Interview with Bruce Sterling
Science fiction fans are likely to be familiar with Bruce Sterling, a multi-award winning writer associated with late 1980s cyber-punk genres of gritty low-life, high-tech fables. Sterling doesn’t just spin tales of alternate worlds, he also designs them – and he’s been doing it for a while. In 1999 he founded Viridian (viridiandesign.org), a techno-cultural project, come green art movement with “a built in expiration date” consciously positioned amongst the more “electrical and unnatural” tinges of green. Sterling’s dry, if enthusiastic launch manifesto declared Viridian “an art movement that looks like a mailing list, an ad campaign, a design team, an oppo research organization, a laboratory…”
According to Alan AtKisson (2016), a core member of the avante-garde Viridian fold, “A key aim of the movement was to reinvent products, services, technologies, whole economies, so that they were ultra-environmental — but still resoundingly cool”. Sterling may deny this last assertion since the movement also launched with the determined call for ‘no street credibility’! Then again, things change. At the outset the expiration date was set to 2012, “a date in the Kyoto accords, when people are supposed to be engaged in a serious decline in CO2 emissions,” at least that was the expectation in 1998, “So it's 2012 or environmental catastrophe, whichever comes first.”
What ended up coming first was Viridian’s retirement. After ten years of electric green shots in the dark and tongue in cheek subversion of all shades of corporate ecology, Sterling officially shut the Viridian movement down during the midst of the global economic downturn of 2008. Reviving his energies in new research projects, Sterling later described Viridian as a brief opportunity that ultimately passed, “a cultural sensibility that never caught on” whereas AtKisson more optimistically traces its historical impact through numerous design publications of the 2000s related to social and sustainable design. (https://www.greenbiz.com/article/viridian-revisited-interview-bruce-sterling).
With the climate crisis continuing to unravel I wanted to ask Sterling his thoughts about these contemporary social and sustainable design movements, particularly after leading his own playful disruption charge for almost a decade. Sterling’s parting notes upon retiring the Viridian experiment in 2008 were surprisingly practical and cheering, urging future generations to streamline but not economise, since the economy is clearly insane and we need to reinvent it. “The day is going to come” he predicted “when you suddenly find your comfortable habits disrupted…Seize that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and sustainable constitution”. With each day feeling more and more like that day, I am very pleased to be able to reflect upon the present time with Bruce Sterling over email with all the benefits of his own hindsight:
In your original 1998 manifesto announcing the start of a Viridian movement you refer to the task ahead as one of social engineering, noting that “Society must become Green, and it must be a variety of Green that society will eagerly consume. What is required is not a natural Green, or a spiritual Green, or a primitivist Green, or a blood-and-soil romantic Green…The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green.” Does this still hold true today?
Probably not. It’s been twenty years. Also, pandemics with financial crises and serious, ongoing climate disruptions, they’re not glamorous.
In the last official blog post on the Viridian site written ten years later in 2008, where you officially retired the Viridian movement you conclude that sustainability largely lies in the design and curation of the everyday, in great part by thinking more deeply about how we design the objects that populate and characterise our daily life. Digital networks can allow us to streamline daily life, via simple strategies like cutting back on printing, and downloading files instead of swapping disks, but they arguably also create their own daily clutter. How might the design of digital applications become an act of bright, green environmentalism?
Well, events have played into the hands of the Big Tech platforms. They’re not “green,” but they’re a lot more green than oil and coal companies, and they can profit by dematerializing people’s lives. This isn’t so much “environmentalism” as stripping people’s material wealth away and reducing them to the status of Uber drivers, but it’s interesting that such a thing is so plausible now.
In that last blog you also reviewed lessons learnt as a result of your efforts to lead a Viridian movement and cautioned that aestheticism is not the solution. Instead, you advise that people are more likely to warm to a practice of “material hygiene” that encourages the best industrial design as a type of “moral duty” – More recently, I notice that in your annual state of the world review on The Well for 2019, you state that “What seems to me to be missing now is not more technological solutionism -- we've kind of had enough too-clever disruption stunts -- but some humanistic concurrence on what a modern civilization ought to look like when nobody's much impressed by the hardware any-more.” How do you see humanism, sustainability and industrial design intersecting now?
Maybe yes, in that their practitioners are all similarly unemployed. They’ve certainly got plenty to be commiserate with each other about. Also, the status quo has very little credibility, everybody including the rich and powerful are very disaffected. Sustainability’s not working, but neither is anything else.
The original manifesto for the Viridian movement, written in 1998 was forward dated January 2003, and included a built-in end goal date of no later than 2012, although the movement ended up being officially retired in 2008. Looking back from our future vantage point now, what do these shifting time/generational zones imply about the sort of effort required to solve a crisis like climate change that won’t go away and keeps getting worse?
Well, one does what one can and it’s a good idea to start no major effort without a clearly defined exit strategy. Also, you don’t have to “win.” For instance, literary problems don’t go away; new generations just confront them under new conditions. You can “win” a prize for a novel which some jury decides to award to you, but you don’t win the novel; if you write a novel that’s successful, people will just nag you to do another one.
I didn’t rescue our stricken planet with the Viridian movement, but when it was done I was a design critic and design teacher as well as a science fiction writer, so the progression of time in fact had an effect on me — I was transformed by it.
In the original manifesto you also consider the possibility of a Viridian revival one day – “‘Neo-Viridian’ ‘retroviridian’…’greenpunk’ even”, however pointedly, in your last blog post dated 2008 you state that is a matter for future generations to decide. If the Viridian movement is ever to be revived what ethos would you hope survives? What might lessons learnt during the course of the Viridian movement offer for future green design efforts?
Everybody wants to reinvent the world, but historical awareness of previous design movements is a good idea. Design movements have a pastiche-like quality, they’re never entirely new but made of broken-up, scavenged and recombined cultural elements combined with some actual novelty. Also, they do best when they’re not too insular but are tied in with broader aspects of change from outside the design world.
Also, they ought to be fun. If they feel like a dutiful chore, you’ll burn out quickly. When I look back at Viridian it feels adventurous, like a lively and motivating thing, it wasn’t cruel, grim or full of chastisement; it wasn’t exactly “hopeful” but at least it was full of potential and variety, and didn’t pretend to have all the answers.