Shaping Things (review)

When Bruce Sterling's edited collection Mirrorshades came out in the mid-1980s, science fiction aficionados and computer geeks found a genre, however short-lived cyberpunk was, that spoke our language and gave us a peek into a future that we were, however unconsciously, helping to form. Here was a writer whose vision of technology influenced a great many of us about information politics, from the power of information to the ethics of hacking it. While at first glance Shaping Things seems a far cry from the "Storm Troupe" in Heavy Weather, the "Mechanists" from Schismatrix Plus, or the "medical-industrial complex" of Holy Fire, his impetus to examine the future is not. Shaping Things is speculative nonfiction—as speculative as any fiction work Sterling has created—about fixing tomorrow by intervening today through, well, shaping the things we create and interact with.

Those who attended Sterling's 2004 keynote address at SIGGRAPH will recognize the subject matter, themes and terminology of this book, since they were introduced in that talk. For the rest of us, his discussion of "spimes" (not to mention "biots," "fabbing," "arphids," "oblopia," "otivion") may seem odd, since it is his "flat out neologism" (p. 8) for "manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system" (p. 11). Some of the ideas found in the book, however, actually date back to his 1996 novel Holy Fire, particularly the idea about the danger posed by the things we unmindfully create and use.

Shaping Things offers arguments, both ethical and logical, about production, particularly production as it is affected by industrial design. Speaking of the former, the book posits, on the one hand, the method for getting beyond what series editor Peter Lunenfeld calls in his "Endtroduction" the "vision deficit" that has plagued "our made world" (p. 146) and has, according to Sterling, the potential of rendering it "unthinkable" (p. 7). In an urgent voice, represented by black print, the capitalization of all his words and the centering of his text, Sterling tells us that:

THE ONLY SANE WAY OUT OF A TECHNOSOCIETY IS THROUGH IT, INTO A NEWER ONE THAT KNOWS EVERYTHING THE OLDER ONE KNEW, AND KNOWS ENOUGH NEW THINGS TO DAZZLE AND DOMINATE THE DENIZENS OF THE OLDER ORDER (p. 132).

It brings little comfort to know that we are only part way through the process of finding a better way of living, particularly when the facts he gives us about the current state of our world are so loathsome.

The logical argument, spoken in green print (conveying a strong political message), tells us what will happen if we do not heed his warning. When talking about "detritus, fertilizers, and pesticides," for example, he tells us: "A human body can be understood as a sponge of warm saltwater within a shell of skin; so everything we emit ends up partially within ourselves" (p. 134). Not a happy thought—but Sterling does not simply point out problems humans have created with their creations; he also offers a solution, a design solution. At the end of the book we learn that,

In order to avoid that fate, we need to work. We need to tear into the world of artifice in the way that our ancestors tore into the natural world. We need to rip root and branch into the previous industrial base and re-invent it, re-build it. While we have the good fortune to be living, we should invent and apply ways of life that expand the options of our descendants rather than causing irreparable damage to their heritage (p. 142).

The end result is a book we are compelled to read and carry around with us to read again and again, a bible for "visualiz[ing] and design[ing]," as Lunenfeld says, a "better future" (p. 146).

The part about carrying Shaping Things around deserves an explanation since...