Bruce Sterling - The Manifesto of January 3, 2000

What We Want: Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure; vastly increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and resources

The Trend: commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism, criminalized banking systems, sweatshops

Industrial Design

Today: very rapid model obsolescence, intense effort in packaging; CAD/CAM

What We Want: intensely glamourous environmentally sound products; entirely new objects of entirely new materials; replacing material substance with information; a new relationship between the cybernetic and the material

The Trend: two design worlds for rich and poor comsumers; a varnish on barbarism

Gender Issues

Today: more commercial work required of women; social problems exported into family life as invisible costs

What We Want: declining birth rates, declining birth defects, less work for anyone, lavish support for anyone willing to drop out of industry and consume less

The Trend: more women in prison; fundamentalist and ethnic-separatist ideologies that target women specifically

Entertainment

Today: large-scale American special-effects spectacle supported by huge casts and multi-million-dollar tie-in enterprises

What We Want: glamour and drama; avant-garde adventurism; a borderless culture industry bent on Green social engineering

The Trend: annihilation of serious culture except in a few non-Anglophone societies

International Justice

Today: dysfunctional but gamely persistent War Crimes tribunals

What We Want: Environmental Crime tribunals

The Trend: justice for sale; intensified drug war

Employment

Today: MacJobs, burn-out track, massive structural unemployment in Europe

What We Want: Less work with no stigma; radically expanded leisure; compulsory leisure for workaholics; guaranteed support for people consuming less resources; new forms of survival entirely outside the conventional economy

The Trend: increased class division; massive income disparity; surplus flesh and virtual class

Education

Today: failing public-supported schools

What We Want: intellectual freedom, instant cheap access to information, better taste, a more advanced aesthetic, autonomous research collectives, lifelong education, and dignity and pleasure for the very large segment of the human population who are and will forever be basically illiterate and innumerate

The trend: children are raw blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery; universities exist to supply middle-management

Public Health

Today: general success; worrying chronic trends in AIDS, tuberculosis, antibiotic resistance; massive mortality in nonindustrial world

What We Want: unprecedently healthy old people; plagues exterminated worldwide; sophisticated treatment of microbes; artificial food

The Trend: Massive dieback in Third World, septic poor quarantined from nervous rich in G-7 countries, return of 19th century sepsis, world's fattest and most substance-dependent populations

Science

Today: basic science sacrificed for immediate commercial gain; malaise in academe; bureaucratic overhead in government support

What We Want: procedural rigor, intellectual honesty, reproducible results; peer review, block grants, massively increased research funding, massively reduced procedural overhead; genius grants; single-author papers; abandonment of passive construction and the third person plural; "Science" reformed so as to lose its Platonic and crypto-Christian elements as the "pure" pursuit of disembodied male minds; armistice in Science wars

The Trend: "Big Science" dwindles into short-term industrial research or military applications; "scientists" as a class forced to share imperilled, marginal condition of English professors and French deconstructionists.

I would like to conclude by suggesting some specific areas for immediate artistic work. I see these as crying public needs that should be met by bravura displays of raw ingenuity.

But there isn't time for that. Not just yet.