructure goes broke.))) (((This crisis should not be split into two issues. The 21st century century solution is network convergence. The digital nets should eat the voltage nets and make them much less filthy and clumsy. Not much sign of this lovely result so far, though. California's hackers think their voltage comes from Oz. Too bad it comes from Texas.))) "Wall Street, meanwhile, started taking notice. (((Uh- oh.))) "'No one wants to hold stock in a company that is subsidizing its customers,' said Paul Patterson, an analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston in New York. 'If PG&E has to swallow this loss, investors will run in droves.' (((So on the money front, it's Wall Street financiers versus NIMBY-obsessed California consumers. These two power-groups can't get at each other directly; they'll have to fight by proxy, ripping the public services to shreds.))) "PG&E placed its power-related debt at almost $5 billion and said it was losing an additional $1 million an hour. (((An impressive burn-rate even in California.))) "'The credit situation is getting much tighter,' said PG&E's Pruett. 'There will come a time when we won't be able to buy power for people. This is going to happen more sooner than later.' (...) "They have chosen to ensure unconscionable profits for the pirate generators and power brokers who are gouging California consumers and businesses,' the governor said. (((That would be California Governor Gray Davis, coining the exotic 21st century term "pirate generators." How slashdot of him. And where's that money going? If it goes anywhere besides a pile of deficits, it'll go to the people who sold fossil fuel to California.))) "In fact, industry insiders estimated that Californians had paid about $10 billion in extra electricity charges since prices spiked in the summer. (((Ten billion is big money, but there's much bigger money in the debts the Californians *haven't* paid. Instead, they've stuck the utilities with the tab.))) "'This is one of the highest transfers of wealth from people in this state to those outside the state in history,' said Mindy Spatt, a spokeswoman for The Utility Reform Network in San Francisco." (((Some people coin great soundbites. Some people == dirty, smog-covered Southerners, mostly == produce and ship energy. They have the Golden State over a barrel, OPEC-style. California's beggars can't be choosers, but that doesn't mean they have to be polite about it.))) Source: San Francisco Bay Guardian editorial http://www.sfbg.com/News/35/14/Berman.html "The Confederate Cartel's war against California "The current war over electricity is a war over the future of California. By Daniel M. Berman "The Confederate Cartel of Southern, Enron, and Reliant is holding California for ransom and looting it dry. (((Southern, Enron, and Reliant sell natural gas. Californians have no other suppliers.))) There's no doubt Pacific Gas and Electric will try again to push through a huge percentage rate increase(...). And the bounty will go to holding companies in Texas and the Carolinas, giving them more cash to buy out PG&E Corp. and Edison International. (((Buying California with the cash from its own gullibility! New Rules for the New Economy.))) "Attorney Jason Zeller, testifying for the normally mild- mannered Office of Ratepayer Advocates, told the commission on December 29 that 'this enormous transfer of wealth ...[is] ... the kind of thing that nations have gone to war over.' (((Good luck going to war with no energy, fella. Empty fuel tanks, busted supply lines.... the kind of crimp in one's style that defeated Erwin Rommel.))) "Is the threat of a Confederate takeover of our energy future for real? Look what has happened to California's biggest bank and biggest telephone company in the past five years: the Bank of America is now owned by a bank holding company based in North Carolina, and PacBell is now owned by SBC Communications, Inc. out of Dallas. High electric rates will also drive business out of California to the benefit of Texas and the Southeast, the bedrock of Republican support. (...) Will President George W. Bush, who believes 'the free market' will solve our electricity problems, oppose further takeovers by hostile interests?" (((These must be rhetorical questions. Oh yes, the Texan Peril is at hand == and they've *got the White House.* Time for a serious policy re-think. The Confederates don't lack customers, so as far as Californians are concerned, it's pay up or sit in the dark. Is it too late to surrender and beg abjectly for mercy?))) (((Okay, so much for the extortionate profits in fossil fuel. Where's the *political* money going?))) Source: http://www.opensecrets.org/news/electricity.htm "Electricity Deregulation "WHAT'S THE ISSUE? J "The U.S. electric industry is undergoing a sea change in the way it delivers electricity to millions of households and businesses nationwide. The $220 billion industry, which has been called the last great government-sanctioned monopoly, is slowly but surely being deregulated and opened to competition, giving consumers the power to choose their electricity provider in much the same way they choose telephone carriers. (...) "THE MONEY J "As talk of national electricity deregulation intensified in the 1990s, electric utilities == not surprisingly == increased their political contributions to candidates and parties. In 1992, utilities contributed a total of $5.4 million in individual, PAC, and soft money contributions. That figure nearly doubled to $9.5 million in 1996. That figure could double again when the final statistics for the 2000 election cycle are known. "The strongest area of growth in political giving from electric utilities has been in the form of soft money. In 1992, utilities contributed just $556,000 in unlimited, unregulated soft money to the Democratic and Republican parties. By 1996, soft money contributions increased by more than six times to $3.6 million. The industry's soft money contributions more than doubled in the 2000 election cycle to approximately $8 million. (((That's still peanuts when you're losing a million dollars an hour. The utilities have been harpooned and they are bleeding soft money. Political fundraisers are standing around with buckets. You think they're going to patch up that $220 billion whale any time soon?))) "It seems that every major group within the electric industry is pouring money into political activities. In fact, there's so much money being thrown around that some observers say Congress has little incentive to resolve the matter quickly. (((A very Russian situation here == crooked pirates feasting indefinitely on the bleeding remnants of the state-supported economic sectors.))) Lobbyists, too, are reaping the benefits of the issue. One lobbyist even called it the 'two-Lexus bill,' reports CQ Weekly. (((A Lexus goes pretty cheap these days, what with that dotcom crash in California.))) "The undisputed lobbying leader in this issue is the Edison Electric Institute, which has spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying Congress on behalf of large investor-owned electric companies. (((Edison Electric Institute are merely the biggest among a vast swarm, but just so you'd know.))) (...) "And then there are the advertisers. As any Congressional staffer or lobbyist knows, publications aimed at Congress have been filled with ads from companies and groups staking out positions on the debate over electricity deregulation. These groups include Americans for Affordable Electricity, a coalition of large-scale business consumers of electricity; Citizens for State Power, a conservative coalition backed by investor-owned electric utilities; and the Electric Utility ShareholdersU Alliance, a coalition of cooperatives, investor-owned utilities and labor interests. (((Plus a swarm of Greenhouse denial freaks such as Greening Earth Society and Global Climate Coalition. It's not surprising to peel up the lid and find a bunch of Viridian class-enemies hard at work here.))) (((Money talks, soundbites walk. So here's the executive summary: Silicon Valley down, natural gas marketing companies up, up, up. Al Gore Info Superhighway, yesterday's news; big, crunchy, energy bills coming due Bush Savings & Loan Crisis style, that is the Next New Thing. Sue your heads off in the dark, Californians. If there's any business entity politically covered in an Administration run by two Texan oil men, it's Texan energy companies like Reliant and Enron.))) (((So now you know where the money went. For extra credit, here's a long, rather technical explanation of where the voltage went. I'm saving all this for last, because these stark facts of life are so boring that even the California Legislature couldn't handle them. If California's power elite had been adding up the watts, they would have known they were coming up a cropper; but since they didn't bother to do that, they'll have to fingerpoint, instead. (((This California energy crisis has market manipulation involved. Of course it does. There are no free markets in fossil fuels: OPEC is a cartel. Calories aren't bits. People *die* to get fossil fuel; it is the biggest, toughest, bloodiest business in the world. (((But that's not the whole problem. If politics could trump engineering, then an interstate legal war on "Confederates" would turn California's voltage back on. It won't, because it can't. Justice comes with a blindfold and a balance, not a generator.))) Source: http://www.ucan.org/law_policy/energydocs/Whathappened.htm "WHAT HAS CAUSED CALIFORNIA'S ENERGY CRISIS J J "(...) It is fair to say that MurphyUs Law has controlled almost every aspect of electric services == from generation to delivery, anything that could have gone wrong HAS gone wrong.J(...) The energy crisis will disrupt the lives and economic well-being of Californians for at least the next four years. J J "We Allowed Ourselves to Run Out of Electric Generation Capacity. California failed to build renewables and cogeneration (...) while relying on out-of-state power that turned up missing this summer. J "We Allowed The Natural Gas Market to be Cornered. Lax federal and state regulation led to market manipulation by the natural gas pipelines and the energy marketers who control pipeline capacity. J JJ "We Overlooked the Interaction of Natural Gas & Electric Markets. Regulators failed to recognize the interaction between the natural gas and the electric generation markets.JJ When one is out of balance, the other market breaks down as well. J JJ "We Tolerated Lazy Regulation. The movement to deregulation served as a convenient excuse to reduce regulatory oversight and authority, to the detriment of the competitive energy markets that were supposed to have been formed.J J "How We Ran Out of Electric Generating Capacity J "In 1996, when the state Legislature passed the electric restructuring law (AB1890),J the legislators were told that California had plenty of power in the near term, but that new power would need to be built.JJ The theory, at that time, was that the private market would see the need for new power plants and would be able to deploy these new plants cheaper and faster than under regulation. J "In 1995, the California Energy Commission issued its Electricity Report 94.J It forecast that California had plenty of power through 2001.JJ It predicted reserve margins in 2001 in the range of 21-23% for PG&E and Edison, when only 16% was needed == in other words, power surpluses of about 2000 MW between the two companies.J J "However, that rosy assessment relied on a number of resources that, when push came to shove, were not there: J "Nine hundred megawatts of renewable and cogeneration capacity (684 MW Edison, 246 MW PG&E) to be acquired (...) were never purchased. (...) The utilities, particularly Edison, got FERC (((FERC are the feds))) to kill the auction as discriminatory against other power generators.J We ended up spending $90 million of ratepayer money (...) to bail out the utilities for killing these contracts and didn't get a single kilowatt-hour. (((California's utilities didn't want to build expensive, complicated green stuff, so they sidestepped the work. That capacity would be mighty handy right now. And mighty profitable.))) J "Nearly 2300 MW of uncontracted 'spot' capacity (1700 MW for PG&E and 588 MW for Edison) from Northwest and Southwest sources who have proven that (1) when push comes to shove, they have very little energy to sell and (2) were demanding cash on the barrelhead to sell what little they had (...). ((((1) The kindness of strangers. (2) Fossil fuel price spikes are for everybody. When there's an OPEC line around the block, nobody's your pal.))) J "Over 2000 MW of DSM that the utilities had no intention of ever acquiring.J PG&E and Edison were projected to be acquiring 100-150 MW per year each, at the same time as they were cutting their budgets in response to performance-based ratemaking incentives and acquiring only 40-70 MW per year each.J(...) (((Don't pretend you'll build 150 megawatts, and then build just 40 because that looks a whole lot better on this quarter's report.))) J "One hundred megawatts of non-existent line loss savings from interruptibles, because the CEC forgot that most of them were at transmission voltage, not secondary distribution. (((Don't blow stuff off through sheer technical ignorance, either!))) J "Add up all of these overestimates and the 2000 MW surplus becomes a 2000 MW deficit, with reserve margins in the 8- 10% range.J(...) These actions set the stage for the artificial shortage of generation that has hit the western United States in 2000." (((That long, eye-glazing recitation doesn't even count the stark effects of California's suddenly booming demand for energy, due to Greenhouse heatwaves and, well, the Digital Gold Rush. "Gold Rushes Finish Ugly," as they say; and lo and behold, the Golden State of California is four thousand megawatts and forty billion dollars short. Californians have two basic choices here: whine all the way down, or invent their way out of it. Every crisis is an opportunity, are we right? Is this a new economy == or was it a mere "New Economy?" Good luck, California! We'll be watching!))) O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O LOSE THE MONEY, BUT DON'T LOSE THE LESSON O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#46 of 48: Linda Castellani (castle) Sun 14 Jan '01 (02:01 PM)

Bruce, thank you for posting those. They do an excellent job of summing up the situation, better than I have seen anywhere.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#47 of 48: -N. (streak) Sun 14 Jan '01 (03:13 PM)

Join the list, folks. The cool points alone are worth it, and _all_ the notes are that good. It's interesting and makes you better-informed than most people.

inkwell.vue 100: Bruce Sterling 2001 - The State of the Future
#48 of 48: can't ruminate too long on cows (roger) Tue 16 Jan '01 (11:49 AM)

Absolutely great stuff, Bruce.