Boing Boing has a post on a new pamphlet from Bruce Sterling on The Internet of Things - Bruce Sterling's "The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things". It's interesting watching the switch from traditional publishing to self-publishing on the Kindle store and other e-book shops. It's also interesting considering Bruce's increasing jaundiced view of "the internet of things" - the first iteration of which he used to promote quite enthusiastically if I recall correctly.

It's a new long-form essay in the tradition of Sterling's must-read, groundbreaking 2005 book Shaping Things, a critical perspective on what it means to have a house full of "smart" stuff that answers to giant corporations and the states that exert leverage over them.

Bruce Sterling has popped up at Medium with a great essay (following up on an older one called "The Blast Shack") on Manning, Assange and Snowden - The Ecuadorian Library.

First let’s consider Bradley Manning, who is not at all close to the NSA. Bradley was a bored and upset minor military technician who burned a zillion US documents onto a DVD, and labeled that “Lady Gaga.”

The authorities finally got around to convicting Bradley this week, of some randomized set of largely irrelevant charges. But the damage there is already done; some to Bradley himself, but mostly grave, lasting damage to the authorities. By maltreating Bradley as their Guantanamo voodoo creature, their mystic hacker terror beast from AlQaedaville, Oklahoma, they made Bradley Manning fifty feet high.

At least they didn’t manage to kill him. Bradley’s visibly still on his feet, and was not so maddened by the torment of his solitary confinement that he’s reduced to paste. So he’s going to jail as an anti-war martyr, but time will pass. Someday, some new entity, someone in power who’s not directly embarrassed by Cablegate, can pardon him.

Some future Administration can amnesty him, once they get around to admitting that Bradley’s War on Terror is history. The War on Terror has failed as conclusively as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations failed. There’s terror all over the sands now, terror from Mali to Xinjiang, and a billion tender-hearted Bradleys couldn’t stop that bleeding, no matter how much they leak.

Thanks to the modern miracle of fracking, though, the mayhem in the oil patch means a lot less to K Street. Someday, Bradley Manning will be as forgotten to them as Monica Lewinsky is. Then they’ll yield to the hornet-like, persistent buzz of the leftie peaceniks, and let Bradley go. He’s not dangerous. Bradley Manning will never do anything of similar consequence again. He’s not a power player. He’s a prisoner of conscience.

However, unlike poor Monica Lewinsky, Bradley Manning will never lack for passionate adherents who admire him and love him. Before Bradley went into his ugly maelstrom, he didn’t have that. Nowadays, he does. Maybe it’s worth it.

Then there’s Julian Assange. Yeah, him, the silver-haired devil, the Mycroft Holmes of the Ecuadorian Embassy. Bradley Manning’s not at all NSA material, he’s just a leaky clerk with a thumb-drive. But Julian’s quite a lot closer to the NSA — because he’s a career cypherpunk.

If you’re a typical NSA geek, and you stare in all due horror at Julian, it’s impossible not to recognize him as one of your own breed. He’s got the math fixation, the stilted speech, the thousand-yard-stare, and even the private idiolect that somehow allows NSA guys to make up their own vocabulary whenever addressing Congress (who don’t matter) and haranguing black-hat hacker security conventions (who obviously do).

Julian has turned out to be a Tim Leary at the NSA’s psychiatric convention. He’s a lasting embarrassment who also spiked their Kool-Aid. Crushing Julian, cutting his funding, that stuff didn’t help one bit. He’s still got a roof and a keyboard. That’s all he ever seems to need.

There’s nothing quite like a besieged embassy from which to mock the empty machinations of the vengeful yet hapless State Department. House arrest has also helped Julian with this obscure struggle he has, not to fling himself headlong onto Swedish feminists. The ruthless confinement has calmed him; it’s helped him to focus. He’s grown and matured through ardent political struggle.

Julian Assange is still a cranky extremist with a wacky digital ideology, but he doesn’t have to talk raw craziness any more, because the authorities are busy doing that for him. They can’t begin to discuss PRISM and XKeyScore without admitting that their alleged democratic process is a neon façade from LaLaLand. Instead, they’re forced to wander into a dizzying area of discourse where Julian staked out all the high points ten years ago.

More astonishing yet: this guy Assange, and his tiny corps of hacker myrmidons, actually managed to keep Edward Snowden out of US custody. Not only did Assange find an effective bolthole for himself, he also faked one up on the fly for this younger guy.

Assange liberated Snowden, who really is NSA, or rather a civilian outsourced contractor for the NSA, like there’s any practical difference.

It’s incredible to me that, among the eight zillion civil society groups on the planet that hate and fear spooks and police spies, not one of them could offer Snowden one shred of practical help, except for Wikileaks. This valiant service came from Julian Assange, a dude who can’t even pack his own suitcase without having a fit. ...

While Julian Assange, to do him credit, has the street smarts to behave as if he’s in a situation of feral realpolitik. Because he is. And how.

However, Assange now knows that. He’s a hardened veteran of it. And he’s gonna stay imperiled for the immediate future, because the upshot of this is pretty easy to see.

The inconvenient truth about the NSA is lying there on a table in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as stark as a poisoned crow. But it’ll join our planet’s many other inconvenient truths.

Snowden told the truth to the public — but then again, so did Solzhenitsyn, and even Al Gore lets on sometimes. The truth doesn’t do the trick for anybody, the truth is just a complicating factor. The present geopolitical situation is absolutely cluttered with amazing lies that didn’t work out for their owners.

The Iraqi weapons of mass destruction never existed. Climate change does exist, and could drown Wall Street any day now. The abject state of global finance is obvious, yet it makes no difference to the ongoing depredations. Drones are stark assassination machines, and they don’t stay classified. Anyone could go on.

And, yeah, by the way, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Google et al, they are all the blood brothers of Huawei in China — because they are intelligence assets posing as commercial operations. They are surveillance marketers. They give you free stuff in order to spy on you and pass that info along the value chain. Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.

Boing Boing has a new (and totally off topic) short story from Bruce Sterling - patron saint of Peak Energy - BEYOND THE COMING AGE OF NETWORKED MATTER.

Bee brains lacked much processing power. Just enough hardware in there to run a high-level bee-dance language where the bees could clue each other in about tasty matter resources. Adrienne had mocked this system up on a whiteboard with boxes and arrows. Julio had coded it with open-source modules.

Then they’d created these 3Dprinted plastic “bee puppets.” Their fake plastic Maker bees were, like, awesomely effective at bee dancing. Their robot bees, set dancing by Arduino, were basically Trojan Bees. They had gotten root in the hive. They had powned the hive colony superorganism. Those bees would do whatever the hackers wanted.

“Their bee-swarm pitch is out of this world!” I told Crawferd. “I can’t believe I haven’t seen this idea before!”

The Maker kids ramped up to their triumphant climax. Being new to California, they’d noticed all the window-box marijuana plants. They’d hacked their bees to go out to forage for dope pollen.

They showed the camera their existence proof: a double fistful of honey-drenched Silicon Valley hashish.

Then little Adrienne and Julio modestly asked the public for twenty grand to go 3Dprint some beehives, so they could issue some royal-jelly marijuana prescriptions. A business-model screwup that was total facepalm. Of course their Kickstarter had exploded. Just gone ballistic. It had blown past twelve million USD in capital and was heading north at high speed.

“You have created a monster,” I told Crawferd. “I can see why you’re so upset now. This is not even funny. Where are those crazy kids? They’re gonna need to lawyer up.”

“They’re no longer with me,” muttered Crawferd. “That’s the bad part. That’s why I’m hiding in here.”

“So where’d they run off to?”

Crawferd toyed guiltily with the hopelessly tangled power cord of his phablet. “It’s worse than that.”

“It’s worse than drugs? They’re busted?”

“Sort of. Worse!”

“They’re kidnapped? Mexican marijuana mob? Paramilitary? Body bags, they’re hanging from an overpass?”

“Lots worse. Totally worse than that. That’s kid stuff compared to what happened.”

“Knock it off with the eldritch, nebulous hints, Crawferd! Put it in words of one syllable!”

ThinkProgress points to a Bruce Sterling talk at the Art + Environment conference - Bruce Sterling: Climate Change Is Now A ‘Melancholy And Tiresome Reality’.

Bruce Sterling, the science-fiction author and futurist whose book Distraction foreshadowed the Occupy Wall Street movement, spoke about the “melancholy and tiresome reality” of climate change at the 2011 Art + Environment Conference in Reno, Nevada this October. Sterling described the catastrophic drought and wildfires that have consumed his home state of Texas. He went on to explain how we now live in the Anthropocene, a term first coined in 2000 by Paul Cruetzen to describe a new geologic era in which the predominant factor on the Earth’s surface is human activity. Sterling’s 30-minute talk is a must-watch tour-de-force of sober acceptance of the world we have created, and what the future holds:

A few quotations from Sterling’s speech:

Climate change has lost all its sci-fi tinge in my lifetime and is now a melancholy and tiresome reality.

There hasn’t been a year when I haven’t written about climate change. It’s one of the most obvious things to predict.

It’s just kind of a blunt reality that the fossil-fuel enterprise has done a regulatory capture of the entire planet, and we’re involved in a war for oil, and it’s the curse of oil, and it’s a war for a curse that’s endless and happening. You know, it gets boring running around being a Cassandra. Starting Earth Day in 1970 was a pretty late start considering the multicentury scope of this problem.

I will pass the rest of my lifetime in the shadow of climate change. It’s not about warning people in 2011, or trying to avert or defuse a misfortune. The wolf is beyond the door. The wolf is in the living room. This is the anthropocenic condition. This is how we live. This is force majeure. It’s here. It’s very obvious.

There are no national forests. You cannot protect a forest with a nation. There are forests that protect nations.

The global climate crisis is the climate crisis and it’s global because the globe is an externality. “Don’t pollute you, don’t pollute me, pollute that fellow behind me.” Just throw that into the atmosphere because the atmosphere is somebody else’s problem.

The thing that encourages me or sort of offers daylight is there’s no pro-climate crisis party. There’s no government that actually likes the idea of wrecking the climate. It doesn’t really benefit anybody. It really is an externality. It’s just something that’s entropic.

Al Gore is kicking off a new initiative to try and get people to look at what is happening to the climate (as opposed to listening to a load of blind ideologues spouting random untruths in the conservative mediadrome) - The Climate Reality Project (via Bruce Sterling's 364 days of rampant climate delusion, who quips "You have to wonder now, not what happens when people accept the truth, but how people who deny the truth can maintain the psychosis. All the proper points were fully made years ago. Like, when you’re on the Governor’s staff in Austin right now, and you prayed for rain months ago and none arrived, and the soil is so dry that sewer pipes are cracking in the dessicated, shrinking turf, how do you go home and sleep? I mean, it’s your own home. It’s not like Murdoch’s propaganda waters your lawn").

This year, we have seen historic droughts, heat waves and floods. We’re experiencing record-high temperatures across much of the United States. This extreme weather is being called the “new normal.” But there’s nothing normal about it.



We recently introduced you to The Climate Reality Project. Our new focus is to help citizens around the world discover the truth about climate change and take meaningful steps toward solutions. We’re launching with a groundbreaking, global event called 24 Hours of Reality.



Join us for 24 Hours of Reality. RSVP on Facebook to show the world what can change in a day.

Beginning in Mexico City and proceeding around the globe, 24 Hours of Reality will offer a round-the-clock snapshot of the climate crisis, sharing unique perspectives from Tonga to Cape Verde, from Jakarta to London. On September 14-15, we will bring the world together to reveal the full truth, scope and impact of the climate crisis.



We’ll hear from the people and places witnessing firsthand the devastation of extreme weather events. I’m joining 23 Climate Presenters from around the globe to deliver a new multimedia presentation that will broadcast the reality of the climate crisis. The entire 24 hours will be streamed live online from start to finish.



Click here to learn more about 24 Hours of Reality and find the event in your time zone:

 http://climaterealityproject.org/



The climate crisis is a global problem we all share. And real solutions can only come when we address it together. Join me on September 14, and find out what can change in a day.



Bruce also has some more on the drought in Texas from the American Statesman - Climate change cracking foundations of Texas capital city.

“With heat unrelentingly beating down on Central Texas, shrinking, dried-out soils are emerging as a threat to infrastructure. Waterlines are breaking, and calls are up at home foundation firms as moisture is sucked out of area soils.

“On Monday, the temperature in Austin reached 105 degrees for the second consecutive day, marking the ninth straight day of triple-digit heat and the 41st of the year, forecasters said.

“The next several days will likely be the warmest days we have seen since mid-June,” National Weather Service forecaster Paul Yura said in an email. “Unfortunately no ‘major’ changes appear on the horizon.”

Real relief from high temperatures may not come for a month. At the current pace, Austin could come close to the record 69 triple-digit days of 1925 and the 68 triple-digit days of 2009 . “Take extra precautions if you work or spend time outside,” the weather service cautions.

“Even as the drought takes an obvious toll on people — between Saturday and Monday afternoon, four people were taken to hospitals in heat-related incidents, according to Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services spokesman Warren Hassinger — it is slowly causing problems for infrastructure.

“The Austin Water Utility has had to respond to roughly 15 more broken waterline calls a week this summer than in an average summer week", said spokesman Jason Hill. The chief culprit is the lack of rain.

“The ground begins to dry out and shift,” he said. “A good portion of the ones we’re seeing are the small lines, from the water mains to homes. Typically the utility responds to 35 to 40 broken line calls a week. This summer, the utility is averaging 55 calls a week, he said.

Mother Jones has a brief article on the SXSW festival and Bruce Sterling's traditional closing rant - SXSW Dispatch: The Geek Triumphant.

For the first time since it was added to the festival's line-up in 1994, SXSW Interactive has outsold Music in paid passes. It's further proof of geek ascendancy in media, as well further proof that Interactive's tagline—The Future is Now—might not be an idle boast. As Bruce Sterling ranted in his annual address at a packed Convention Center ballroom last night, the momentum of the scientific innovation has slipped into hyperdrive, for better or for worse.

In Sterling's eye, of course, it's for worse. We're making a mess of things, with all the tweet-ups and meet-ups and downloads and bootlegs and status updates and blithe disregard for the impact on the world outside our sleekly designed bubble. Our combination of self-absorption and apathy in the face of war, recession and environmental collapse is going to earn us the disgust of the next generation, and we aren't doing enough, and even if we were, there's not much we could do anyway, and it's all going to hell, chaos, technofascism and waste. He's seen the future, baby, and it is Juarez.

Brian Fitzgerald has a rough transcript of the rant - SXSW: Eclectic rough notes, Bruce Sterling closing speech..

Growing old is pleasant in many ways, and beats the alternatives.

“Kids these days” is where I jump the shark. This is probably the best behaved generation in history. Depression, two land wars, zero in the way of predictable future and they’re still confident and cheerful, and kindly. By the standards to the 20th century we shouldn’t be surprised if they were settting fire to the core of every city on the planet.

Now to the complaints. Two big problems. A Finance crisis, and this long lasting greenhouse effect. We are networking while Rome Burns. ...

I was pleased and touched by the reception that the internet critics got. But they do a disservice to Kevin Kelley, to Tim O’Reilley when they calls them internet-promoting idealogues. They’re not. They’re deep thinkers and much more comples.

Your fate will be to be attacked by the digital natives who never knew the pre-digital times but become pre-digital nostalgists. The buzz words of today will be used as the whips and scorpions of their critique. Why did your “social media” rob us of the right to watch Gunsmoke?

Take Juarez. People talk about the extinction of the press, the demonetizing of reportage. In Juarez people are being shot. Twice the people we lost in 9/11. Why? Because the anti-terrorist anti-insurgency troops switched sides and decided to become a narco-terroritst regime. And something they were told was to ice the media. What conceivable moral leap is there between spectacular beheadings in Mexico and you guys? Because they are in the business of keeping Austin stoned. And this is because of American policy to criminalize drug use with a malfunctioning drug enforcement policy that has festered for a generation and become really severe. And that’s the situation that the internet will be in a couple generations down the pike. The problems that we see today, that we have not dealt with, are going to fester and we’re going to get excoriated for them.

You are going to have to find it in your heart to help these people. It will be your greatest moral test. Things that you didn’t plan, that you meant to plan, the tendency to treat everything as censorship and route around it, the rubber band and scotch tape mashup kluge of putting it together is going to come back to haunt you. But you have to put aside the inate conservativism about the things you did to overturn the existing order. You will say you didn’t intend it. You will say it wasn’t forseen. And that will be true. And it won’t matter. You have to be kind to your critics, and you have to help them. ...

If we had it to do over the first thing we would have demonitized food and shelter. Imagine if the world had open source food, and shelter.

neighborgoods.net check it out. It’s Socialist media. Why is there not a single startup whose business model is communist? From each according to their ability to each according to their need, Vanguard of the revolution… how much could it hurt?

It’s obvious what happens in a depression. Poverty! But still I hear pundits ask ”Gee what would an extended depression where the means of production collapsed look like?” Well it looks like Detroit.

Or “What would an envrionmental crisis in which extreme weather events were ravishing our cities due to global warming?” It looks like New Orleans!

Why is there so much febrile resignation about giving up? It’s arrogant to despair. We’ve multiplied so many options we can’t even name them. Anything is possible, and that’s what gets me out of bed. Telling the truth about the future is not hard. But why would people listen, and how would they respond?

Shapeways has an chat with Bruce Sterling, talking about all sorts of random topics - Shapeways interviews Bruce Sterling.

Bruce Sterling is a noted sci fi author, futurologist & speaker. As well as being an award winning author and one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement he is an early and constant booster of Augmented Reality technology and coined the word Spime. Spimes are pieces of technology that know where they are and can reveal their entire history to you. He is also behind a project that hopes to document dead media, founded a green design movement, loves Bollywood movies, is a hacker in the original sense and you really should read his Wired blog Beyond the Beyond.

Joris Peels: I was wondering if at one point you would be interested in doing an interview about 3D printing/the future?

Bruce Sterling: Well, man, all I can tell you is that I'm hanging out at a monster science event with labs-on-a-chip and 3d biofactories. ...

I should have pointed to Bruce's annual "state of the world" fest on the Well at the start of the year, but it kind of got lost in the link bucket - Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010. He seems to have a bit of a bee in his bonnet about global warming inspired genocide, going all Herman Kahn on the subject.

On the subject of geo-engineering, I think it's a crock. We'll never
get there. They're all techie fantasies, far-out sci-fi notions, Star
Wars physics-style. The cheapest and most effective method of
geo-engineering is to cut the world's population in half.

Just a tremendous massacre. That's the genuinely effective
geo-engineering: it's fast, it commonly works, it's been proven
effective for centuries by lebensraum exponents everywhere, and if you
chose the right tactics and weaponry it might even look like a big
accident.

You don't have to put on a fascist armband and start ranting for the
public's blood; an effort like that could be quite subtle and covert,
the very opposite of showboat geo-engineering. "Mysterious deadly flu
in the Congo? We'd better keep all our health workers right here,
they're badly needed in New York!"

Nobody's gonna sit around watching Copenhagen delegates debating giant
phony orbital solar mirrors if the windmills in Copenhagen harbor are
blowing over When and if it becomes obvious that we truly need
massive, ultra-costly geo-engineering interventions, that we have no
other choice, then somebody -- likely some traumatized veterans of
weather havoc who are full of Al Qaeda self-righteousness -- they're
gonna cut emissions in half by cutting people in half. Mankind
wouldn't lack for means, motive, opportunity and eager volunteers.

Genocide has much more proven shelf-appeal than any of these hokum
Rube Goldberg geo-schemes. It's by no means easy to kill off half of
everybody, but we've already invented a wide variety of ingenious ways
to attempt that, and almost all of 'em are much simpler, more rugged
and more plausible than putting the North Pole under a tinfoil hat.

You don't see these Gothic issues raised in public discourse much, but
you go hang out with some Beltway thinktank asymmetric-warfare types,
and man, they talk this kinda stuff all the time. Kind of a Herman
Kahn think-the-unthinkable industry. "Should the Center for Disease
Control be scanning flu-strains for signs of designed interventions?"
"Gee uh, maybe not, could cause panic... but if we had some
off-the-books funding for that, that capacity could be pretty handy."
...

*Today, people look at our crazy, broken, self-absorbed finance
system, which we used to frankly worship like a pagan god, and they're
so full of bitterness and skepticism... "How could they ever let
things get into such a parlous state! What benefit did they ever bring
us? They're all crooks and charlatans!"

I don't think that modern Internet zealots are crooks and charlatans,
but I see no reason why a weird system of small-pieces-loosely-joined
couldn't drift into fungal lunacy just like the financial system did.
Maybe harder, faster, and less retrievably. They're children of the
same era. They're built with the same logic.

*After all -- who's minding the store there? To what end? It's all
about whatever seemed to work -- moguls, monopolies, offshoring...
Works great technically (sometimes), might create utter social mayhem
(somebody else's problem). All the broadband you can eat and you're
left with a mouthful of ashes.

*If that happened, who would we blame for that? Wouldn't we be
staring at each other with that same shocked, shocked look that Alan
Greenspan had in Congress? "Gosh, I can't believe that they would
irrationally do such bad things to themselves." Markets are not
inherently rational, and the Internet isn't rational either. Not a bit
of it.

*Some day this too will pass. "What comes after network culture?"
We're so enmeshed in network culture that it's hard for us to envision
anything outside it now. That's dangerous. It's like believing in
contemporary finance to the point that alternatives become unthinkable.

Stewart Brand, years ago: "And the larger fear looms: we are in the
process of building one vast global computer, which could easily become
The Legacy System from Hell that holds civilization hostage -- the
system doesn’t really work; it can’t be fixed; no one understands it;
no one is in charge of it; it can’t be lived without; and it gets worse
every year." Does that sound familiar? It's sounds plenty familiar
if you're talking about the global economy now, but that's not what
Stewart was talking about.

"Today’s bleeding-edge technology is tomorrow’s broken legacy system.
Commercial software is almost always written in enormous haste, at
ever- accelerating market velocity; it can foresee an 'upgrade path' to
next year’s version, but decades are outside its scope. And societies
live by decades, civilizations by centuries..."

Speaking of genocide, Peter Costello is looking to profit from the Cambodian one by investing in still depopulated rural regions - Costello’s $600 million Cambodian crusade.

Peter Costello’s first major private sector venture is a $US600m investment fund aiming to bring agricultural technology to Cambodia, one of the world’s most corrupt countries. ...

In a video interview with the paper, Costello said he would “bringing in major multinational agro-technology firms and investors in a bid to add value to the Kingdom’s farming sector”, as well as teak and palm oil.

The massive investment will be greater than the total foreign investment Cambodia attracted in 2009, and will far exceed any previous investment in agriculture in one of the world’s poorest nations. Cambodian Government approval will be required both for the investment fund and its projects, which, according to BKK chairman Alistair Walton (who is also chair of chair of Indochina Gateway Capital) will be over 100,000 hectares in size. ...

Anderson cited record commodity prices and Cambodia’s swathes of unoccupied land wiped out by the Khmer Rouge as a major incentive behind the project.

“Commodity prices spiked in 2008 and in many developing countries there’s limited land available, limited water. In Cambodia there’s an abundance of land and water because the Khmer Rouge wiped out 40% of the people. Thailand and Vietnam are the largest agricultural hubs in South East Asia, while Cambodia exports next to nothing…,” said Anderson.

Bruce has a typically cynical take on a recent John Robb post at Global Guerrillas (as per usual, Bruce's intervjections are marked ((())) ) at Beyond The Beyond - Meanwhile, in the American digital favela.

“There are growing signs — from a black swan in savings/debt reduction to massive debt loads to quarterly trillion dollar losses in personal wealth to stagnant/falling consumer purchases to persistently low consumer confidence — that the parasite ridden American “consumer” is finally dead. (((Okay, maybe so, but if any other non-American consumer is still alive, aren’t they going to use their brilliant capitalism to simply *buy* American consumers? Consumer society is vastly more productive than any rival form of economics.)))

“If this is true, the economic model of the latter half of the last Century is likely dead too, and that will mean wrenching change. It’s my belief that the dominant solution is to prepare for a local future to ride out this storm. Here are some of my random (more random than I would like) thoughts on what you should do to prepare:

(((Check out how much like a favela this is.)))

“Ruthlessly reduce debt. Nothing on credit. Pay off every loan. Strategically walk away from underwater assets (like homes that are worth less than the mortgage). This will allow you to stay one step ahead of the death throes of the old economy. (((Not to mention that this activity, carried out on any large scale, would *murder* the old economy. It’s called “capitalism” because people borrow “capital,” am I right?)))

“Turn your hollow home into a productive asset. Most homes are devoid of any productive capacity. Adding energy, food, etc production to them turns them into real, productive assets. Get your assets out of financial derivatives (stocks, bonds, etc.) as fast as you can and put them into productive assets (not commodities) you can touch. (((The busy workshop slums of Dharavi, biggest favela in Asia. After leaving your underwater home, sleep in the sweatshop.)))

“Make everything you can yourself. Grow your own food. Produce your own energy. Make/repair your own clothes. Turn costs into savings. Reskill to do this. The new “fashionable trend” isn’t what you can buy, it’s what you can make. Anyone that buys “designer or branded” anything is a fool. (((Okay, but suppose you start making stuff so good that people actually want to buy it. Wouldn’t you need a brand at that point? If not a “brand,” at least some kind of recognizable ID like a big Arduino Italian logo.)))

(((Also, isn’t a division of labor proven to be more productively efficient than this primitive autarky? I seem to recall something cogent about Adam Smith explaining how to make pins with assembly lines.)))

“Work online. Convert your skills into something that can be sold electronically (most of my complex work is done this way). Develop the skills necessary to work as part of a virtual team. Telecommute whenever possible (and push to do this, even if it means less money), reduce the number of cars/dress clothes/etc you own in synch with this conversion (and move to a less expensive locale when possible!). Always have two jobs going at the same time. (((This is the really interesting part. I mean, to accomplish this you’ve gotta have some financially bomb-proof homemade Internet equipment that you made in your favela out of bark and twine. Otherwise your pretense of sturdy urban yeomanry is ludicrous, because you’ve just traded in the Constitution, US Treasury and the Justice Department for your new feudal overlords, Microsoft and Google. )))

(((Now, a grown-up Favela Chic would in fact run the means of Internet production out of the favela, presumably with open-source, free hardware and instructables. They’d also use community banking and cellphone micropayments on their own equipment. This wouldn’t be survivalism though, it would be some variety of Kevin Kelly Digital Socialism. If the upshot was a stable middle-class of petty and haute bourgeoisie, as opposed to the buccaneers who wrecked everything, you’d be back to a workable economy, except they wouldn’t be “consumers,” they’d be “sharers” (or whatever). )))

“Build a local business. Own assets that produce and sell that production locally. Even if it is small, it will help down the line via contact networks/experience (a new spin on modern “networking”). Develop the niche skills that sell locally. Group/tribe up when possible to tackle larger opportunities. (((Why not group/tribe up from the beginning? Presumably that would be called something like a “labor union” or maybe a “political party.” Or who knows, if they were superambitious and had lots of solidarity and social cohesion, they might call themselves a “state” or “nation.” Sounds great, eh? However, since this is the “Global Guerrillas” site, presumably these hapless national entities get torn shreds between the global guerrillas with money and the global guerrillas with guns.)))

“Barter. Cashless trades. Convert what you have to what you need. Skill set bartering is amazingly effective. Become part of a local barter network (the backchannel). (((”The favela black market.”)))

“Bring your family home. (((You know those right-wing horror stories of entire Mexican immigrant families crammed into a single room? This is like that, except in a solarized McMansion.))) Grow your home to accommodate more people. Bring back parents and grown kids (with their families). This will allow you to pool incomes and radically reduce workload/costs. It’s also beneficial for security. NOTE: I’ve found that consideration/compromise is the best way to handle an expansive family home environment.

Suggestions welcome!! (((I think I’ve got the ideal post-national guerrilla leader for a family-centric, moose-skinning scheme of this sort: Sarah Palin. “Prayer-Time and Barter With Sarah.” Neato!)))

This change doesn’t require cute and crunchy notions about “lifestyle” environmentalism. (((I agree, but unless it finds some cuteness and crunchiness, its inhabitants will swiftly die of despair.)))

Also at BTB, some cold civil war style analysis of some recent conservative political meltdowns - American centipedes.

*Happy 5th of July! Let’s study recent political meltdowns in the USA and examine their electronic elements!

*First, Senator John Ensign of Nevada. Senator Ensign ruefully announced that he had an affair with a staff member — not because of sudden remorse for his affair, but because the offended husband, also a member of the Ensign staff, compiled a damning dossier about Ensign’s activities and leaked it to the right-wing press.

*Partisanship is now so toxic in the US that rightwing leakers feel compelled to leak sex scandals to their own pet press, rather than leak it to what they consider the entirely savage “main stream media.” They consider this a mercy, the classy way to handle a sex leak.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jun/19/we-have-suffered-indescribable-pain/

Near the end of the two-page, single-spaced document, he (((the injured husband/leaker))) noted: “I could have sought the most liberal, Republican hating media to expose this story, but there are people’s lives at stake and justice is about proper process as well as outcome. Senator Ensign has no business serving in the US Senate anymore!” (((I want you to imagine a future America where “proper process” involves the proper crafting of mini-Lewinsky scandals rather than any proper processes of actual law or governance.)))

(…)

In his letter, Hampton (((the husband))) said he sought Fox News’ help out of desperation.

“It appears there may be nothing the law can do to correct and bring justice and restitution to this terrible wrong that has been done us,” he wrote. “I have sought a number of lawyers who are having difficulty finding charges that may hold up in court.”

Hampton said he understood the story was difficult to believe, but he added that there was a paper trail, phone records and witnesses to corroborate the allegations.

(((Mr Hampton carefully collated all this evidence for the use of Fox media.)))

“It is my belief we are dealing with a very powerful person and institution in the U.S. Senate that only the media can pierce to expose the wrong and bring light and focus to what needs to be done.

“Please help me! This should not be how the leadership of our country should be allowed to behave. I need justice, help and restitution for what Senator Ensign has done to me and my family.” (…)

Ensign’s sudden acknowledgment of the affair continues to create fallout in the nation’s capital and Nevada.

(…)

The affair with Cynthia Hampton occurred while she, her husband and their adult son were all on the senator’s payroll. (((One has to wonder about the psychological dynamics of this feudal entourage.))) She was Ensign’s onetime campaign treasurer and the former treasurer of the senator’s Battle Born Political Action Committee.

Unnamed sources cited in various media reports (((centipede/bimbo-eruption brigade))) initially raised the specter of extortion as the reason for Ensign’s news conference, but Metro Police and the FBI said they were not investigating. Ensign’s office on Thursday declined to say today whether the Hamptons sought any money to keep quiet. (((Hampton wasn’t asking anybody for yet more money, he’s an upset insider who probably believes in Ensign’s Christian rightist “Promise Keeper” rhetoric. But why didn’t he confront the Senator privately, and resign on principle (along with his son)? Why fight this out in front of cameras in a massive rupture of privacy? Because that’s contemporary politics; that’s how he was trained as a modern Senate staffer.)))

(((Meanwhile, Governor Sanford of South Carolina gets outed for having a South American mistress. Somebody hacked her email account and passed their correspondence to the political press in the South Carolina state capital. A classic centipede tactic: but who did it? Sanford didn’t out himself; he was mousetrapped. How? Why? Rumor said a jealous South American boyfriend, but Maria Belen Chapur apparently says otherwise.)))

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/70932.html

Here’s what Sanford’s lover wrote to Argentine journalist

This is the e-mail sent by Maria Belen Chapur to Eduardo Feinmann, a journalist with Argentina’s C5N television, as published on the television station’s Web site. It was translated from Spanish by McClatchy’s Mark Seibel.

Dear Eduardo:

I’ve decided to send you this communication, which will be the only one, to clarify certain incorrect things that are being said and in that way put an end to the subject that, as you can imagine, is a huge source of pain for me, my two children, my whole family and the good friends, men and women, whom I’ve gathered throughout my life and who have always been with me.

1. Of my private life I won’t say anything, now or in the future. It’s been made public enough already, a fact that causes me terrible discomfort.

2. I deny categorically that the person who hacked my “Hotmail” was the friend with whom I shared some days in Brazil during the Rolex Regatta. This friend, as everyone can read in my emails, is a most excellent, respectable and honorable man incapable of doing such a thing. Not only is he not the author of this perverse act, but he also was a victim. In December 2008, the e-mails were sent to him as well as to The State newspaper, anonymously by whoever hacked them.

3. My Hotmail account was hacked around the 24th of November through an old e-mail account provided by an Argentine company. I filed a complaint then with both the Argentine company that was still hosting my old account, and Hotmail.

I was able to shut down this old account and recover my hacked Hotmail on Dec. 8, after answering a long questionnaire sent by Microsoft. All this is on file with Microsoft as well as the Argentine company. I have in my possession all the complaints I sent to Microsoft and all the responses; Microsoft responded to my problem quickly and efficiently. Due to the seriousness of my complaint, the Argentine company, by phone, made an exception and immediately shut down this account, even though it wasn’t in my home.

3. (sic) Finally, I have a firm suspicion of who did this great act of damage, which was aimed at me specifically but at the same time destroyed the lives of so many others. Since I don’t have sufficient proof and live in a country of laws, I’m obligated to keep their identity anonymous. I’m no one’s judge; I leave all that in the hands of God.

María Belén Chapur

(((Ms Belen Chapur may have her firm suspicion about her own enemies, but I kinda wonder why the enemies of some minor Argentinian businesswoman would want to methodically destroy the Presidential aspirations of the Governor of some remote American state. And do that so swiftly and effectively, too. It’s not like this lovelorn Argentinian has been the guy’s mistress for 15 years. Sanford engaged in some weird machinations to get down there, spent three nights in a hotel and got hammered immediately on his return. My suspicion? Somebody was watching the Governor’s computer for quite a while now. They didn’t release its hacked contents, because that’s 87 kinds of GWOT cyberwar. However, they cracked open the girlfriend’s account using the good old Palin method, and had that wrapped up with a ribbon for domestic consumption as soon as the guy committed his blunder.)))

(((Anybody gonna bother to investigate that? Or are they content to leave vengeance in the hands of God (while the next victim Governor awaits the same tactic)?)))

Chairman Bruce is amused by all the commentary on his recent SXSW speech but claims he has been misquoted, and ironically notes there doesn't seem to be any video of that part of the conference - SXSWi: You Pretty Much Had To Be There.

*You know, this offhand speech of mine -- truly a rant, delivered from notes -- is provoking a remarkable response specifically BECAUSE there is no crisp digital record of exactly what I was saying. People are just, you know, creatively riffing about what they thought I might have said. Sorta.

*I myself don't know exactly what I said at SXSW, because I was too busy eating taco chips at the podium to take shorthand on my own remarks. But mostly it was about losing old forms of personal sociality through deploying new forms of electronic sociality. As McLuhan said, (and I hate to quote the guy,) every mediated extension is also a mutilation.

*This speech got mutilated. And as it wriggles around on its bloody stumps, it's provoking more reaction that the speech itself would have done. I find myself hoping that *there is no record of this speech,* that it simply vaporizes forever. Then it would be like one of the party conversations people used to have at my house. Before people blogged everything.

*I don't mind being blamed for people's stark emotional reactions to hearsay remarks I likely never made; I'm a novelist, I'm pretty used to that.

http://badatsports.com/2009/searching-for-bruce-sterling/

"So what does this all mean? Heck if I know. But I do find it incredibly ironic and stupid and maybe brilliant–but maybe not so much–that Sterling gave this talked-about talk at one of the biggest freaking INTERACTIVE conferences in the country, he’s one of the cultural cognoscenti whose opinion, on certain issues anyway, drives the discourse forward. He puts ideas on people’s agendas, makes writers like Heffernan rethink their assumptions and publicly question them, etc.

But I can’t even find audio or video of his talk anywhere online that would allow me to form my *own* opinion about what he said firsthand (well, a recording would make it sorta second-hand, but you know what I mean). As a result I’m forced to depend on other people’s truncated versions, reliable though they may at first appear.

"Caught In The Web" has some entertaining (if you are a fan of Bruce Sterling like I am, anyway) ruminations on Bruce's recent talk about connectivity and poverty, claiming Bruce sounds like a classical Marxist - Heffernan (on Sterling) on Twitter.

Bruce pokes a lot of fun at Marxists, so I'm not sure they'd appreciate this characterisation (especially those who already view him as an agent of the liberal elite) - and while he does occasionally come off sounding like a Marxist (his recent "Bruno Argento" column springing to mind) he usually seems to reside (in my mind anyway) in the uneasy land between the libertarians and the anarchists...

Bruce Sterling, a hero to many of us, who study media critically, has recently gained traction among the New York Times reading crowd thanks to Virginia Heffernan’s blog post this past week on “connectivity as poverty.”

She was echoing the sentiments expressed by Sterling at a panel at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX, that the poor relish their connections and connectivity (the capacity to connect) because they have nothing else. Here’s how Heffernan describes it:

Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Though Heffernan thinks that Sterling’s position is Nietzschean, which I can see, I ultimately think that the position is far more evocative of Marx.

Now some (or many) of you may think, Who cares? Let me briefly lay out the stakes. If Sterling’s stance is Nietzschean, that is to say, “a disdain for regular people,” than there would be a kind of implicit alternative within Sterling’s position. Now granted, I’m taking Sterling at Heffernan’s word (and thus may be misrepresenting him), but Nietzsche’s “disdain for the regular person” is not so much an antipathy but more so a phobia for what he frequently calls “slave morality.” Slave morality can be defined orienting one’s actions (thus developing his her ethics) by taking on the conditions and assumptions of the dominator. In other words, it is the trap of attempting to act ethically within the dominator’s rules. It becomes a trap, in which the slave actively invests in his own domination via ethics. (The most glaring example of this, according to Nietzsche, was Christianity. You can see why.)

Now, I’m not so sure Sterling is coming from such a place. In fact, as I noted earlier, I see him being more classically Marxist. The idyllic life of solitude imagined by Sterling is straight out of ideals of the Enlightenment–culture, leisure and most importanty autonomy (leaving the free-thinking, rational being time and space to think). Marx, at the end of “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) quotes from The German Ideology, which so strikes a hauntingly similar note to Heffrenan’s characterization of Sterling.

to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

Marx’s argument is that the human being, in a truly utopian-socialist society, would be free to do whatever s/he pleases without it becoming obligatory, and thus alienating, as wage-labor ultimately will be. Despite what people may think of when they hear “communism” or “socialism,” which is some idea about forced sharing, the vision of Marx is completely embedded in the Enlightenment discourse of individual self-realization and expression.

Metamedia has a post on Bruce Sterling's recent SXSW talk, where he held forth the surprising level of connectivity the world's poor have obtained via the mobile phones (“poor folk love their cellphones!”) - Connectivity and Poverty.

I'd have to say Sterling misses the bullseye on this one. In fact, he has it sort of backwards.

The real issue isn't connectivity per se, but control of access and interruption.

Everyone is being connected, even the poor, by cell phones as they become cheap commodities; but the rich were the first to adopt them in the 80s and early 90s when there were expensive (e.g. the scene from film Wall Street (1984) with Gekko using walkie-talkie-esque cell phone on the beach).

They will not give them up or ever be unconnected.

However. the difference is who can control being unconnected as they choose to: who can control and to what extent they can be unconnected and from whom.

This is not new -- those is power have always known the importance of the power to control access to themselves. The more power one has, the more powerful one's gatekeepers must be. Kings and courts developed vast rituals to control access to power. Corporate royalty do the same. My boss can interrupt me at any time, but I cannot interrupt my boss. My boss goes on vacation, and the only one who can reach them is their boss. But they can reach us anytime. It's hierarchical.

In fact, rather than a simple dichotomy of rich/poor connectivity, more fruitful would be to apply an analysis such as Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.

Fussell calls the top of the class system "Top Out of Sight," and they are out of sight because they are able to control access to themselves most thoroughly. The lowest class (e.g. the homeless) is likewise "Bottom Out of Sight," because there is no point in connecting to them as they don't serve any purpose as part of the labor force.

I'll bet that connectivity is stratified along a continuum according to class, where

* we have to be connected to respond to the commands of those above us,
* choose to be connected to communicate to those equal to us, and
* can be or not to control access to ourselves to those below us.

So Sterling has it right, but backwards: connectivity is not any indicator of poverty, rather impoverishment indicates a lack of power, which means being at the beck and call of the powerful.

And the powerful want their servants to be always connected to serve them.

The BBC has an interview with ex-Viridian Pope Emperor Bruce Sterling - Bruce Sterling - Prophet and loss.

Author Bruce Sterling is one of the most respected writers of science fiction. He is also a web activist, columnist, teacher and one of the most anticipated speakers at the South by South West Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, at which he will give a talk entitled: The state of the Cybersphere.

The difficulty with interviewing Bruce Sterling is knowing where to start. His interests range from literature and design culture, to futurism, political activism, micro and macro economics, technology and 11th Century writers.

Perhaps the simplest starting point would be: The future? Explain.

But Sterling does not speak in handy, journalist-friendly soundbites and rejects the notion of being a prophet. Instead he speaks as he writes, launching verbal hand grenades packed densely with ideas, answers and counter questions. "I am a cult author; I don't write for the vast hamburger-eating, seething masses. I try to plant mind bombs - do the most damage," he tells me.

He is the author of 10 novels, many short stories and is one of the most interesting, magpie bloggers of the modern-day techno-infused culture.

Along with writers such as William Gibson and Pat Cadigan, he drove the take-up of the cyberpunk literary genre which both fomented and predicted contemporary society's heady mix of technology and culture. ...

Despite cyberpunk's prescience Sterling does not want to cast himself as a prophet.

In his 1988 novel Islands in the Net he wrote of off-shore global terrorist groups, of de-localised, networked corporations, and of computers becoming fashion items.

"If you read a piece of science fiction that is very accurate about future developments it makes you unhappy. When you read these books you wonder why nothing was done about these problems if you were able to predict them.

"It gives you a sense of helplessness."

But he adds: "There's a clear social need for someone willing to predict the future. People really need prophets in the same way they need faith healers and witch doctors." But he warns that looking to these prophets "doesn't galvanise people; it doesn't change their behaviour".

Sterling is not looking to produce manifestos of the future to try and corral people into making change, despite his strong activist feelings around issues such as the global economy and climate change.

He says: "I like ideas as abstract constructs. I don't fancy myself as political organiser.

"I am too literary and poetic to be an organiser or rabble rouser. I am an attention philanthropist, always pointing to stuff other people are doing."

Science fiction, he says, has as much relevance in today's world of seemingly relentless scientific endeavour across many different fields as it did in the past when the perception of the pace of change was arguably slower.

He says: "Science fiction writers are not suffering from the pace of development. We're suffering much less than stockbrokers and financiers from that pace of change."

Sterling says he is still as able to project 1,000 years into the future as he is the next handful of years.

He says his most satisfying area of output currently is his blog, Beyond the Beyond, for Wired magazine. "I like throwing ideas and making things thinkable that were not thinkable," he explains. "I am a slightly entertaining, cranky fringe figure."

Bruce Sterling has a companion piece to his "Bruno Argento" article at Seed Magazine, this one taking an alarmed look into the near future - 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic.

I'm always impressed by people's behavior during massive panics. They rarely believe or admit that they are panicked. Instead they assure one another that at last the wool has been lifted from their eyes. They are seeing the clear daylight of rationality after years of delusion.

But a delusion that lasts for decades is not a delusion. It's an institution. And these, our institutions, are what now fail us. People no longer know what they value. They don't know what to believe. And unfortunately, it's part of the human condition to believe and invest in things that are demonstrably not true.

As 2009 opens, our financial institutions are deep in massive, irrational panic. That's bad, but it gets worse: Many other respected institutions have rational underpinnings at least as frail as derivatives or bundled real-estate loans. Like finance, these institutions are social constructions. They are games of confidence, underpinned by people's solemn willingness to believe, to conform, to contribute. So why not panic over them, too?

Let's consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary to fact.

1. The climate. People still behave as if it's okay. Every scientist in the world who isn't the late Michael Crichton knows that it's not. The climate is in terrible shape; something's gone wrong with the sky. The bone-chilling implications haven't soaked into the populace, even though Al Gore put together a PowerPoint about it that won him a Nobel. Al was soft-peddling the problem.

It's become an item of fundamentalist faith to maintain that the climate crisis is a weird leftist hoax. Yet, since the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, an honest fear of the consequences will prove hard to repress. Since the fear has been methodically obscured, its emergence from the mists of superstition will be all the more powerful. Unlike mere shibboleths of finance, this is a situation that's objectively terrifying and likely to remain so indefinitely.

2. Intellectual property. More specifically, the fiat declaration that properties that are easy to reproduce shouldn't be reproduced.

Declaring that "information wants to be free" is an ideological stance. A real-world situation where information can't be anything but free, where digital information cannot be monetized, is bizarre and deeply scary. No banker or economist anywhere has the ghost of clue what to do under such conditions.


Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when conditions of production favored it. Now they don't. If it's simple to copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this kind of "property" becomes absurd.

To imagine that real estate is worthless is strange, though we've somehow managed to do that. But our society is also built on the supposed monetary worth of unreal estate. In fact, the planet's most advanced economies are optimized to create pretty much nothing else. The ultimate global consequences of this situation's abject failure would rank with the collapse of Communism.

3. National currencies. What do these odd numismatic relics have to do with today's roiling global economy? There is no national currency remotely strong enough to resist persecution by speculators. They're all potential bubbles — panics in the making.

If cash becomes king, what happens when market forces smash the cash? Was that inky paper really, truly supposed to be worth more than real estate, or unreal intellectual property, or shares in productive companies? Why should anyone honestly believe that local treasury departments are somehow more credible than global bankers? What on earth were people thinking? Flee for the hills!

4. Insurance and building codes. Every year, insurance rates soar from mounting "natural" catastrophes, obscuring the fact that the planet's coasts are increasingly uninsurable.

Insurance underlies the building and construction trades. If those rates skyrocket, that system must keel over. Once people lose faith in the institution of insurance — because insurance can't be made to pay in climate-crisis conditions — we'll find ourselves living in a Planet of Slums.

Most people in this world have no insurance and ignore building codes. They live in "informal architecture," i.e., slum structures. Barrios. Favelas. Squats. Overcrowded districts of this world that look like a post-Katrina situation all the time. When people are thrown out of their too-expensive, too-coded homes, this is where they will go.

Unless they're American, in which case they'll live in their cars.

But how can dispossessed Americans pay for their car insurance when they have no fixed address? Besides, car companies are coming apart with the sudden savage ease of Enron's collapse. Indeed, the year 2009 is shaping up as a planetary Enron. Enron was always the Banquo's ghost at the banquet of Bushonomics. The moguls of Enron really were the princes of contemporary business innovation, and the harbingers of the present day.

5. The elderly. There's nothing so entirely predictable as demographic change. Obviously we're facing enormous booming hordes of elderly. Yet no one is confronting that issue. People remain in denial. They're hoping a miracle will turn up, like, for instance, the sudden disinterest of a demographic majority who always vote.

Even elders who have long-garnered private nest eggs quite likely no longer have them in 2009. There is no sound way to live off the hoarded efforts of earlier labor. Inflation looms, ready to destroy fixed incomes. The elderly, supposedly the calm, serene, seasoned elements in our society, have every right to panic. They will not go gentle into that good night.

6. The Westphalian system. Why are so many great military powers losing a war in Afghanistan? Afghanistan isn't even a nation-state, yet it's defeating all comers. Why do we even pretend to have nations these days? Hollow states, failed states, non-states... The European post-state!

No flag, no currency... People no longer have to believe in these effigies. Why do they persist? The benefits of believing in nations are slim. The planetary slum-dwellers of failed states may find the rollicking life of a Somali pirate far more attractive than the hard work of state-building. The nation-state is torn from both above and below. The global guerrilla and the Davos globe-hopper are cousins.

7. Science. To be a creationist president is not a problem. A suicide cult is the most effective political actor in the world today. Clearly the millions of people embracing fundamentalism like to make up their own facts.

Standards of scientific proof and evidence no longer compel political and social allegiance. This is not a return to the bedrock of faith — it's an algorithm for ontological anarchy. By attacking empiricism, the world is discarding all of the good reasons to believe that anything is real.

If science is discredited, why should mere politics have any intellectual rigor? Just cobble together a crazy-quilt mix-and-match ideology, like Venezuelan Bolivarism or Russia's peculiar mix of spies, oil, and Orthodoxy. Go from the gut — all tactics, no strategy — making up the state of the world as you go along! Stampede wildly from one panic crisis to the next. Believe whatever is whispered. Hide and conceal whatever you can. Spy on the phone calls, emails, and web browsing of those who might actually know something.

If that leads you to a miserable end-state, huddling with the children in a fall-out shelter clutching silver bullion, then you can congratulate yourself as the vanguard of civilization.

So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly blows one's brains out for no sane reason.

We can do better than this.

Bruce, briefly translating himself to "Bruno Argento", has a column at Seed on "solidarity and precarity" - and thinks financial crises are no big deal - The True 21st Century Begins.

We now come to the useful word "precarity," which is part of the American lifestyle but distant from American politics. "Precarity" is, of course, the condition of existing precariously. The condition of losing one's safety and security, of losing predictability and the ability to rationally plan ahead, the condition of being humiliated and in danger.

"Precarity" has much to do with the need for a steady income, for predictable hours of work, for a humane respect from one's employer and a need not to be unjustly fired. Below this thin shell of labor-management relations is the deeper, more primal nature of European precarity. It is found in our time-honored European predilection for abject misery, political extremism, totalitarian violence against the dignity of the individual, and world wars.

Normally Americans and Europeans fail to agree about "precarity" — Americans think their precarity is a kind of fluidity and dynamism, while Europeans are lazy featherbedders dawdling over two-hour lunches. But what's certain is that, whatever its definition, precarity is now global. The wealthy and powerful — especially the wealthy and powerful — are precarious. They are being flung about like flotsam, and the precarity once reserved for blue-collar workers is now inside the corner office and the corporate boardroom as well.

This means that we all have new chances to see eye-to-eye on major global economic issues such as currency flows and the aging population. Italy is leading the way in aging — we're the oldest country in Europe — and business stabilized remarkably when we rid ourselves of the comically useless Italian lira. It's proof that people can both adapt to the inevitable and make some bold steps.

For me personally, the greatest, latest example of Euro-American cooperation is the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, whose radar was built by Italians. In 2004, this baroque, elephant-sized spacecraft lumbered with stately dignity into the orbit of Saturn, where, like Marco Polo, it proceeded to boggle the collective mind with a whole panoply of new worlds. Just one example: Cassini-Huygens showed us that the minor moon of Enceladus has hot, liquid-water geysers blasting out of its icy south pole. No science fiction writer ever predicted this, but there seems to be a dense organic soup merrily boiling away inside that moon, a steaming orb something like an espresso machine. For all we know — and we may know soon — Enceladus is blasting blind fish into outer space. It would be poetically appropriate if an Italian spacecraft made the greatest discovery since Columbus.

In a world so redolent with wonder, how can we allow ourselves to conduct our daily lives with so little insight, such absence of dignity? We should discover that there is no objective need for such precarity; the planet Earth should not be run as a fire sale. Precarity was supposed to be for the little people; when it is for everybody, its absurdity is manifest. Precarity cannot make us a cleaner, better, or more just society. Precarity is not sustainable. It has nothing to do with economic productivity. It does not help us sustain our precious cultural heritage or our natural heritage, the planet's priceless biodiversity. It is the mayhem of a disturbed ant's nest.

Once we recognize precarity as an existential threat for all, we will find the means to deal with it. A guaranteed annual income would be a good start. Shorter work weeks give us the chance to rejoin civil society, to re-establish trust with neighbors turned strangers, to engage in some convivial joie de vivre over healthy, genuine cuisine, instead of ridiculous cardboard-packaged fast food. You might want to drop by Turin to see how this can work. Here, we have built a global food-heritage industry. It would do you good to see wealthy Indians and Chinese gourmets venturing to sample the cheeses (likely the world's greatest) available from local producers. Each side is enriched. Italy has been enduring massive tidal waves of tourists for two hundred solid years. Our tourist trade is so old and well established that we should perhaps build monuments to it.

I am a futurist — Italian "Futurismo," 100 years old in 2009, is arguably the world's oldest futurism, after all — so I will venture to predict something that seems to me obvious: Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.

The "true" 20th century — the Communist century — began in 1914 and ended in 1989. We are now in the true 21st century.

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where "history ended." Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

The year to come is best approached as a learning opportunity. It offers a golden chance to bury our dead prejudices and learn how to properly feed the living. Once we stop shaking all over and scolding Americans, we will recognize the tremendous potential this new century offers the people of the world. The sun still shines, the grass still grows, we are still human. If we stopped pretending to be puppets of an invisible hand, we would not fret over the loss of the 20th century's strings. We might see that life is sweet.

I included a quote from Bruce Sterling's "State Of The World 2009" show on the Well recently but I probably should have used the one below, so here we go again.

Well, I have to doubt that we're all left-wing green yeoman peasantry
by next Christmas. But we won't be stricken cannibals gnawing each
other's thighbones, either.

As for local currencies -- what, hot-pink San Francisco rubles? Yeah,
maybe.

Cellphone banking is happening now among Third Worlders who never saw
a bank in their lives -- forgotten people who'd be spat upon by
conventional bankers. Their need for money is so dire that even
rapacious cellphone outfits look good to them.

There are two major kinds of poor in this world: people inherently
incapable of generating value for others, and people who are KEPT from
making any money by oppressive systems that don't serve their
interests. You don't have to be a Marxist to see that this second
problem is a major issue for everybody now.

The shattered banks are making honest, industrious, capable people go
broke. It's not that we created some over-complex loan vehicles, and
things would be great if we returned to the limpid honest of the Gold
Standard. That's idea is wingnut hokum. Money is always a social
invention. Money is never simple or natural. Money always has winners
and losers.

The problem with these booming cellphone banking systems -- thriving
in places like Kenya -- is that they are stealth operations. If the
local kakistocracy caught on that the Little People were actually
making money, they'd drive by in a Mercedes Benz to beat and shoot
them. Improving things by stealth has limits. Kenya isn't like Kenya
by accident.

The same goes for Americans trying to rebel against Wall Street.
There's no visible other space. There's no liberated territory. It's
like rebelling against a funhouse mirror because it makes you look so
fat and stupid.

I get it about the Phil Gramm argument that one should always put up a
brave front in big troubles. So Americans are a lame bunch of
crybabies... I guess the Americans ought to put up with the savage
loss of their comforts, privileges, prerogatives and civil rights, and
let the likes of Phil get on with the everyday plunder.

But dude, this is not just a bad vibe happening. Merrill Lynch is
gone. Enron is long gone. Madoff is a crook. The big boys are
hurting. Cities are broke, states are broke, the feds are a
laughingstock. The Congress and the former Administration have fully
earned the public's contempt. You can't "blame the media" for that.
Even the media's broke -- ESPECIALLY the media. You can't pull a
Reagan, triple the national debt and pretend that everything's jolly.

I agree that there's an irrational panic now. There are also a large
crowd of severe, real-world, fully rational, deeply structural problems
that have gone unconfronted for years. These problems are not
directly responsible for the money panic, but the blatant neglect there
has created an atmosphere of crisis.

The Iraq War was a harebrained adventure that wrecked the
international community. And to what end? The War on Terror is a
bust: stateless terror is the new status quo.

Huge demographic changes in the world have not been confronted. Why
are the victors of World War II still the so-called Security Council?
What real security are they providing most living people today?

The planet's population is aging. Contemporary Italy looks like a
Florida retirement city. And it's not just the rich white guys who
forgot to have kids -- Mexico is also rapidly aging, and China has
one-child families. We lack the financial capacity to allow retirement
funds to run the world. We can't have ninety-year-old rentiers who
are rich when young people can't go to college. That doesn't compute.

Then there's energy. I'm not a Peak Oil guy, but of course wild
turbulence in energy prices is gonna put people on edge. How can any
person of reasonable prudence invest, plan and build with that kind of
uncertainty?

Last, and slowest, and worst, there's the climate. The planet's
entire atmosphere is polluted. Practically everything we do in our
civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff.
Climate change is a major evil. It's vast in scope and it's
everywhere. The climate crisis would be a major issue even for a
technically with-it bright-green secular Utopia, where every single
citizen was an MIT grad. Of course our world looks nothing like that.
Nor will it.

The people fighting climate change -- they look like Voltaire
combatting Kings and Popes. They're still eighty percent witty
comments. They have a foul, hot wind at their backs, but they don't
yet have the battalions.

Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any
economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living
planet. Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no
place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for
that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a
new global religion.

None of this a counsel of despair. Seriously. We dare not despair
because in any real crisis, the pessimists die fast. This is a frank
recognition of the stakes. It's aimed at the adults in the room.

Let me put it this way. People don't have to solve every problem in
the world in order to be happy. People will always have problems.
People ARE problems. People become happy when they have something
coherent to be enthusiastic about. People need to LOOK AND FEEL
they're solving some of mankind's many problems. People can't stumble
around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like
Phil Gramm tell them to buck up.

When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't
mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in
ways that are unimaginable.

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.

Bruce has a post on the latest Technorati survey results, showing the long tail is wagging pretty weakly these days - Who killed the blogosphere ?. Like Bruce, I'm happy to say my "one man surfblog" (with occasional extended entries) seems to be going fine in terms of reader numbers (though the cameraderie that existed 3-4 years ago has admittedly disappeared entirely). One blog which has made a pleasing comeback from the dead is The Energy Blog - welcome back Jim. Like Past Peak, the primary reason for the outage on this one was health issues - something I suspect afflicts a lot of single-author blogs.

Blogging seems to have entered its midlife crisis, with much existential gnashing-of-teeth about the state and fate of a literary form that once seemed new and fresh and now seems familiar and tired. And there's good reason for the teeth-gnashing. While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there's still a "blogosphere." That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they're part of a "blogosphere" that is distinguishable from the "mainstream media" seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

And that's why there's so much angst today among the blogging set. As The Economist observes in its new issue, "Blogging has entered the mainstream, which - as with every new medium in history - looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death."...

(((Furthermore, it would appear that my humble one-man old-skool surfblog here has outlasted 94 percent of all blogs ever founded...)))

"It's no surprise, then, that the vast majority of blogs have been abandoned. Technorati has identified 133 million blogs since it started indexing them in 2002. But at least 94 percent of them have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent "state of the blogosphere" study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days. Now, as longtime blogger Tim Bray notes, 7.4 million and 1.5 million are still sizable numbers, but they're a whole lot lower than we've been led to believe. "I find those numbers shockingly low," writes Bray; "clearly, blogging isn’t as widespread as we thought." Call it the Long Curtail: For the lion's share of bloggers, the rewards just aren't worth the effort.

"Back in 2005, I argued that the closest historical precedent for blogging was amateur radio. The example has become, if anything, more salient since then...."

Bruce also loves throwing in the occasional piece of leftism, like this one - And now for some refreshing Revolutionary Anarcho-Leftism, quoting an article called "Hope In Common". I haven't seen much (if any) anarcho-communist triumphalism around before (the far left being, in my virtual experience, pretty demoralised and helpless) so this one is pretty novel in its upbeat tone (I've only quoted a bit of it but the rest is worth a skim).

*Guys who think BHO is some kinda Marxist need to cozy up to this screed. Rhetoric like this used to be common. Very common. EXTREMELY common. Last time guys were standing around in soup lines, you heard this all the time.

We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction -- even of “progressives” -- is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

The first question we should be asking is: How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine what a better world would even be like?

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. If we really want to understand this situation, we have to begin by understanding that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as they create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain, for instance, what happened in the former Soviet Union, where one would have imagined the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around? This is just one extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire capitalist system down with it, and possibly, the earth itself.

The spirals of financialization and endless string of economic bubbles we’ve been experience are a direct result of this apparatus. It’s no coincidence that the United States has become both the world’s major military (”security”) power and the major promoter of bogus securities. This apparatus exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy any possibility of envisioning alternative futures. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is more and more money, and debt spirals entirely out of control. What is debt, after all, but imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future: future profits, the proceeds of the exploitation of workers not yet born. Finance capital in turn is the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits; and once one assumes that capitalism itself will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one everyone is equally free to invest in the market -- to grab their own piece in the game of buying and selling imaginary future profits, even if these profits are to be extracted from themselves. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.

And since the bubble had built on the destruction of futures, once it collapsed there appeared to be -- at least for the moment -- simply nothing left.

The effect however is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice movement tells us anything it’s that the moment there appears to be any sense of an opening, the imagination will immediately spring forth. This is what effectively happened in the late ‘90s when it looked, for a moment, like we might be moving toward a world at peace. In the US, for the last fifty years, whenever there seems to be any possibility of peace breaking out, the same thing happens: the emergence of a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatory democracy, aiming to revolutionize the very meaning of political life. In the late ‘50s it was the civil rights movement; in the late ‘70s, the anti-nuclear movement. This time it happened on a planetary scale, and challenged capitalism head-on. These movements tend to be extraordinarily effective. Certainly the global justice movement was. Few realize that one of the main reasons it seemed to flicker in and out of existence so rapidly was that it achieved its principle goals so quickly. None of us dreamed, when we were organizing the protests in Seattle in 1999 or at the IMF meetings in DC in 2000, that within a mere three or four years, the WTO process would have collapsed, that “free trade” ideologies would be considered almost entirely discredited, that every new trade pact they threw at us -- from the MIA to Free Trade Areas of the Americas act -- would have been defeated, the World Bank hobbled, the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population, effectively destroyed. But this is precisely what happened. The fate of the IMF is particularly startling. Once the terror of the Global South, it is, by now, a shattered remnant of its former self, reviled and discredited, reduced to selling off its gold reserves and desperately searching for a new global mission.

Meanwhile, most of the “third world debt” has simply vanished. All of this was a direct result of a movement that managed to mobilize global resistance so effectively that the reigning institutions were first discredited, and ultimately, that those running governments in Asia and especially Latin America were forced by their own populations to call the bluff of the international financial system. Much of the reason the movement was thrown into confusion was because none of us had really considered we might win. ...

For at least five thousand years, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt -- this was true long before capitalism even existed. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to take relations that are fundamentally based on violence and violent inequality and to make them seem right and moral to everyone concerned. When the trick no longer works, everything explodes. As it is now. Clearly, debt has shown itself to be the point of greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of anyone’s control. It also allows endless opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtor’s strike, or debtor’s cartel.

Perhaps so -- but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions: to pledge, neighborhood by neighborhood, to support each other if any of us are to be driven from our homes. The power is not just that to challenge regimes of debt is to challenge the very fiber of capitalism -- its moral foundation -- now revealed to be a collection of broken promises -- but in doing so, to create a new one. A debt after all is only that: a promise, and the present world abounds with promises that have not been kept. One might speak here of the promise made us by the state; that if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs, we would at least be provided with basic life security. Or of the promise offered by capitalism -- that we could live like kings if we were willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another. Directly. Without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking: what sort of promises do free men and women make to one another, and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?