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Bruce Sterling on Living Glocally

November

18th

Dan Gould

Bruce Sterling has closed the door on the Viridian Design movement. His last Viridian note ends a discussion on green design that he’s been conducting since 1999. In this last email newsletter,the science fiction writer and design professor has written a fantastic essay about living “glocally” and the importance of everyday sustainable, quality lifestyle design. Highly recommended.

Some parting thoughts from Sterling:

Living on the entire planet at once is no longer a major challenge. It’s got
its practical drawbacks, but I’m much more perturbed about contemporary
indignities such as airport terrorspaces, ATM surchanges and the open banditry
of cellphone roaming. This is what’s troublesome. The rest of it, I’m rather
at ease about. Unless I’m physically restrained by some bureaucracy, I don’t
think I’m going to stop this glocally nomadic life. I live on the Earth. The
Earth is a planet. This fact is okay. I am living in truth.

Another major change came through my consumption habits. It pains me to see
certain people still trying to live in hairshirt-green fashion — purportedly
mindful, and thrifty and modest. I used to tolerate this eccentricity, but now
that panicked bankers and venture capitalists are also trying to cling like
leeches to every last shred of their wealth, I can finally see it as actively
pernicious.

Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like
the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes
the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any
effective way. It doesn’t do or say anything conceptually novel — nor is it
practical, or a working path to a better life.