Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2009  

Bruce's annual start of year "overview of Things in General, the State of the World, Where We Have Been and Where We are Tending" at the Well is on once again - Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2009. I think it lasts for 10 days or so, so there is still time to participate if you feel so inclined.

I'm a bohemian type, so I could scarcely be bothered to do anything
"financially sound" in my entire adult life. Last year was the first
year when I've felt genuinely sorry for responsible, well-to-do people.
Suddenly they've got the precariousness of creatives, of the
underclass, without that gleeful experience of decades spent
living-it-up.

These are people who obeyed the social contract and are *still*
getting it in the neck. The injustice of that upsets me. The
bourgeoisie who kept their noses clean and obeyed the rules, I never
had anything against them. I mean, of course I made big artsy fun of
them, one has to do that, but I never meant them any active harm. I
didn't scheme to raise a black flag and cut their throats because they
were consumers.

I even fret about the bankers. Seventeen percent of the US works in
financial services. That's a lot. I've got friends and relatives who
work in those industries. I frankly enjoy tossing myself into
turbulent parts of life, because I'm a dilettante who bores easily, but
jeez, bankers are supposed to be the ultimate humorless brown-shoe
crowd. They're not supposed to wake up on a sleeping roll and scrounge
breakfast.

If the straights were not "prone to hostility" before that experience,
they might well be so after it, because they've got a new host of
excellent reasons. The sheer galling come-down of watching the Bottom
Line, the Almighty Dollar, revealed as a papier-mache pinata. It's
like somebody burned their church.

I keep remembering the half-stunned, half-irritated looks on the
faces of those car execs when they were chided for flying their company
jets to Washington to beg. I felt sorrow for them. Truly. These
guys are the captains of American industry at the top of the food
chain. Of course they fly corporate jets. Corporate jets were
*invented* for guys like the board of General Motors. And now they're
getting skewered for that by a bunch of punk-ass Congressmen they can
usually buy and sell?

*That's* the issue at stake, a few jets? General Motors built the
aviation industry in World War II. General Motors aircraft pounded
Nazi Germany into a flaming ruin. Here they get this off-the-wall,
total-hokum act of peanut-gallery gotcha humiliation about the
corporate airplanes they've used for fifty years. That must have felt
surreal, even nauseating.

There are going to be so many nettling, humiliating experiences for
similar people, people congenitally unable to laugh at themselves and
roll with the punches. Nowhere is safe any more, not even the
mirrorglass skyscraper, not even the boardroom.

I wish I could make them feel safe, but since I've lived in parts of
the planet with no-kidding, real-deal economic collapse... I dunno,
does reading Dmitri Orlov feel safe? I love that guy's writing, I
really get it about him, but the prophets of doom have so little
comfort to offer people. Last thing I heard about Orlov the guy had
chucked it and was living on a small boat. ...

*Americans -- and Orlov's an American now, he's much too relaxed and
funny to be a Russian -- love to imagine that America leads the
collapse. If we're not the Shining City on the Hill, we've at least
got to be the Smoldering Wreckage on the Hill. You know: as long as
we're always the Hill.

*People with loose money still think we're the Hill. That's why all
the loose change is moving into Treasury bonds. I mean, if you buy
China, you're basically buying US Treasury Bonds anyway... Japan is
old and gray and has no rate of return... Rich Europeans can't take
Europe seriously. They're afraid it will turn into an actual empire
instead of their toy trading bloc, so they're always parking their cash
somewhere far outside their own legal jurisdiction...

So what does that leave you, if you've got a spare 50 billion?
Brazil? Russia? India, for heaven's sake? What kind of rich person
preserves his wealth in INDIA? You'd have to be crazy. Should you buy
oil? Oil's got blood all over it and it's skyrocketing up and down.

So that leaves the Americans -- the global wealthy are clinging to 'em
like a drunk to a lamppost. When Russia collapsed, every Russian with
a shred of wealth shipped it to Cyprus and Switzerland. The Americans
don't have a place to offshore their money. They can offshore their
LABOR, that's dead easy, but their money? If the American dollar goes,
finance as an industry gets the blue screen of death. ...

*These posts are making the New Year situation look blacker than I
think it is, so maybe I should raise the cogent issue of self-reliance
and "resilient cities." I notice that John Robb, one of my favorite
prophets of doom, has formed some tacit New Urbanist alliance with
James Howard Kunstler, also one of my favorite prophets of doom.

This would be John "Global Guerrillas" Robb and James Howard "Long
Emergency" Kunstler, for those of you entering the catastrophe
sweepstakes late in the game. If you've never read these guys before,
you might want to take a walk around the block before Googling 'em, as
otherwise your heart might stop.

In any case, after eight glum years of watching Bush and his neocons
methodically wreck the Republic, both Kunstler and Robb have gotten
really big on American localism -- "resilient" localism. Kunstler has
this painterly, small-town-America, Thoreauvian thing going on, kinda
locavore voluntary simplicity, with lots of time for... I dunno, group
chorale singing. Kunstler seems kinda hung up on the singing effort,
somehow... Whereas Robb has a military background and is more into a
gated-community, bug-out-bag, militia rapid-response thing.

Certainly neither of these American visions look anything like what
happened to Russia. As Orlov accurately points out, in the Russian
collapse, if you were on a farm or in some small neighborly town, you
were toast. The hustlers in the cities were the ones with inventive
opportunities, so they were the ones getting by.

So the model polity for local urban resilience isn't Russia. I'm
inclined to think the model there is Italy. Italy has had calamitous
Bush-levels of national incompetence during almost its entire 150-year
national existence.

Before that time, Italy was all city-states -- and not even "states,"
mostly just cities. Florence, Milan, Genoa, Venice. Rome. They were
really brilliantly-run, powerful cities. (Well, not Rome -- but Rome
was global.) Gorgeous cities full of initiaive and inventive genius.
If you're a fan of urbanism you've surely got to consider the cities
of the Italian Renaissance among the top urban inventions of all time.

And cities do seem in many ways to respond much better to
globalization than nation-states do. When a city's population
globalizes, when it becomes a global marketplace, if it can keep the
local peace and order, it booms. London, Paris, New York, Toronto,
they've never been more polyglot and multiethnic.

In my futurist book TOMORROW NOW I was speculating that there might
be a post-national global new order arising in cities. Cities as
laboratories of the post-Westphalian order.

However... okay, never mind the downside yet. Let's just predict
that in 2009 we're gonna see a whole lot of contemporary urbanism going
on. Digital cities. Cities There For You to Use. Software for
cities. Googleable cities. Cities with green power campaigns.
Location-aware cities. Urban co-ops. "Informal housing."
"Architecture fiction." The ruins of the unsustainable as the new
frontier.

A President from Chicago who carried the ghettos and barrios by
massive margins. Gotta mean something, I figure.