Bruce Sterling closing remarks at SXSW 2007

What he does best is remind­ing us all that the Emper­or has No Clothes, that there’s a man behind the cur­tain, that the car­ney bark­ers are sell­ing us a bill of goods, and you’d best watch your wal­let and your soul. Great fin­ish to a fab­u­lous con­fer­ence. As the mag­i­cal bub­ble pops and all the­se hyper-intel­li­gent and hyper-cre­ative peo­ple dis­perse, I just want to say thanks to every­one who made this dig­i­tal Glas­ton­bury one heck of a hoo­te­nan­ny. Raw notes ahead, folks. Not pret­ty. But Wicked.

Bruce Sterling’s clos­ing remarks, SXSW Inter­ac­tive 2007:

I used to be here when it was just mul­ti­me­dia and I’d invite every one over for beer. Can’t do that any­more, so now I just bat cleanup and come here to lev­el with peo­ple I respect. Last year talked about RFID and vir­tu­al as actu­al, and I could do that again, but I don’t want to. I just want to offer one exam­ple: every­body has spy chips in their wrist bands. They are not hook­ing your wrist­band up to your web­site or to your twit­ter pro­file or to your flikr set or your youtube or the sys­tem that took your dig­i­tal pic­ture when you got your badge. They’re not doing that.

This is the year of video on the net. And it´s kind of a stu­pid year and a stu­pid medi­um Tv is the dumb­est med­dia. It’ s use­fu­lo see­ing vieo being metab­o­lized by the web. Peo­ple repeat­ed­ly ask me to do video and I´m streamed as a mat­ter of course, so it has reached a tip­ping point.

War to the knife between via­com and google. Old Media vs New Media. Con­ver­gence? TV guys talk about inter­net grow­ing up and being more like film and tv. Bu the old guard is liv­ing on arti­fi­cial scar­si­ty, and broad­band is eat­ing every­thing in its path.

There are fears that the inter­net will get stepped on. But the teens are com­ing. The denizens of the web don’t care about old media.

I don’t like to use the word hope, because I don’t think it’s an appro­pri­ate word for a futur­ist to use. Hen­ry Jenk­ins Con­ver­gence Cul­ture book impor­tant book. Welath of Net­works, reads like Das Kap­i­tal. Not sen­ti­ments but den­si­ty. Then there’s a chrome dome Lev Manovich — Soft Cin­e­ma. Com­ing from three dif­fer­ent areas cul­tura, legal media stud­ies. Talk­ing about same kind of groundswell of devel­op­ment. Accept­able face of Richard Stall­man.. Richard is a rad­i­cal vision­ary, but you can’t take him in crack cocaine dos­es and get him into the cir­cles of pow­er. But the­se guys are ana­lyt­ic aca­d­e­mic speak­ers.

A polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment is always inter­est­ed in new mod­els that might increase people’s wealth and pow­er.

comes a time to sweep old out, rename every­thing. New Years I looked up obscure stuff and I realised infor­ma­tion IS free. I’m trained to find arcane knowl­edge by dif­fi­cult means, here’s this free tool that gives me tor­rents. Pitch Google and Wikipedia togeth­er and it’s game over for the 80s. Avail­able to all, pow­er­ful, grow­ing vis­i­bly in front of you. It’s not an areas of strug­gle, it’s just kind of done.

If you hang out in the sec­ond world and the third world, you find the sec­ond world is miss­ing, we need a new vocab: The first world is glob­al cap­i­tal­ism (Mar­ket World) sec­ond is gov­er­nance the EU, the state local and fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, and the new Third World Com­mons based Peer pro­duc­tion. It’s not com­mu­nism, not the state. It’s a com­mon based we world of not for prof­it agglom­er­ate. Then there’s the fourth world where they are just tear­ing up the roads and aban­don­ing the map.

Peo­ple think this new third world is weak but it has just nev­er been put into mass scale pro­duc­tion. Hen­ry Jenk­ins would say you can use new media to defeat the pol­i­tics of fear. But I say there’s just a tran­fer­ence of fear. I don’t think the social net­works are frag­ile, they will prove to be resilient. Things that are busi­ness­es stop being bus­niess­es. Jour­nal­ists wor­ry about Craig’s list. If he was Mogol, peo­ple would under­st­nat him. They can’t fig­ure out a guy who just wants 2.5 mil­lion friends. He has gut­ted the rev­enue streams of news­pa­pers the world over. They expect this guy to be a cutrhroat. The jour­nal­ists want to know why they have to live like peop/le con­tribut­ing to Wikipedia. if some­body tries to acquire your busi­ness you can fight back, but if peo­ple are simp/ly replac­ing you with peo­ple who work bet­ter and cheap­er and faster than you thourgh com­mons-based peer pro­duc­tion, how do you nan­dle that? Peer to peer netork will out­ship any­thing you can ever make.

I don’t want to sug­gest it to be a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty. It’s a new world of Lap­top Gyp­sies vul­ner­a­ble to lynch mobs and dun­der­heads. There are down­side to too much fan involve­ment in Fan art. Fan art is not good. No paint­ing by com­mit­tee is going to be a good paint­ing. FFans with so lit­tle cre­ativ­i­ty that they have to repur­pose Har­ry Pot­ter char­ac­ters? It’s a sow’s ear. And pig farms are fine. Just don’t call it silk.

Mashups. Peo­ple love to pre­tend it’s great cre­ativ­i­ty. Nobody will lis­ten in ten years. They are nov­el­ty they have no stay­ing pow­er. It’s a pas­tiche. It’s like mag­a­zine col­lage. It can have a tremen­dous pow­er, audi­ence, but it’s not tremen­dous­ly good. But we need to be hon­est that it’s not art.

Soft cin­e­ma: dig­i­tal tools are melt­ing all media down into a slum gul­ley. It used to be you worked in pho­to or text or video, but the­se dis­tinc­tions go away if you have pow­er­ful enough com­pos­ite tools. Effects are the means of pro­duc­tion. not one untouched frame in a hol­ly­wood movie. Any­body can grab a com­pos­i­tor now and be in a posi­tion to do that kind of con­struc­tion.

Media is NOT con­verg­ing. It’s just dif­fer­ent flavours com­ing out of the same machine. Doesn’t make us all artists, just give us dif­fer­ent frames to look at streams of ones and zeros.

I fret about it. Looks like Cuisin­eArt. When you have a laser, every­thing looks laser­able. If you have cuisi­nart and can do and extrud­ed media pro­duct and can pitch it over broad­band. It’s not the way for­ward, it’s a new capaic­ty. Deviant Art? Inter­est­ing stuff. Not great. Noth­ing Great. 20, 30 mil­lion peo­ple? Even with 200 mil­lion. I don’t know why, but I think it has to do with the ease of pro­duc­tion. I’m not an elit­ist, folk cul­ture is a valu­a­bel thing, but the down­side is folk cul­ture is for HICKS!

We need a new form of media crit­i­cism, and aban­don music crit­i­cism, film crit­i­cism, and the bar­ri­ers are melt­ing and some­body has to apply dis­ci­plined analy­sis. Now we’re fetishiz­ing the process and not look­ing at the effects.

55 mil­lion blogs and some of them have to be good? No, actu­al­ly. There won’t be that many around in ten years. I’ ll be sur­prised in 2017 if any­one uses the word Blog.

Look at this look at this look at this is like being beat­en to death with crou­tons.

It’s hard to find a blog that will make you cry, or has the effect of fine art.

And weird: three para­graphs, youtube, hotlinks, flickr set, digg this.

We bare­ly have a web design cri­tique that is wor­thy of the term and this medi­um is tran­for­ma­tive. It may nev­er aspire to great­ness because the gournd is being eat­en out from under it.

I’m sus­pi­cious of new media tech­nolo­gies that mean turn­ing on an infor­ma­tion machine and then leav­ing the room. It’s not a mode of self expres­sion, it’s amode of machine expres­sion. It’s often a form of semi­otic pol­lu­tion.

95% of the net is machine gen­er­at­ed rob­bery and gib­ber­ish. Spam. Imag­ine if every time you turned on your TV some­one tried to rob you. Or you go to the cin­e­ma and all the peo­ple are pick­pock­ets.

Go look up the for­mer head of FCC Reid Hundt. Has this weary look of Wash­ing­ton bureau­crats, best and the bright­est hav ethis weary look. He ws involved in auc­tion­ing broad­cast spec­trum. That´s like chlo­ro­form in print. He has come up with a mad scheme to sell the 700 mhz part of the broad­band spec­trum to emer­gen­cy ser­vices and YOU. Take it away from TV. If you like TV you get satel­lite or you buy DVD. Oth­er­wise it’s for the semi edu­cat­ed, the shut ins, a low medi­um that debas­es the pover­ty strick­en peo­ple that watch it.

Broad­c­st tv was bad even BEFORE Amer­i­can Idol. Dal­las was at least glob­al­ly pop­u­lar. Just not many peo­ple being served by tow­er, so take those powe­ful sig­nals and just put the inter­net on them. And you just sat­u­rate TV areas with broad­band inter­net. It would only take a few chan­nels worth of spec­trum. If there were a groundswell… the peo­ple in this room are not pow­er­ful enough. But if Cops, Fire­fight­ers, Ambu­lance ser­vices are in that pack­age, they’ve got the mus­cle to get it done. It could move Amer­i­ca form nation 42 in broad­band sat­u­ra­tion. Semi lit­er­ate divro­cees in Korea have bet­ter access than we do and it’s kind of embarass­ing from a nation­al secu­ri­ty per­spec­tive.

Check out his site, it doesn’t have any danc­ing baloney but go throw your­self on the barbed wire and pry some broad­band out of the hands of TV

Yochai Ben­kler. If you won­der how flickr, wikipedia etc get built. Ben­kler has this idea about how to build the­se things. You don’t just open your web­site and ask peo­ple to com­ment cuz that dies imme­di­ate­ly.

I want­ed to do it imme­di­ate­ly but that is too much workd. you do it I’ll port it.

1. Divy up the work. IT’s a lot you’re not pay­i8ng and you’r not draft­ing you are not teh state not the mar­ket. HAs to be gran­u­lar. So I can add some­thing to it and so can the guy who has spent 50 years in the field. That lit­tle bit still needs to mat­ter.

Mod­u­lar: divide the work up into projects. Prop­er­ly sized so peo­ple can see pro­gres sto­ward goal.

Inte­grat­able: has to add up to one thing that actu­al­ly achieves some­thing in the broad con­text of soci­ety. It has to do some­thing. Cap­ture hearts and minds. You don’t see that in oth­er lines of work. The con­si­tu­tion doesn’t site the­se as prin­ci­ples of amer­i­can gov­ern­ment.

SElf-selec­tive: peo­ple choose to join you. Make it easy to find them, win­nows out. And make sure you have a two way mem­brane of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Some plat­form so they can talk, not quar­rel… the list goes on

Trust con­struc­tion: 21st cen­tu­ry job. They have to trust each oth­er and not many on the interet are. Like con­fi­dence build­ing mea­sures in two coun­tries that have been at war. has to be the kind of thing you can major in. Con­struct­ing Trust By the Met­ric Ton.

Norm Cre­ation: All the­se schemes have dif­fer­ent folk cul­ture vibe. Can i make smut­ty com­ments? Are we inter­na­tion­al peo­ple? Waht’s nor­mal behav­iour in World of War­craft? Sec­ond Life?

Trans­paren­cy: Can’t just stand behind the cur­tain. Author­ship, writ­ing fic­tion is the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. But that doesn’t work with social­ly based peer based pro­duc­tion.

Mon­i­tor­ing: you need a police force. Make sure nobody is putting in weird code.
Griefers, hack­ers thieves and if you don’t mon­i­tor you get torn up.

Peer Review: Every­body needs to know who is good at what they do. This moti­vates peo­ple a lot because they all aspire to being the gold­ent idol.

Dis­ci­pline: it is hard to do good work. It’s easy to turn on the infor­ma­tion machine and walk out of the room.

Fair­ness: make sure nobody has invent­ed a giant exploita­tion machine. Is web 2.0 the means for the intel­li­gen­sia to exploit the pro­le­tari­at? Fiendish­ly enter­tain­ing each oth­er on MySpace while Rupert Mur­doch pock­ets mon­ey to fur­ther his right wing agen­da. And yeah, that’s one way to look at it.

For­mer pro­fes­sions are falling apart. There are a whole lot of things that used to be busi­ness that are just melt­ing like the Arc­tic, and there’s a lot of hun­gry polar bears — the tel­cos…

I don’t know how long a thing like Slash­dot can sur­vive. It wasn’t a bad run for a bunch of guys called com­man­der taco, but they are bieng eat­en alive by Digg and their ilk. The hard­ware is rad­i­cal­ly unsta­ble. Intel 8088?

Al Qaeda is the num­ber one social­ly moti­vat­ed peer pro­duc­tion con­tent based. And they have this whole thing licked. Norm cre­ation? It used to be called mass sui­cide, now it’s polit­i­cal genius. Peer review? peopole know who is heavy. Dis­ci­pline? boy ahve thy got that’ Insti­tu­tion­al sta­bil­i­ty? yep , hard to kill. And more come pour­ing through the cracks. They are issue one. The are exis­tence proof of the poten­cy of this mod­el. Fourth gen­er­a­tion war­fare groups. Lead­er­less cells of the KKK.

Ben­kler says in order to make this work we have to recog­nise that com­put­ers are plat­forms for self expres­sion and not well-behaved appli­ances. com­put­ers stink. Trech­er­ous, full of barbed wire, per­me­a­nent beta, painful, steep learn­ing curve, high­ly inno­v­a­tive.

When you see some­thing that bare­ly works, like ubun­tu lin­ux you are see­ing a weapon of com­mons based peer pro­duc­tion. Beca­suse it stinks and it’s painful.

What do you make of all that. One oth­er think about Ben­kler. He threw open a wiki. Dis­trib­ut­ed book in PDF you don’t have to pay for it. Opened a wiki for peo­ple to help explore all the exctit­ing aspects of this world chang­ing con­cept. Bu there is nobody there. Because it’s easy to post a com­ment but it’s real­ly hard to be as smart as Ben­kler. There’s just this vast echo. Where you can go to any knuck­le­head site of any paja­ma mujuhadein and find the tor­rents of agree­ment. This is a very intel­li­gent group of peo­ple, there may be two or three of you that can help him. It’s cer­tain­ly out of my league. But if you are in his league, you ought to go help him. hyou will derive some ben­e­fit and may­be you can help all of us.

Last year I read this Amer­i­can poem about peo­ple suf­fer­ing and it was tough and bit­ter. Well I want to change that back with apo­em by a guy who suf­fered a lot Czes­los Milosz who did the 60s sev­en­ties disident thing and paid some dues. He wrote this poem in Berke­ley. He set­tled down in Cal­i­for­nia, and he wrote this poem about ser­en­ti­ty and a sense of ful­film­ment. May­be this is some­thing we under­vlaue.

GIFT

Fog lift­ed ear­ly, I worked in the gar­den.
Hum­ming­birds were stop­ping over hon­ey­suck­le flow­ers.
There was no thing on earth I want­ed to pos­sess.
I knew no one worth my envy­ing him.
What ever evil I had suf­fered, I for­got.
To think that I was once the same man did not embar­rass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straight­en­ing up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

-Czes­law Milosz, Berke­ley, 1971