This evening, I talked to my girl and then got into bed. Because I’m in hospital, each night, I fall asleep hooked up to Monty the heart monitor and my iPhone. I listened to a heart-breaking song by Des Ark, then a beautiful, cyclical, looking-across-the-misty-hills-early-in-the-morning type song by my friend, Sherry, that then segued into talks from Webstock 2009. I heard a bit of Tom Coates on tracking data about aspects of our lives and then segued my own way into sleep.

I woke up a while later having had a restless dream where I was on some sort of mission to sabotage or subvert the government. I’d been through a sort of army-like training programme with some fellow activist friends and now we were running through darkened offices and municipal buildings at night. I think I shot a policeman. I woke just after I had stuffed myself into a dumb waiter to find that Tom Coates had finished talking and Bruce Sterling had been going for a while.

He alternated between a monotone that sounded like Lee Marvin describing the end of the world in Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s song, The Dead Flag Blues, and a more robust sing-song delivery that was like the accompanying music. In my half-sleep state, my revolutionary dream merged with the end of the world he was describing into a shaking, tremulous feeling filled with possibility.

You can listen to the audio of his talk [relevant section starts around 1h and 31m in], or you can watch the video [relevant section is the last seven or eight minutes], or you can read the transcript [relevant section excerpted below].

Bruce Sterling at Webstock 2009, excerpt:

“Are there some non-financial structures that are less predatory and unstable than this radically out-of-kilter invisible hand? The invisible hand is gonna strangle us! Everybody’s got a hand out – how about offering people some visible hands?

“Not every Internet address was a dotcom. In fact, dotcoms showed up pretty late in the day, and they were not exactly welcome. There were dot-orgs, dot edus, dot nets, dot govs, and dot localities.

“Once upon a time there were lots of social enterprises that lived outside the market; social movements, political parties, mutual aid societies, philanthropies. Churches, criminal organizations – you’re bound to see plenty of both of those in a transition – Labor unions – not little ones, but big ones like Solidarity in Poland; dissident organizations, not hobby activists, big dissent, like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.

“Armies, national guards. Rescue operations. Global non-governmental organizations. Davos Forums, Bilderberg guys.

“Retired people. The old people can’t hold down jobs in the market. Man, there’s a lot of ‘em. Billions. What are our old people supposed to do with themselves? Websurf, I’m thinking. They’re wise, they’re knowledgeable, they’re generous by nature; the 21st century is destined to be an old people’s century. Even the Chinese, Mexicans, Brazilians will be old. Can’t the web make some use of them, all that wisdom and talent, outside the market?

“Market failures have blown holes in civil society. The Greenhouse Effect is a market failure. The American health system is a market failure – and most other people’s health systems don’t make much commercial sense. Education is a loss leader and the university thing is a mess.

“Income disparities are insane. The banker aristocracy is in hysterical depression. Housing is in wreckage; the market has given us white-collar homeless and a million empty buildings.

“The energy market is completely freakish. If you have no fossil fuels, you shiver in the dark. If you do have them, your economy is completely unstable, your government is corrupted and people kill you for oil.

“The human trafficking situation is crazy. In globalization people just evaporate over borders. They emigrate illegally and grab whatever cash they can find. If you don’t export you go broke from trade imbalances. If you do export, you go broke because your trading partners can’t pay you.

“Kinda hard to face up to all this, especially when it’s laid out in this very bald fashion.

“But you know, I’m not scared by any of this. I regret the suffering, I know it’s big trouble – but it promises massive change and a massive change was inevitable. The way we ran the world was wrong.

“I’ve never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I’m bored with the deceit. I’m tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I’m disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I’m up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch.

“The cure for panic is action. Coherent action is great; for a scatterbrained web society, that may be a bit much to ask. Well, any action is better than whining. We can do better.

“I’m not gonna tell you what to do. I’m an artist, I’m not running for office and I don’t want any of your money. Just talk among yourselves. Grow up to the size of your challenges. Bang out some code, build some platforms you don’t have to duct-tape any more, make more opportunities than you can grab for your little selves, and let’s get after living real lives.

“The future is unwritten. Thank you very much.”