Bruce Sterling On Digital Disruption
I have watched with interest the reports of Violet Blue and many others from the SXSW cultural festival in Austin every year. I’ll never go, I don’t think, not when even the Super 8 charges $800 a night (which is the rumor I heard this year on Twitter); but there’s much that happens there that’s relevant to my interests, including this set of closing remarks by Bruce Sterling:
I won’t play Debbie Downer in this space by sharing his trenchant remarks on the state of blogging, but felt I had to transcribe his broad-strokes view of the effect digital disruption is having on our prosperity:
Now, most of you in here are not novelists. I’m not complaining that novelists are disrupted and are very badly off, although we are. What I’m telling you is that you’re more disrupted. You are worse off. Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody, including you.
People like to say that musicians reacted badly to the digital revolution, that they put a foot wrong. What really happened is that the digital revolution reduces everybody to the state of musicians. Everybody! Not just us Bohomian creatives, but the military, political parties, the anchor stores and retail malls, academics subjected to massive open online courses. It’s the same thing over and over! Basically the only ones making money are the ones who have big legal stone castles surrounded with all kinds of regulatory thorns, meaning: the sickness industry, the bank gangsters, and the military contractors. Gothic high tech.
If more computation and more networking was going to make the world prosperous, we’d be living in a prosperous world. And we’re not! Obviously, we’re living in a depression.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=9527
Ned Ludd for a new century.
Er, not really…
I find his arguments not dissimilar to those put in the mouths of early 19th century artisans by EP Thompson in “The Making of the English Working Classes”. That is, people accustomed to a certain economic reality affected negatively by a radical change in technology that affects their industry.
I’m almost certainly misreading Sterling’s argument, not having bothered to make myself more familiar with his total body of work, but it does smack of a disillusionment over a revolution that didn’t quite work out the way he might have hoped.
The fact is, we’re in the very earliest stages of this brave new world and we’re a couple of generations away from starting to know what it might all mean.
“I’m almost certainly misreading Sterling’s argument, not having bothered to make myself more familiar with his total body of work…”
Yes, this.
I’m not trying to be dismissive, it’s just that Sterling’s reaction to all of this is a fair bit more nuanced and (especially) self-aware than you seem to be crediting him with. And you don’t need his total body of work. I’m guessing you’re reacting just to the excerpt I transcribed, and not to the embedded audio clip in its entirety?
Thanks Bacchus for this outstanding post. This must have been quite a dose of reality for people at a tech conference, but despite the protestations of “tech uber alles”-types (such as the other commenter), Sterling was exactly right.
Other than those in a tiny minority in governmentally-protected fields, the “digital revolution” has merely served as a deflationary force, unlike any mankind has ever seen. And most people are not aware to the long-term negative effects that deflation has across an entire economic structure, not just “accustomed people” in certain industries. Not only is this economic displacement greater and more widespread than in the past, especially in terms of the number of industries affected (anything that doesn’t have “protection”), but environmental limits, such as pollution & peak oil, limit the number of ways that the entire system can recover.
If you live in a tech bubble, you probably don’t know we’re actually in a depression, that will probably last for a couple of generations. So, it’s absurd for people to request “a couple of generations” of faith in technology, to see how the Jenga tower falls. I’d like to see what people are supposed to do for a living in the meantime.
What we need is a more thoughtful look at what technology does to the economy, and not just have a reactionary approach that says “all tech is good”…then hope civilization doesn’t take huge backwards steps, while waiting half a century, in the faith that tech will bring some sort of utopia (and hoping it’s not a dystopia). In fact, Sterling is right about the time frame…we would know by now if technology would make us prosperous (it hasn’t), and the argument is compelling that technology, on a go-forward basis, is only going to make humanity less prosperous.
Jim, it’s important to be careful and very clear about who “us” is and about the distinction between wealth and prosperity.
Wealth is only “prosperity” if it’s broadly distributed, and one of the things that gets disrupted by tech is existing patterns of wealth dispersal. It’s very possible that “humanity” could simultaneously be getting wealthier (more net wealth) and less prosperous (if wealth is being concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people). Some indicators suggest that’s what’s currently happening, as our economy changes in ways that tend to make things harder for people whose skills and abilities are not exceptional (that is, most of us).