Is Bruce Sterling Future-Shocked? Or: Michael Moore 1 -- Bruce Sterling 0

Sometimes the mighty do fall. And as they fall, they cause others to fall in their wake. Even people that used to be some of their main critics. For those, it's a fall from grace, even if it's a fall in style: shrouded in pithy observations, perpetrated with sharp similes and suffused with the air and eloquence of a grandmaster. Beautiful to watch, but still a gracious fall from grace.

I'm talking about "The Blast Shack": Bruce Sterling's recent piece about Wikileaks. I've read through it several times, and can't escape the following two conclusions:

1): Bruce Sterling is effectively arguing against more transparency.

Price quote:

For diplomats, a massive computer leak is not the kind of sunlight that chases away corrupt misbehavior; it’s more like some dreadful shift in the planetary atmosphere that causes ultraviolet light to peel their skin away. They’re not gonna die from being sunburned in public without their pants on; Bill Clinton survived that ordeal, Silvio Berlusconi just survived it (again). No scandal lasts forever; people do get bored. Generally, you can just brazen it out and wait for the public to find a fresher outrage. Except.

It’s the damage to the institutions that is spooky and disheartening; after the Lewinsky eruption, every American politician lives in permanent terror of a sex-outing. That’s “transparency,” too; it’s the kind of ghastly sex-transparency that Julian himself is stuck crotch-deep in. The politics of personal destruction hasn’t made the Americans into a frank and erotically cheerful people. On the contrary, the US today is like some creepy house of incest divided against itself in a civil cold war. “Transparency” can have nasty aspects; obvious, yet denied; spoken, but spoken in whispers. Very Edgar Allen Poe.

All right, so protecting politicians from possible scandals is more important than the information that the Wikileaks cables have provided (so far)? Even worse -- see the next price quote:

And I don’t much like that situation. It doesn’t make me feel better. I feel sorry for them and what it does to their values, to their self-esteem. If there’s one single watchword, one central virtue, of the diplomatic life, it’s “discretion.” Not “transparency.” Diplomatic discretion. Discretion is why diplomats do not say transparent things to foreigners. When diplomats tell foreigners what they really think, war results.

Diplomats are people who speak from nation to nation. They personify nations, and nations are brutal, savage, feral entities. Diplomats used to have something in the way of an international community, until the Americans decided to unilaterally abandon that in pursuit of Bradley Manning’s oil war. Now nations are so badly off that they can’t even get it together to coherently tackle heroin, hydrogen bombs, global warming and financial collapse. Not to mention the Internet.

The world has lousy diplomacy now. It’s dysfunctional. The world corps diplomatique are weak, really weak, and the US diplomatic corps, which used to be the senior and best-engineered outfit there, is rattling around bottled-up in blast-proofed bunkers. It’s scary how weak and useless they are.

Do I read that right? Global warming and financial collapse happened as the nation couldn't tackle it because there was too much transparency? Global warming and the next financial bubble can be stopped by more “discretion” (read secrecy)? Talk about having it backwards.

This appalls me. And thankfully not just me: cue, for example, to Mark at comment #61:

• Saudi Arabia put pressure on the US to attack Iran. Other Arab allies also secretly agitated for military action against Tehran.


• Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.


• Small teams of US special forces have been operating secretly inside Pakistan’s tribal areas, with Pakistani government approval. And the US concluded that Pakistani troops were responsible for a spate of extra-judicial killings in the Swat Valley and tribal belt, but decided not to comment publicly.


• The US ambassador to Pakistan said the Pakistani army is covertly sponsoring four major militant groups, including the Afghan Taliban and the Mumbai attackers, Laskar-e-Taiba (LeT), and “no amount of money” will change the policy. Also, US diplomats discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan earmarked for fighting Islamist militants was not used for that purpose.


• The British government promised to protect US interests during the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.


• Russia is a “virtual mafia state” with rampant corruption and scant separation between the activities of the government and organised crime. Vladimir Putin is accused of amassing “illicit proceeds” from his time in office, which various sources allege are hidden overseas. And he was likely to have known about the operation in London to murder the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, Washington’s top diplomat in Europe alleged.


• British and US officials colluded to manoeuvre around a proposed ban on cluster bombs, allowing the US to keep the munitions on British territory, regardless of whether a treaty forbidding their use was implemented. Parliament was kept in the dark about the secret agreement, approved by then-foreign secretary David Miliband.


• One of the biggest objectives at the US embassy in Madrid over the past seven years has been trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of the killing of a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad.


• The British military was criticised for failing to establish security in Sangin by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the US commander of Nato troops, according to diplomatic cables.


• Rampant government corruption in Afghanistan is revealed by the cables, including an incident last year when the then vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52m in cash.


• The British Foreign Office misled parliament over the plight of thousands of islanders who were expelled from their Indian Ocean homeland – the British colony of Diego Garcia – to make way for a large US military base.


• The US military has been charging its allies a 15% handling fee on hundreds of millions of dollars being raised internationally to build up the Afghan army.


• Conservative party politicians promised before the election that they would run a “pro-American regime” and buy more arms from the US if they came to power.


• The president of Yemen secretly offered US forces unrestricted access to his territory to conduct unilateral strikes against al-Qaida terrorist targets.

• A potential “environmental disaster” was kept secret by the US last year when a large consignment of highly enriched uranium in Libya came close to cracking open and leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere.


• Libya threatened UK with “dire reprisals” if the convicted Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, died in a Scottish prison.


• Ann Pickard, Shell’s VP for sub-Saharan Africa, claimed in Oct 2009 that the oil giant had infiltrated all the main ministries of the Nigerian government.


• Two British civil servants, Dr Richard Freer and Judith Gough, contradicted Gordon Brown’s statement on reduction of the Trident fleet in conversations with US embassy officials in London.


• The US ambassador in Kampala sought assurances from the Ugandan government in December 2010 that it would consult the US before using American intelligence to commit war crimes in the conflict against the LRA.


• The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer paid investigators to unearth corruption links to Nigeria’s attorney general in an attempt to persuade him to stop his legal action against a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis.


• The pope intervened personally to ensure the Vatican’s increased hostility towards Turkey joining the EU.


• The Vatican refused to allow its officials to testify at Irish inquiry into clerical child abuse and was angered when they were summoned from Rome.


• BP suffered a giant gas leak in Azerbaijan 18 months before the Gulf of Mexico disaster.


• Azerbaijan accused BP of stealing $10bn of oil and using “mild blackmail” to secure rights to develop gas reserves in the Caspian Sea.


• US energy company Chevron negotiated with Tehran about developing an oilfield despite tight US sanctions.


• Speculation that Omar al-Bashir siphoned $9bn in oil money and deposited it in foreign accounts could fuel calls for his arrest
  
  Do you honestly think that US taxpayers should not know this information?

(Emphasis of last sentence mine.)

(See also comment #69, comment #75 and comment #108, and this article in The Economist.)

Indeed, as a concerned, tax-paying citizen (in my case of The Netherlands)(and I'm certainly no 'naturally sociopathic hacker' ) I also want to know if, for example:

• our goverment let themselves be coerced into the war with Iraq;


• our goverment let themselves be coerced into the war with Afghanistan: our previous coalition fell over the question of withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan;


• Trafigura did indeed play some very dirty games in getting rid of chemical waste in Ivory Coast;


• Shell does indeed play dirty games in Nigeria;


• And more things I'm probably not aware of;

If that kind of transparency gives headaches to diplomats and politicians alike: then so be it. They should learn to deal with it, and--especially the politicians, but also big corporations--it should help prevent more outright lies, deceptions and skullduggery.

If Bruce Sterling is against that kind of transparency, then I greatly prefer documentary maker Michael Moore, who campaigns to free Bradly Manning:

"To suggest that lives were put in danger by the release of the WikiLeaks documents is the most cynical of statements," Moore said.

"Lives were put in danger the night we invaded the sovereign nation of Iraq, an act that had nothing to do with what the Bradley Mannings of this country signed up for: to defend our people from attack. It was a war based on a complete lie and lives were not only put in danger, hundreds of thousands of them were exterminated.

"For those who organised this massacre to point a finger at Bradley Manning is the ultimate example of Orwellian hypocrisy."

Amen to that. Or, in other words: Michael Moore 1 -- Bruce Sterling 0.

2): Bruce Sterling is failing as a futurist.

A large part of Bruce Sterling (professor of internet studies and science fiction)'s reputation hinges on his ability to explore the near-future: this is what Beyond the Beyond is majorly about. In that light, I find it quite disappointing that he does pinpoint the 'real issue':

That’s the real issue, that’s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don’t mix any more.

But then, while he admitted he didn't quite see it (Wikileaks) coming:

But who cared about that wild notion? Why would that amateurish effort ever matter to real-life people? It’s like comparing a mighty IBM mainframe to some cranky Apple computer made inside a California garage. Yes, it’s almost that hard to imagine.

So Wikileaks is a manifestation of something that has been growing all around us, for decades, with volcanic inexorability. The NSA is the world’s most public unknown secret agency. And for four years now, its twisted sister Wikileaks has been the world’s most blatant, most publicly praised, encrypted underground site.

He doesn't see any solution to this problem, or fails to see the positive sides and effects of it:

The data held by states is gonna get easier to steal, not harder to steal; the Chinese are all over Indian computers, the Indians are all over Pakistani computers, and the Russian cybermafia is brazenly hosting wikileaks.info because that’s where the underground goes to the mattresses. It is a godawful mess. This is gonna get worse before it gets better, and it’s gonna get worse for a long time. Like leaks in a house where the pipes froze.

This is (intentionally?) missing the point: Wikileaks is, as Sterling mentions at length in his piece, *not* a sovereign state spying on another state: Wikileaks are showing the hidden data to the public at large.

So spying becomes easier for nations: well, they've been spying on each other since time immemorial. This is just business as usual. What has changed is that it is much more difficult for nations (and corporations) to hide their schemes from the public at large. And thus they try, desperately, to put the ghost back in the bottle. I hope they fail. I hope that nations--*any* nation--will be less able to wage wars based on disinformation, lies and deceit.

More openness, more abilities for concerned citizens to make informed choices. It seems that Bruce Sterling sees this as a bad thing, but he can't put the cat back into the bag, either.

What's the matter, Bruce? Future-Shocked?

UPDATE: Gabrielle Coleman on The Atlantic more or less makes the same point:

There is no denying that there is tremendous support for WikiLeaks among geeks -- although much of it came after the backlash against WikiLeaks; there is no denying that hackers will attempt to impact politics through technological means; there is no denying that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange deserve some critical scrutiny, which is what Sterling dished out. But I am less sold on the idea that the form of exposure so powerfully provided by WikiLeaks does not have some merit.

Personally I find myself sympathetic toward the purported mission behind OpenLeaks. They are seeking to do something similar to WikiLeaks but transforming it by injecting a dose of much needed transparency and accountability. And yet, due to the obsessive media spotlight on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (including Sterling's piece) the public may be led to believe that there is only one way to spread leaks, when in fact WikiLeaks helped to usher a paradigm that can be tweaked and hacked to better serve democratic goals.

Excellent: like the age-old question -- "Who's watching the watchers?" -- Coleman points to OpenLeaks as the next step in transparency: keep the organisation that strives for more transparency transparent itself. Practice what you preach, and by doing so better serve democratic goals.

Now you can shoot me, but the 'old' Bruce Sterling -- say, the writer of Islands in the Net, Holy Fire and Distraction -- used to come up with such forward-looking visions himself.

The king is dead: long live the king!

Imaging President Barack Obama

First (and most important of all): many, many congratulations with President Barack Obama! To many of my American friends, and the many outside of it as well. Too many to mention, and you know who you are.

(I returned from World Fantasy on November 4, and was so jetlagged I couldn't sleep. Which was good, as I had planned to follow the US elections live anyway, but now I had no problems staying awake [I had those today]. At 05.30 am or so Dutch time McCain gave his concession speech. I feel so happy I nearly cried, and so many in the US must have felt -- probably still feel -- much, much happier than I do.)

Back in May 2005 I received a story from Ed Morris in the IZ slushpile called "Imagine" (Paul Di Filippo had urged him to try Interzone with it, and too good effect, and my belated thanks here). I forwarded the story to my (then) Interzone colleagues and Andy Cox published it in Interzone #200, on September 2005.


The last paragraph of the story is as follows:

"Well, we would have been denied our President Barack Obama, who just allowed me back into the States a week ago Tuesday. About him, at least, I have no room to bitch."

My question to the blogging masses is: does anybody know of fiction (not non-fiction) that imagined a President Barack Obama that was published before September 2005?

As a second query: what might be the first story (or novel) that imagined a black President of the USA?

Ethical Investments, Sustainable Banking and Optimism

On Saturday September 20th, instead of going to the British FantasyCon (which I did want to attend, but after the credit card bills of my Summer trips came in, and the airfare from Amsterdam to East Midlands went above 350 euros and didn't come down, I had to skip it), I went to the customer's day of the Triodos Bank.

Triodos are one of the pioneers in ethical investments, and it's the place where I'm investing my surplus money (with current trends in pension funding in The Netherlands, I'll probably be expected to keep working until my 67th, or -- who knows -- my 70th birthday. I'm putting away money to at least make it possible for me to afford to do 3-day work weeks after my 60th birthday, and I certainly don't like the fact that most big Dutch pension funds invest heavily in hedge funds). Now, while their return on investment may not the best in the business, they performed very well last year. Also, the current credit crisis doesn't affect them at all. As CEO Peter Blom says:

“By sticking firmly to our own approach, the crisis currently impacting on the banking industry is bypassing Triodos Bank. This crisis is the caused by losing touch with the real economy. Triodos Bank makes the conscious choice to remain close to the real economy. We do not get involved in speculative derivatives. Instead the bank invests its savings in concrete sustainable businesses and has direct contact with the entrepreneur. That too is a form of sustainability.”

On the day, there was a speech by their CEO, and -- strongly condensed and highly generalised -- it came down to this:

"The root cause of the current credit crisis is greed. Bank managers have been put under enormous pressure -- through CEOs and shareholders -- to make high profits: 'meet this (unrealistic) mortgage goal every month, and then get your bonus, or otherwise get fired. And that goal was raised every month. Under such tremendous pressure, people will only look at the short term, not at the long term consequences. The mortgage dealers made their goals, not quite checking if the people they sold the mortgages were actually solvent (and indeed people taking on unrealistic mortgages are to blame, as well: must we assume all people are not much more than morons, or assume they have some basic intelligence?). The debts were sold, through increasingly complex and untransparent constructions to other financial institutions: a pyramid scheme of truly unprecedented proportions. Basically, money is the lubrication of the economy: that is the means (by which the economy works). Things went wrong when it became the end in itself. The reason why Triodos Bank is not -- or very minimally -- suffering from the current credit crisis is because it invests in actual, sustainable projects with full transparancy for its customers".

(Note: not the actual words being said, but my recollection and summarisation of them.)

Greed, indeed, and -- check out Glen Greenwald at Salon -- the knowledge that the state would bail them out (another post with some superb observations, like why are Americans so afraid to socialise healthcare, but -- apart from a few shouters in the desert -- seem to think that nationalising failing mortgage and financial institutions is OK?)

Sorry, but I can't help to reproduce this price quote:

Can anyone point to any discussion of what the implications are for having the Federal Government seize control of the largest and most powerful insurance company in the country, as well as virtually the entire mortgage industry and other key swaths of financial services? Haven't we heard all these years that national health care was an extremely risky and dangerous undertaking because of what happens when the Federal Government gets too involved in an industry? What happened in the last month dwarfs all of that by many magnitudes.

It's appalling (and that's a huge understatement) that taxpayers -- the population at large -- must cough up for corporate greed. Yes, I know it's a complicated problem, and that part of the blame goes to hugely overspending citizens, as well. But this way also the actually fiscal conservative Americans (and I don't mean Republicans, or Democrats, or people from whatever party, but people who really took care not to spend more than they earned) get to pay the bill for this recklessness. Not to mention those *outside* the USA: for example, the pension premiums I pay through my day job go into a huge pension fund. The managers of that pension fund (unlike Americans -- and do correct me if I'm wrong here! -- who can decide where their 401 funds go, I as a Dutchman have no influence in to where my pension premiums are invested) have invested heavily in hedge funds, the same ones that are now also suffering heavily under the current credit crisis. As they bloody well should, being the sharks they are, but it just pains me that some of *my* money -- without my consent, through my pension funds -- has gone their way.

It's the reason why I have a savings account outside of the centrally regulated way -- actually the bog Dutch pension funds have had some harsh critiques for investing heavily in weapons industries, indeed investing in land mine manufacturing companies, out of which they retracted only after massive public outcries (they were *lucrative* investments, thanks in no small part to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars).

To put this in my personal perspective: what little hope I had that governments would try to set right all the wrongs in this world has just completely evaporated. I increasingly believe it comes down to actions that bypass governments, where small, forward-thinking (and thus almost by definition -- yeah, kill me now -- ethical and sustainable) initiatives and companies drive progress. Like Triodos bank.

Anyway, it turned out to be a very illuminating day: I ran into quite a few interesting projects I wasn't fully aware about, and which I do gladly support. To wit:

For example, one of the presentations I attended was about microcredit financing. It began by reminding me how well-off we are in the western world:

1. 80% of the world's wealth belongs to 20% of its people;
2. Two billion people make less than 1 euro per day;
3. One billion people live in slums.

To them 'credit crisis' is business as usual.

So what can microcredit financing help this situation?

The way it was explained was like this: the money from my -- and other Triodos Bank customers -- savings account is (partly: obviously they have lots of other projects going on, some of which I will mention) going via Hivos to MFIs (local 'Microfinance Institutions', the Dutch abbreviation is MFI) who then give loans to local entrepreneurs.

As a very important aside: where do the most of these microcredit loans go to (this was actually asked, and answered correctly by almost all attendees), men or women? The utmost majority goes to women (Grameen Bank of Bangladesh reports 97%, Mibanco of Peru reports 86%), because they are much more responsible, reliable and motivated to not only make the project work, and pay that loan back with the -- admittedly very high -- interest. It almost makes me feel ashamed to be a man (because they -- generally, not the good exceptions! -- tend to use the money to buy something relatively useless like a TV, or just get drunk on it).

The point is, though, that these MFIs tend to keep a very close look on the people they invest in. Of course, they have their failures, but the successes more than make up for those. And, on average, they do bring a return on investment, even if this is only some 3 to 4%. More importantly, they raise the local wealth in a sustainable way: people *borrow* money, and know that they must pay it back. Then, when they realise they can do this successfully, they expand their business -- even if it's a microbusiness by western standards -- bringing increased wealth (OK: less poverty is probably the better term) to their immediate surrounds (family and local people).

(As another aside, the interest rates the third world entrepeneurs are paying are something like 30 to 40%. This initially shocked several people -- me included -- until it was told that commercial banks in the third world ask for much higher interest rates, typically well over 100%. I don't know enough about this to give any meaningful comment on these rates, but I do appreciate the openness, the transparancy of both Hivos and Triodos Bank on this: they practice what they preach.)

To keep things in perspective, Hivos handles about a 150 million euros to MFIs in the Third World, and the Triodos Bank Noord-Zuid ('North-South') saving accounts have about the same amount of money. Luckily they're not the only players in this game, and I was given to understand that the largest player in the MFI game -- Grameen Bank -- has about 8 million customers in Bangladesh and India, and had expanded to Tanzania, where they acquired 64,000 customers in the first year. Also, the Mibanco MFI in Peru has acquired enough funds to have become a savings banks (with savings mainly from Peru, not from the western world) in its own right, and become a true player on Peru's financial market, having 94 branches throughout Peru.

These may be (relatively) small progresses, but they are *sustainable*, and -- I suspect -- might be more important in the long run than whatever 'get-rich-quick' or other pyramid scheme western capitalism gone haywire can dazzle investors with.

Other informations stands (among others):

• Ode Magazine: a magazine for intelligent optimists. Well, the moment I fail to feel attracted by the label 'intelligent optimist' is the moment when I will stop drinking beer. I thought it was the Dutch version of an American magazine, only to find out that it's the other way around: the magazine originates from The Netherlands, but has expanded into the US (an office in San Francisco);
• Biologica: a Dutch organisation for organic food;
• Windunie: A Dutch organisation for wind energy production;
• Humanitas: the biggest Dutch community work organisation;
• Tuyu (can't get the English part of it to work just yet): a fair trade company specialising in business gifts;
• Ko-Kalf: an organic, animal-friendly (until they go to the slaughterhouse, as one of my friends has said) meat provider, who sold 'bitterballen' (untranslatable Dutch snacks);
• Wijngoed Reestlandhoeve: an organic Dutch winery, with wine tastings (I bought a bottle of the 'Reestlander Rood': a red wine with the sublabel barrique, which is the wooden barrel, originally from Bordeaux, in which the wine is aged);

More on some of those (also with a certain future project of mine in mind: yes, I am tickling your interest) later.

As a final aside, Triodos Bank also -- among a lot of other things, all either sustainable, ethical, humanitarian, or all of the above --invests in art & culture. Reasoning: innovative thinking generates new, profit-making projects; innovative thinking needs inspiration; art & culture can provide inspiration; thus some of the money from the innovative projects Triodos Bank finances -- and makes money from -- is invested in art & culture.

Another reason why I invest in this bank.

So this is one of the things I do to try to make a difference.