Dispatches from the Hyper-Local Future
Bruce Sterling, one of my favourite SF authors, has written a series of vignettes for Wired called Dispatches from the Hyper-Local Future. I can’t work out if this is a one-off, or will be posted regularly (I think the former), but it’s a fantastic bit of flash-fiction mixed with just enough reality to make it zing with authenticity.
Of course, it suffers from hyper-local extrapolation, something that a lot of the post-cyberpunk crowd keep doing - there’s an unspoken assumption that the current Googlemaps37SignalsFlickriPod web 2.0 buzz is some kind of logical kick-off point for ‘the future’, that geotagging and RFIDs and ‘laptop gipsies’ (which Sterling himself has styled himself as in a few of his speeches and writings over the last few years) will become a self-sustaining sub-culture that won’t get eaten up, appropriated or simply fade away.
I suppose it’s an intriguing idea, that the feted cyberculture is finally here, and in many ways, it is - hell, I got married because of Flickr. And good SF often does exactly this, holding a mirror up to the wonders and absurdities of today, revealing them in the twisted funhouse mirror of a ripping yarn, recognisable but accessed from subtly different directions and positions. But at the same time the underlying assumptions behind it are troubling to me.
Consider this:
Torino used to be the “Detroit of Italy,” but some of its derelict Fiat assembly plants have been turned into city-subsidized creative-class hangouts. Big retrofitted lofts, lots of auto-watered greenery, ping-pong tables and massage chairs…. Lots of freeware. You want a bicycle, you just beep at it and take it. Free Italian movies every night, right up on sides of buildings.
In Torino’s cyber-district, you get your basic Euro-trash laptop gypsies, some installation artists, robotics freaks, do-it-yourself makers, raffish free-software fanatics — stir continuously and feed with cheap spaghetti. Result: a classic Euro-bohemian ferment. It’s like a garage sale Ars Electronica that runs all year.
Personally, this sounds awesome, and a very cool place to go and live in (that’s what we want from our futures, right?). But a part of me wonders whether a stories about the subtle barriers to entry to such a glorious techno-Eden would be the more interesting side to read - what happens in Sterling’s glorious future when a tramp wanders in and falls asleep on one of the massage chairs?
