Speaking for myself, all of the economic doom and gloom news of late is beginning to merge in my feeble brain into a mash of free floating fear and loathing. I read about the Baltic Dry Index and precipitous changes in the Federal Reserve and come away only convinced that I should have taken Economics after all. After reading newly minted laureate Paul Krugman for years, I now conclude that he is just as confused. I send email to card-carrying economist buddies and they shrug their metaphorical shoulders- "uncharted waters" is all the insight I can glean.
Now we learn that the US automobile industry is collapsing around us. What is this? Some twisted version of an Atlas Shrugged future? Where is Hunter S Thompson when you need him? And then neurons slowly begin to fire- somewhere in the dim dark past I read about that? Collapse of Detroit? Where was that?
A vaguely remembered vision of post-apocalyptic, post industrial America emerges from my fog. Bruce Sterling it seems, wins the vision thing (not William Gibson?!?). Distraction is the book.
I find it more than a little creepy.
I thought that everything was going to speed up more and more until we found ourselves setting up home sweet home in shipping containers and living out Gibson's vision of a crowded globalized asian/transpacific technobio heaven/hell. But maybe not.
Maybe the whole thing melts down before we ever get there.
Maybe it is Sterling, not Gibson who has channeled the shock of the future (and the mind of Dave Barry). Maybe it is just that I have spent too much time in the company of the USAMRIID and WRAIR types. But I cannot get Sterling's vision of our near-term future out of my mind.
From the Publishers Weekly:
It's 2044 A.D. and America has gone to the dogs. The federal government is broke and, with 16 political parties fighting for power, things aren't likely to improve soon. The Air Force, short on funding, is setting up roadblocks to shake down citizens and disguising its tactics as a bake sale. The governor of Louisiana, Green Huey, is engaging in illegal genetic research and has set up his own private biker army. The newly elected president of the U.S., Leonard Two Feathers, is considering a declaration of war against the Netherlands, a country that finds itself half under water due to global warming. Trying desperately to hold things together is Oscar Valparaiso, political consultant and spin doctor extraordinaire, who has just engineered the election of a new liberal senator for the state of Massachusetts, only to discover that his boss suffers from severe bipolar disorder. Looking for a new challenge, Oscar takes a job with the U.S. Senate Science Committee. His first assignment is to investigate the scandal-ridden Collaboratory, a gigantic, spaceshiplike federal lab in East Texas.
Allow me to further set the scene by cribbing liberally from Cosma Shalizi's lovely review. I warn you, this is some seriously twisted stuff. And somehow Sterling seems to have captured some intrinsic future truths that are now knocking down our doors.
Distraction begins in 2044, and its plot revolves around Oscar's political battle with the mad governor of Louisiana, Green Huey. This gets started with a hilarious scene where an Air Force base is conned/forced by Huey into holding a bake-sale/road-block shakedown; Oscar is among the shaken. This sort of thing happens in broken-down empires with hyper-inflation, terminal political stagnation, and a collapsed economic base. But Sterling isn't just reflecting his recent travels in Russia; no, this is a high-tech information society, so instead of being run by the Organizatsiya, the country is run by networked permanent State of Emergency committees, media spin, pork-barrel spending, and the personal ``krewes'' of members of the overclass. There are better ways for Oscar to attack Huey than to have him shot, or than to have somebody run against him. These center around the Buna National Collaboratory in Buna, Texas, a huge self-contained biological research station, ``funded, created, and built in an age when recombinant DNA had been considered as dangerous as nuclear power plants'' (p. 24). Huey seems to be trying to subvert its administration, so Oscar engineers a laboratory revolution which puts Greta in charge of the Collaboratory. (The depiction of scientists' politics and mores at large research facility is dead-on, though it may be more funny if you grew up in and around the NIH.)
Huey makes trouble for our heroes by sicking the Regulators on them. These are a cross between a mobile nation-wide motorcycle gang which manages its pecking order via an on-line ``reputation economy,'' and a self-sufficient nomadic society of drop-outs heavily into open-source hacking, computational and biological. Oscar counters by getting his laboratory revolution endorsed, sort of, by Washington, becoming a spook in the process, and by allying with the Moderators, a rival set of nomads who use different on-line protocols to regulate their reputation economy. Summarizing the plot any further would introduce spoilers, so I'll say it involves, in addition to the elements already mentioned, self-organizing buildings, the greenhouse effect, Haitian refugees, the neuronal basis of attention (hence the title), the nature of political authority and social order in the information society, the Detroit auto industry's last stand, giant mutant catfish, and the Cold War with Holland.
Please note, dear Kossacks, that Sterling published this stuff in 1999!
Again, quoting Cosma Shalizi in her 1999 book review:
Distraction makes this believable. In fact, it makes so much believable that I'm this far from the conviction that the future belongs to an alliance of crazed scientists and networked biker gangs.
Here's where it becomes clear that Sterling has truly channeled- his 1999 reviewer (a peer and a friend) thinks that he has gone way too far:
The only thing wrong with Distraction is that Sterling reduces America to decrepitude in a totally unbelievable way. Namely: the Chinese destroy our information economy by making all our intellectual property freely available over the Internet and by satellite. I mean, it's a kicky idea, very amusing, very new world order, but really, this isn't going to fly. (Where, just for starters, is the percentage in destroying the economy of your main export market?) Coming from somebody who's world-building is otherwise more convincing than that of the New York Times, this is irritating.
But Cosma concludes with admiration and patriotic stirrings that may be familiar to many in this community. She writes
Oscar isn't so much into restoring democracy as restoring order. Still, this is largely a book about America and what it will and should become.
quotes from Sterling-
``I wasn't born in America. In point of fact, I wasn't even born. But I work for our government because I believe in America. I happen to believe that this is a unique society. We have a unique role in the world.''
Oscar whacked the lab table with an open hand. ``We invented the future! We built it! And if they could design or market it a little better than we could, then we just invented something else more amazing yet. If it took imagination, we always had that. If it took enterprise, we always had it. If it took daring and even ruthlessness, we had it --- we not only built the atomic bomb, we used it! We're not some crowd of pious, sniveling, red-green Europeans trying to make the world safe for boutiques! We're not some swarm of Confucian social engineers who would love to watch the masses chop cotton for the next two millennia! We are a nation of hands-on cosmic mechanics!''
[p. 90]
And then concludes
Admittedly this is Oscar seducing Greta into revolution (she replies: ``And yet we're broke''), but it's also palpably sincere (on several levels), and nicely articulates my own feelings during my rare spasms of patriotism.
And so I leave you on this Friday evening in November to ponder the meaning of the Baltic Dry and Federal Reserve indicies, the sustainability of exponential growth, the nature of patriotism, and what would Hunter S Thompson make of all this.