*A scholar just took the trouble to transcribe all of this 40-minute conference rant of mine… “Share it, or stop it.”

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Bruce Sterling

Reboot 11 closing talk

Copenhagen, 25.06.2009

Transcript by Sonja Schöpfel

00:00:29-9

So, thanks for having me up here. I always wanted to see Thomas and his Nordic geeks in action.

I have to say that, having been here two days, it’s about what I expected. That was very gratifying.

Okay, so you’ve been through a lot in two days, and the last speech in an event of this kind can’t possibly be too short. There will be no graphics. Those of you who are into graphics, I would like you to look on Google for a set of graphics called “Studies in Atemporality”.

These are some graphics I did earlier. If you’re a graphics guy, you’ve got to have graphics during your speech, look on my Flickr set “Studies in Atemporality”. I really need some help with this Flickr set.

I know you aren’t going to pay any attention to my graphics anyway. You’re very bright people, easily distracted. Go onto Bruce Sterling’s Flickr set, look for “Studies in Atemporality”, you can help me out there. 00:01:33-1

Okay, you know what’s great about your event? Well, it really matches up to its billing. It’s Reboot.

What’s not so great about your event? Obviously you’ve had eleven reboots. Eleven reboots, people! When are you going to have a stable, functional system? I don’t think you’re going to get one in your lifetime.

Remember that “grand narrative”? That grand narrative, like we had last year? That mythic, breakthrough, interpretative grand narrative?

Well, we got another grand narrative! We rebooted another narrative. We’ve got another paradigm, and it’s even more de-stabilizing and subversive than last year’s paradigm. That’s problematic.

“Action, not words”. Okay, I’m a novelist. You know, a bunch of words, that is a very tiresome action-issue for me. I actually have to deliver a bunch of words, 80,000 in a row, and it helps if they make some sense. 00:02:38-9

Grand future narratives, I do a lot of that, I’m going to give you one. Not just one reboot. I’m going to give you an entire decade, because I think you need to stretch out a little.

I’m going to tell you what next decade looks and feels like as a culture.

But first I have to tell you a story. Because you guys are obviously big on myths and stories, and that’s my profession. 00:03:00-4

So I’m going to tell you an anecdote about Fiat. I happened to run into this guy in Turin, chief of design for Fiat. I was at this event where the chief of design for Fiat was there.

He was explaining the design philosophy of Fiat. Now, you may not know that Fiat is actually doing pretty well lately. They basically wrecked Turin when they went broke, but that was 20 years ago, and now they’ve come up with a better design scheme.

What’s it about? Well, it’s about the Fiat 500, which is a big hit for Fiat. It’s this cute little car, and beloved of people of your generation, and selling like hot cakes.

Fiat made so much money off it, they tried to buy General Motors Europe, couldn’t quite make it before the bankruptcy. But they did buy Chrysler. Fiat’s made enough money off of that car that they’re like moving into Detroit, which is the American Turin, except they’re a hundred times worse off. 00:03:59-0

So our friend, the chief of design from Fiat, was addressing an audience about this size. He was explaining why this car was such a hit.

And, well, you know, it’s 50 years old. And that’s why it’s so contemporary. It’s an old new Fiat. It’s a skeuomorph.

It’s just the same picture of the old Fiat, it’s just put back into a novel, but not exactly futuristic, but at least best-selling, car package. It’s a powerfully well-designed, very popular contemporary car, which is of now and also 50 years old.

I was very curious about this, so I asked him. I stood up, I asked him in public, “Okay, given that the Fiat 500 is a big success for you, in fact an even bigger success than the original Fiat 500, where do you plan to go from here? What’s the future of the Fiat 500? Are you going to release the next car that came after the Fiat 500 historically?”

Because there was a car that came after the Fiat 500 and presumably it was an improvement over the Fiat 500, right? 00:05:16-5

“So if you’re going to revive this old car, you’re going to revive the next car that came after that car?” And he said no. This was an important issue and they spent a lot of time thinking about it. What they were doing was, they had introduced the Fiat 500, and they were watching the demographic groups who had picked up on the Fiat 500. And they were looking at post-consumer alteration of the Fiat 500, and then they were going to professionalize that, right?

In other words, there were young, soccer-hooligan tough guys who toughed out their Fiat 500, special little hub-caps and so forth, racing stripes. So they were going to do that.

And then there was the women’s group who liked the Fiat 500 because it was cute, and they were doing cuter versions with anime dangling dolls on the rear view mirror, and maybe some hot pearlized pink.

And they were tracking that and they were going to adopt that too. In other words, they were going to move the Fiat 500 into emergent demographic groups. This was the way forward. They were looking for emergent consumer groups and they were going to move the car into their social space year by year. 00:06:35-9

I thought this is a really clever idea. I thought I’m in a society that’s going to do a lot of this. And I thought this is a terrible and scary paradigm of the future. Because it’s very difficult for us to construe that kind of activity as progress.

Everybody for 200 years, almost since the twelve hundreds have known what progress means. They know what it means to be progressive and they know what it means to be futuristic.

You get more scientific knowledge, you create more tools, make more jobs, you master nature, you get more power, cheaper power, you struggle for a better life for your children, you’re looking for health, prosperity, material security, shelter, bigger, faster, stronger, knowing more. Everybody knows that’s progress. That’s not what we’re going to get. 00:07:37-7

The actual objective situation looks more like this: No money, scarcity, financial collapse, collapsed states, general precarity, an energy crisis, low intensity global warfare, and a rapidly advancing climate crisis.

That’s the situation on the ground. People ask where did the future go? Where are these glamorous versions of the future? Why are we…? – Okay, we’re deliberately choosing to move away from that and into a non-twentieth century space.

We’re moving into a situation with Generation-Xers in power, in a Depression. A Depression where people are afraid of the sky.

That’s what the next decade actually looks like. And you’re going to live there. 00:08:32-6

I just saw John Thackara, who’s a design critic. I’m a big fan of this guy. He declared in public that the future, the word “future”, is an old paradigm. The word “future” will soon go out of use.

I’m inclined to agree with the guy, actually. I’m not sure that the word “future” goes out of use, and obviously we have some kind of absolute future. We’re not going to go back to the year 1950. The clock is ticking, the pages are going to fall off the calendar. In a decade it’s going to be 2019, we’ll be ten years older, you’ll be ten years older, these are all solid things.

It’s more like a mythos of the future or a structure of the future, or a belief in the future. It’s just not the same. It’s just not being attacked from the same area at all. It’s being attacked from a different kind of area, which I call “Atemporality”. 00:09:26-6

I’m still working on this, I’m not quite prepared to do a big pitch on Atemporality. William Gibson’s a big fan of this, he’s working on a book right now called “Zero History”. He and I are mulling over Atemporality, but it’s going to take us a while to work on this.

Atemporality, if you wanted a bumper sticker, it’s “steampunk with metaphysics”. That’s a very authorly thing to do, sort of a super culture-critic thing. If you want to help me, you’re a theory-guy, literary guy, great, send an e-mail. But that’s not what I’m going to talk about here. 00:10:07-0

I want to talk about the next decade and what comes after your event. What it’s going to feel like to live through the next ten years. It does not feel like progress. However, it does not feel like conservatism either. There’s neither progress nor conservatism, because there’s nothing left to conserve and no direction in which to progress.

So what you get is transition. Transition to Nowhere, as they would call it in the Eastern Bloc. Transition to Nowhere, a very common experience in eastern European states.

No big boom bubbles. We might have one, I don’t expect to see them, I think we had our fill of those. Bad weather, really a given. Bad weather happening much faster than we expected. And global emergent change. 00:10:58-3

So now I’m going to describe a futurist quadrant for the twenty-teens. Except I wouldn’t call it a futurist quadrant, I would now call it a “strategic forecasting quadrant,” because that’s what futurists call themselves when they’re no longer allowed to be futurists. Then they become strategic forecasters.

So here’s your strategic forecasting quadrant. We’re dividing the future up into four interest groups, four possible worlds. 00:11:23-7

Number one, quadrant number one, “crisis capitalism for ageing baby boomers”. You’re going to see a lot of this over the next decade. Boomers, they’re getting old, they’re kind of feeble, they’re not major actors, but they’ve got all the votes. So they’re not going to get out of the way.

But they’re going to become more and more incapable, and more and more attached to crotchety fantasies, and more and more detached from any ability to get anything coherent done. So, crisis capitalism for ageing baby boomers, kind of a majority outlook. 00:11:59-9

Quadrant number two, “brics.” B. R. I. C., Brazil, Russia, India, China. You write Russia out of there if you don’t like oil. Brazil, India, China. The emerging states, emerging to nowhere. The developing countries, developing in no direction in particular. Sopping up other people’s technology, they’re globalizing, they’re not progressing, they’re not developing, they’re just globalizing. 00:12:28-1

Shock of the old. Fundamentalists are in that quarter. Christian fundies, Islamic fundies. You put them in power, they never do anything. Nothing happens, they have no policy. They don’t improve anything, they don’t change the structure of society in any way except ruin whatever is left of the economy and politics. They’re not a transformative force, except for ruin. So never mind those. The vast majority of the human race is in those two quadrants. Old rich world, emerging semi-poor world. 00:13:03-5

I want to talk about the quadrants of direct interest to you. The area where you guys are going to be working. “Reboot in power”. What’s it look like, Reboot in power? Gen-Xers actually running things, sort of. What is the cultural temperament of this era?

Well, I think it’s got a good two-word summary: “Dark Euphoria.” Dark Euphoria is what the twenty-teens feels like. Things are just falling apart, you can’t believe the possibilities, it’s like anything is possible, but you never realized you’re going to have to dread it so much. It’s like a leap into the unknown. You’re falling toward earth at nine hundred kilometres an hour and then you realize there’s no earth there.

That’s a dark euphoria feeling. It’s the cultural temperament of the coming decade. 00:14:06-3

It comes in two flavours. Top end and low end. Everybody in this room is sort of schismed between top end and low end. Because that’s the nature of your particular demographic.

The top end we can describe as “Gothic High-Tech”. Let me explain to you what Gothic High-Tech is like.

In Gothic High-Tech, you’re Steve Jobs. You’ve built an iPhone which is a brilliant technical innovation, but you also had to sneak off to Tennessee to get a liver transplant because you’re dying of something secret and horrible.

And you’re a captain of American industry. You’re not some General Motors kinda guy. On the contrary, you’re a guy who’s got both hands on the steering wheel of a functional car.

But you’re still Gothic High-Tech because death is waiting. And not a kindly death either, but a sinister, creeping, tainted wells of Silicon Valley kind of Superfund thing that steals upon you month by month, and that you have to hide from the public and from the bloggers and from the shareholders.

And you just grit your teeth and pull out the next one. A heroic story, but very Gothic. Something that belongs in an eighteenth century horror novel. Kind of the “man in the castle” figure. 00:15:50-0

Or from a political aspect. The ultimate Gothic High-Tech figure: Nicolas Sarkozy. You’re Nicolas Sarkozy, you’re brilliant, you’re poly-ethnic, you have no ideology. You don’t care about any particular line, political line, and you have no alternative. You sucked all the air out of the political room, it’s just all about you.

The only conceivable alternative you have is “Danny the Red Cohn-Bendit.” He’s like this burned out 68er guy.

There’s very little you can do about Sarkozy because there’s no way to debate him. If you debate him, you just make him stronger. If you ignore him he simply steals your clothes. So the only thing you can do is wait and hope that he changes his mind. And he will, because he will cheerfully campaign against himself.

He will reboot. In six months or eight months, it’s like “Oh, you didn’t like my gangster bling-bling Sarkozy, well how about my top end literary guy Sarkozy? You didn’t like wife number one, wife number two, how about the new one who’s the cool folk singer?” 00:17:03-5

Barack Obama is a Gothic High-Tech figure. I know that Europeans are totally enamoured of this guy. I don’t blame you for that. He’s a Chicago machine politician, all right? He’s not freakin’ Vaclav Havel.

He’s an ethnically indeterminate community organizer with a massive fundraising digital machine. You’re an American, you get e-mail from Obama, it’s like “We love to give you European-style health care, please send us a whole lotta cash.” That’s what it’s like.

They have their Gothic moments. Barack’s about hope, but – You know, he’s about hope, but if he’s suddenly removed from the situation, all hope has been sucked from the room. Just say Obama trips over a skateboard, breaks his neck. Where is the hope? You see any other sources of it? 00:18:14-0

So after this Air France crash, the Brazilian airliner crashes, Sarkozy comes out, gets on television. Why? Because it was an opportunity to be on television. And what does he say? He said, “I told them the truth.”

And he did tell them the truth. And it was a very Gothic truth: They blew up in mid-air and everybody died. You can see the guy rehearsing his ability to convey news of this kind, year after year after year. He’s going to be really good at it. 00:18:55-9

These are Gothic High-Tech figures, people who position themselves in the narrative rather than building any permanent infrastructure. That’s what you’ve been telling each other to do all day. That’s why you love these guys. They’re positioning themselves in the narrative rather than building any permanent infrastructure. They’re cheerleaders, they’re not leaders. They’re cheerleaders.

And if the narrative happens to be poverty, floods, air-crashes, drug addiction, infidelity, whatever, they’re going to be good to go. It’s like the Gen-X temperament, really. 00:19:39-5

Why are Gen-X goths? Why are they goths rather than hippies, beatniks? Why do they like to dress up like dead people? That’s their temperament.

When you’re a young goth, you dress up like a dead person because that’s something grownups do. Dying.

But if you’re an adult Gen-Xer and you’re dressed up as a goth, it’s like “Don’t blame me — because I’m already dead! I’m not morally responsible, I’m not a political actor, it’s not my fault, look, I’m a vampire. Don’t blame me! I voted for blood.” Or, whatever. It’s gothic. 00:20:26-3

What is the downside, what’s the other side of this? The flip-side of Gothic High-Tech? The flip-side of Gothic High-Tech is downmarket, and it’s called “Favela Chic.” Favela Chic.

What is Favela Chic? Favela Chic is when you have lost everything material, everything you built and everything you had, but you’re still wired to the gills! And really big on Facebook. That’s Favela Chic.

You lost everything, you have no money, you have no career, you have no health insurance, you’re not even sure where you live, you don’t have children, and you have no steady relationship or any set of dependable friends. And it’s hot. It’s a really cool place to be. 00:21:17-4

Myspace is a favela. You’ve ever been to a Brazilian favela? It basically, politically, represents the structure of Myspace. You’ve got this remote, distant, old-school Brazilian tyrant. Anti-democratic, wicked mogul, pays no attention to you, supposedly owns the whole show, but the whole shebang is going south in a hurry.

It’s been out-competed by some other economy, there’s nothing happening there. You have no civil rights in Myspace. You can’t go anywhere in Myspace, you can’t organize in Myspace, you can’t make money in Myspace.

You can have a hut in Myspace. And you live in the hut until they pull the plug. That’s a favela. It’s made of instructables. A favela is an emergent structure, it’s made out of corrugated tin and breeze blocks. 00:22:14-4

Every slogan you have here, practically every slogan fits perfectly in a favela. “Action is cheaper than control.” That’s a favela slogan. It’s cheaper to just build the hut and move into it than it is to try to sue you to leave, or get anything done.

“Just fucking do it.” That’s a favela slogan. “So fix it.” That’s a favela slogan. “Always in beta.” Of course a favela is always in beta. You can’t insure it, you can’t get title to it, you can’t raise kids in it. There’s no inspection of the water, the heating, the electricity. It’s a slum!

You built it yourself, with play-labor, but politically it’s a slum. It’s a squelette.

A squelette is a Brazilian high-rise where they built the internal structure, but they never managed to put any utilities or a wall on it. Kind of a see-through building. Because it’s pretty easy to just throw up the girders and the cement part. Some of them are 80 stories high, 40 stories high, they just have no skin. 00:23:28-8

And people squat them. They go in there with the breeze blocks and the corrugated tin and they rent a high-rise favela. The Squelette.

Or a “Stuffed Animal,” which is the European equivalent. Very big on stuffed animals here. This building is a stuffed animal. This is not a place where people overturn society and throw it on its ear. This is like some smokestack industry.

Someone was in here making big stuff. Burning coal, bread, beer, whatever. The building’s been re-purposed. It’s like an extinct animal, like a European aurochs. It’s still got the hide and the hooves and the big glass eyes, and then you come in here and you sit on your stackable European designer chairs which vanish without a trace as soon as you leave the building. This is a “Stuffed Animal.” 00:24:25-3

It’s not an accident that you live in stuffed animals, that you meet in stuffed animals. This is what the next ten years of your life looks like.

You like stuffed animals. Stuffed animals are the curse of your generation, but they’re also your frontier. It’s the place where they’re not paying attention. Like a civilized squat. You can get a lot done in a stuffed animal. There isn’t any other place to go in Europe. There’s isn’t any other place to go on the planet.

The unsustainable is the only frontier you have. The wreckage of the unsustainable, that’s your heritage. And here it is. It’s the old new. You’re in an old new structure.

It’s a steampunk appropriation. There is your steam, that big chimney out there. It’s an urban intervention. I’m surprised you’re not planting tomato gardens here. I don’t know why you want to plant tomato gardens; if you had actually ever been gardeners in your lives, you’d know that this was hard, dirty, patient work. Urban agriculture, not for you. Cell-phone uprisings lead by conservatives, that’s more your line of work. 00:25:45-0

I want to give you some practical advice here, because I know it’s the theme of your event. Even though I’m a novelist, on occasion I do practical things when absolutely forced to do it.

I was shamed by Matt Webb’s “hundred hour” speech, I know what I ought to be studying. I’m going to have to go do it now.

So I want to give you some good advice, practical advice on environmentalism. Specifically, geek-friendly bright green environmentalism. Because it’s one of your biggest problems.

You didn’t do it yourselves. You’re inheriting 200 years of atmospheric abuse, but that’s not going to get you off the hook. And you have your own successors to worry about. 00:26:30-8

Okay, I want to offer you a general principle here. For a Gothic generation like yours, this is going to be painful for you. I mean, really a cognitive upset.

“Stop acting dead.”

Now, you think that acting dead is a virtue. Because you’ve been trained to behave as is if you were dead for a long time, and it actually appeals to your temperament as a generation. It’s your default position.

But you have to stop it. Because Hairshirt Green, which is most of the things that you had on your action list there, Hairshirt Green just changes the polarity of the twentieth century.

It’s just the opposite of consumer culture. It’s like Satanism for a consumer culture. And all Satanists are actually Christians. It’s not really a different way to live. And it’s not something that’s going to fulfil you. 00:27:28-3

Now, how do you know if you’re acting dead? Well, there’s a test for this. It’s the Great-Grandfather Principle.

You’re saying: I’m going to do something morally worthwhile that’ll make me feel proud of myself. But does your dead great-grandfather do a better job of it than you?

For instance, saving water. Okay, water is indestructible, first of all. You cannot possible damage water unless you turn it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then it just spontaneously recombines.

But you’re trying to save water, because you’re told to save water. All right, your dead great-grandfather is saving more water than you. You cannot possibly save any more water than a dead guy. He’s greener than you in that regard.

Saving electrical power. Okay, you should be using less power, power’s bad, you need a lower footprint. Okay, your grandfather is not using any electrical power. 00:28:31-4

He’s much greener than you, you cannot compete with that. If you move into a smaller apartment, your grandfather is in a very, very small apartment. It’s underground, there’s no lighting, there’s no heating, he doesn’t have any broadband.

Recycling, okay, recycling is useful in some ways. Your grandfather is literally being recycled. You can’t actually out-recycle your dead grandfather.

And furthermore, in a pretty short amount of time compared to the length of the problems you’re tackling, you’re going to be dead, like your grandfather.

You’ll be saving everything at that point. You might be alive 70, 80, 90 years. You’re going to be dead for hundreds of millions of years. Billions of years of saving water, billions of years of having a light carbon footprint. It was carbon sequestration. You’re full of carbon, they buried you. 00:29:31-3

So you need to do things that you can do while alive. Do things you can do while alive. If your grandfather’s doing a better job at it, you can put that aside for later, when you’re dead, like him.

Now let me explain how you can go about doing this, and it really is a different material way of life than any in the twentieth century. It’s a geek-friendly approach to consumption.

It’s about objects and services. Especially objects, devices. I think your temperament is actually quite close to this, and this is an area where I think you can do lot of good work, in ways that your grandfather or dead great-grandfather could not have done.

For people of your generation and especially for your children, objects are print-outs. They’re best understood as print-outs. They’re not treasures, they’re not things you want, they’re not things to stockpile, they’re not material wealth, they’re basically frozen social relationships. That’s what these chairs are, and this building, and that duct tape and the rest of it. 00:30:51-3

You need to think of them not in terms of “Oh, I have this pen and I must keep my pen.” You need to think of these objects in terms of hours of time and volumes of space.

I know that sounds very science-fictional, but it’s also a good design approach to it. Because if you’re picking these things up, moving them around, all these possessions, this material clutter in your environment… You’re washing it, you’re storing it, you’re heating it, you’re trying to keep it from its inevitable decay. You’re curating it. You’re looking after it.

These possessions are embodied social relationships. They’re all made by people, designed by people, sold by people, promulgated by people, advertised by people. They’re a whole set of relationships that happen to have some particular material form. And it’s not hard for you to get other ones or get new ones. 00:31:51-2

Now, you can argue that you should economize and just buy cheap things, or try and de-materialize. Not be materialistic, and content yourself with things that are very cheap or very organic.

That’s not the way forward. Economizing is not social. When you economize, you’re starving somebody else. Really. If you don’t give them money, they don’t have any money. And if they don’t offer you any money, you don’t get any money. That’s not a social flow, or even a sociable relationship.

What you need to do is re-assess the objects in your space and time. And I’m going to explain to you how to do this. 00:32:30-6

The king of objects, the monarch among objects are not fancy objects. They’re not high-tech objects, they’re not organic objects, they’re not biological objects, they’re everyday objects. Things that you’re with every day.

Whatever is in your time most, what’s taking up most of your time, or in your space most. The stuff that’s closest to your skin, on your skin, inside your skin, in intimate areas. Space and time. That’s what’s going on, that’s where it’s at. That’s where it’s happening.

Common everyday objects. You need to have the best possible common everyday objects. 00:33:11-4

Number one, a bed. You’re spending a third of your life in the thing. You never take it seriously. Rich people have great beds. You should go out and get the best bed you can get. Money is no object. On a per hour rental basis, beds, super important. The sheets, the pillows, pretty high up there too.

Every morning when you wake up you will thank me for this.

I know you’re resisting it. It’s like: “Why? Why am I buying a fancy bed? It’s bad for me, I’m being taken outside of my comfort zone.”

You live in the thing! Get rid of the wedding china! Get rid of the tuxedos! The exercise equipment you never use! The things you never touch! The heaps of things, the heaps of material objects in your closet and, God help you, your storage locker. Sell them all, buy a bed. Get a real bed.

Get a chair. 00:34:21-8

I shouldn’t have to tell people who work with computers to get a chair. No, they’d rather whine about their wrists blowing out, their spines blowing out. They wouldn’t come up with a chair that would cost them maybe fifteen cents an hour over the first amortizable period. The world is full of beautifully designed ergonomic chairs. Get a real damn chair!

Sell the other chairs, the fancy chairs, the couch, the over-stuffed thing, your grandmother’s chair. Get rid of your grandmother’s chair, it was never properly built to begin with.

Get rid of it. Get rid of it, if you don’t use it! If you haven’t touched it in a year, get rid of it immediately. Sell it, buy real things you really use. 00:35:08-7

Now, you’re going to have a lot fewer things, but the actual quality of your life will skyrocket! If you have real shoes. Real underwear. Women, if you use actual cosmetics instead of shoplifting cheap cosmetics, because you’re deeply conflicted about your impulses. Go ahead, it’s on your lips, it’s on your eyelids, get real cosmetics.

I’m going to explain to you how you do this, because it’s a hard karma. I’ve done it three times, I’m an author, I’m pursued by books, things accumulate. Periodically I have to scrape the barnacles off, but it’s doable. It’s doable and it’s very hackerly. 00:35:54-0

First you need to make lists. Hackers love lists. A chart. You can make a flowchart. Flowchart it if it makes you any happier.

Four variety of items: Beautiful things; emotionally important things; tools, devices and appliances that efficiently perform some useful function; and category four, everything else.

Let me repeat these four things. Number one: beautiful things. Number two: things that have some emotional meaning for you. Number three: your tools, devices and appliances. Number four: everything else. 00:36:37-8

How do you know if it belongs in category number one, beautiful things? Beautiful things are very important. Is it so beautiful that you’re going to show it to your friends? Is it on display? Are you going to share its beauty with people in your immediate area? Your wife, your husband, your drinking buddies, your pals, the techno DJ from downstairs, whatever. Is it so beautiful that you’re driven to exhibit it, to show it off and to share it with others?

It’s not that beautiful? It’s not beautiful! Gotta go!

Take its picture. Make sure you get the bar code, if for some reason you want it back. Just virtualize it, put it in your thumb drive. It does not belong in your immediate vicinity. You weren’t born with it, you’re not going to die with it, it’s gotta go. 00:37:29-9

Number two, emotionally important. Okay, we’re all the slaves of our objects. You’re going to be in there, you’re going to think: “Oh yeah, Sterling says I should annotate and catalogue my stuff, and remove the things that are basically enslaving me! Oh, but not this! Not you, not you, beloved little pancake-turner!”

How do you know if it’s emotionally important? Are you going to tell anybody else about it? “This is your grandfather’s watch, son. He wore this, and I’ve worn it too, and it should be for you. Look at how well made it was. He carried this in battle, he fought for our freedom, look, there’s bloodstains on this watch.”

Does it have a narrative? Is there something you want to tell other people about it? 00:38:15-3

Or are you actually its slave? Is it just emotionally blackmailing you because you’re used to having it around? If you can’t tell anybody about it, there’s no associated story, and it has no possible emotional meaning for anybody else but you, it doesn’t really mean anything to you. Get rid of it, you’ll never miss it.

Take its picture first. Catalogue everything about it. You might want to write down a story, the way it made you feel. It’s all right. You can get another one. Plenty of junk on eBay. It’s just going to sit there, you can click it, you can have it, it’s not hard.

Great-grandfather couldn’t do that: got no eBay. Get it out of your vicinity. Stop dusting it off, stop heating it up, stop paying for it. Just get it away! 00:39:04-7

And then there’s your tools, right?

You’re losing nothing by getting rid of these things. They have no real meaning for you. You are gaining time and light and space and health by removing these objects from your vicinity. They’re social relationships imposed on you by other people. There are powerful forces that put those there for you.

Tools — okay, high technical standards. I don’t have to preach to you about this. Be very demanding of these tools. Do not make do with broken stuff. You’re going to meet lots of Hairshirt Greens, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s perfectly good! Look, it’s only a little bit splintery! Put some duct tape on it, it’s fine!”

Do not make do with broken stuff. There’s nothing more materialistic than doing the same job five times because your tools are inferior. You should understand this, you should be trying to reward best practices from people. 00:39:59-4

Go out and buy real stuff! Stuff that functions. You’re knowledgeable people in this area.

However, you have to look out for time-sucking beta-rollout crap. Because that’s the dark side of your tool fixation.

Are you really experimenting with this stuff? You’ll claim that, “Oh look, it’s nice, I think I’d better get it, it might be useful! I’ve got its sisters and its brothers. It’s marked down! It must be in my home.”

Okay, are you really “experimenting”? How do you know if you’re really experimenting? You’re working on it methodically and you’re publishing the results! It’s not an experiment if you don’t publish the results in some verifiable and falsifiable form, okay?

“I just needed it. No, no, it was mine, mine, mine, me, the shiny tech-boy jackdaw! I had to, like, have it. In my underwear drawer.”

If you’re not telling other people about it, you’re not experimenting with it! You’re enslaved by the thing. Put down the shiny gadget, go look in the shiny mirror.

If you’re experimenting, you’ve got to be sharing the knowledge. Just put it out there, be brave! Be brave. Tell other people. Share it, or stop it! 00:41:28-3

And everything else. Category four, everything else. Virtualize it, store the data, get rid of it.

Tons of stuff. Tons of stuff! You’re going to need help. You’re going to be crying hot bitter tears about this one. Number four, colossal category. Probably 80 percent of whatever’s in your immediate vicinity. It’s going to arrive like barnacles.

This is a hard discipline. It’s a hard thing to do, really hard. It’s not the sort of thing you do on impulse after you leave a tech conference.

It’s the sort of thing you do when a spouse dies. It’s the sort of thing you do when you move to another city. It’s the sort of thing you do when a child is born, or a child leaves your home. It’s the sort of thing you do after a divorce. You have to pick a moment when you can cleave into it, because it’s tough.

It’s not a thing to do on impulse. I don’t urge you to do it right now. I urge you to think about it. 00:42:28-2

I think you should go home, catalogue what you’ve got, morally prepare yourself for this moment. Because it’s going to come. It comes in everybody’s lives. It’s going to come in yours, probably a lot more often in your lives than the lives of people whose lives are going to be a little less turbulent.

But if you’re morally prepared for it, it’ll actually help you lessen the shock. You’ll be like, “Okay, I’m ready. This moment, I’ve been plotting and scheming about this, the moment where I rid myself of this dross and come face to face with some more authentic version of myself.”

It’s not going to hurt you to lose all these things. You don’t need them. After you go through this particular discipline, you will look different, you will act differently. You will become much more what you already are.

Thank you for your attention. 00:43:19-8

(((the comic-relief voice-recognition version:)))

http://laurian.posterous.com/bruce-sterlings-reboot-11-closing-talk-as-see