W: LP: GRP: BS: Distraction

Distraction by Bruce Sterling

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Published in 1998, the story takes place in the years 2044 to 2045, but it is a thinly veiled commentary on what is going on currently (as of this writing--c.2011AD). Mr. Sterling is a skilled writer, so the story gets a higher rating because he has accomplished the first goal of publishing a book--it needs to entertain. I was entertained and found some of the ideas in the story quite interesting; it's worth your time to read this novel. I liked a number of passages in this book, so I'll quote them here:



[Quote:]

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized*, it became harder and harder for American culture to breath. Not only were people broke, but they were driven to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave. They gathered publicly to burn their licenses, chop up their charge cards, and hit the road. The proles considered themselves the only free Americans.

[Unquote.]

[Quote:]

She looked at him with sudden pity. "Poor Oscar. You've got it all backward. That's not why I feel guilty. I'm guilty because I know it's going to work. Talking with those Moderators for so long...I really understand it now. Science truly is going to change. It'll still be 'Science.' It'll have the same intellectual structure, but its political structure will be completely different. Instead of being poorly paid government workers, we'll be avant-garde dissident intellectuals for the dispossessed. And that will work for us. Because we can get a better deal from them now than we can from the government. The proles are not so new; they're just like big, hairy, bad-smelling college students. We can deal with people like that. We do it all the time."

He brightened. "Are you sure?"

"It'll be like a new academia, with some krewe feudal elements. It'll be a lot like the Dark Ages, when universities were little legal territories all their own, and scholars carried maces and wore little square hats, and whenever the university was crossed, they sent huge packs of students into the streets to tear everything up, until they got their way. Except it's not the Dark Ages right now. It's the Loud Ages, it's the Age of Noise. We've destroyed our society with how much we know, and how quickly and how randomly we can move it around. We live in the Age of Noise, and this is how we learn to be the scientists of the Age of Noise. We don't get to be government functionaries who can have all the money we want just because we give the government a lot of military-industrial knowledge. That's all over now. From now on we're going to be like other creative intellectuals. We're going to be like artists or violin-makers, with our little krewes of fans who pay attention and support us."

"Wonderful, Greta. It sounds great!"

"We'll do cute, attractive, sexy science, with small amounts of equipment. That's what science has to be in America now. We can't do it the European way, where there's all kinds of moral fretting and worrying about what technology will do to people; there's no fun in that, it's just not American. We'll be like Orville Wright in the bicycle shed from now on. It won't be easier for us. It'll be harder for us. But we'll have our freedom. Our American freedom. It's a vote of confidence in the human imagination."

[Unquote:]







*I don't think Bruce foresaw America's sudden lurch toward statism or the 2008 beginning of our economic collapse.



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