Shaping
Things
by Bruce Sterling; Lorraine Wild, Designer
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005
144 pp. illus. 62 b/w. Trade, $45.00;
paper, $17.95
ISBN: 0-262-19533-X; ISBN: 0-262-69326-7.
Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Texas Woman’s University
dgrigar@twu.edu
When Bruce Sterling’s edited collection,
Mirrorshades, came out in the mid-
1980s, science fiction aficionados and
computer geeks found a genre, however
short-lived cyberpunk was, that spoke
our language and gave us a peek into a
future that we were, however unconsciously,
helping to form. Here was a writer whose
vision of technology influenced a great
many of us about information politics,
from the power of information to the ethics
of hacking it. While at first glance Shaping
Things seems a far cry from the "Storm
Troupe" in Heavy Weather, the "Mechanists"
from Schismatrix Plus, or the "medical-industrial
complex" of Holy Fire, his impetus
to examine the future is not. Shaping
Things is speculative nonfiction––as
speculative as any fiction work Sterling
has created––about fixing tomorrow
by intervening today through, well, shaping
the things we create and interact with.
Those who attended his 2004 keynote address
at SIGGRAPH would recognize the subject
matter, themes, and terminology of this
book since they were introduced in that
talk. For the rest of us, his discussion
of "spimes" (not to mention "biots," "fabbing,"
"arphids," "oblopia," "otivion") may seem
odd since it is his "flat out neologism"
(8) for "manufactured objects whose informational
support is so overwhelmingly extensive
and rich that they are regarded as material
instantiations of an immaterial system"
(11). But some of the ideas found in the
book actually date back to his 1996 novel,
Holy Fire, particularly the idea
about the danger posed by the things we
unmindfully create and use.
Shaping Things offers arguments,
both ethical and logical, about production,
particularly production as it is affected
by industrial design. Speaking of the
former, the book posits, on the one hand,
the method for getting beyond, what series
editor Peter Lunenfeld calls in his "Endtroduction,"
the "vision deficit" that has plagued
"our made world" (146) and has, according
to Sterling, the potential of rendering
it "unthinkable" (7). In an urgent voice,
represented by black print, the capitalization
of all his words, and the centering
of his text, Sterling tells us that:
THE ONLY SANE WAY OUT OF A TECHNOSOCIETY
IS
THROUGH IT, INTO A NEWER ONE
THAT
KNOWS EVERYTHING THE OLDER ONE KNEW,
AND
KNOWS ENOUGH NEW THINGS
TO
DAZZLE AND DOMINATE THE DENIZENS
OF
THE OLDER ORDER. (132)
It brings little comfort to know that
we are only part way through the process
of finding a better way of living, particularly
when the facts he gives us about the current
state of our world are so loathsome.
The logical argument, spoken here in green
print (conveying a strong political message),
tells us what will happen if we don’t
heed his warning. When talking about "detritus,
fertilizers, and pesticides," for example,
he tells us: "A
human body can be understood as a sponge
of warm saltwater within a shell of skin;
so everything we emit ends up partially
within ourselves" (134).
Not a happy thought––but Sterling
does not simply point out problems humans
have created with their creations; he
also offers a solution, a design solution.
At the end of the book we learn that
"[I]n order to avoid that fate, we need
to work. We need to tear into the world
of artifice in the way that our ancestors
tore into the natural world. We need to
rip root and branch into the previous
industrial base and re-invent it, re-build
it. While we have the good fortune to
be living, we should invent and apply
ways of life that expand the options of
our descendants rather than causing irreparable
damage to their heritage." (142)
The end result is a book we are compelled
to read and carry around with us to read
again and again, a bible for "visualiz[ing]
and design[ing]," as Lunenfeld says, a
"better future" (146).
The part about carrying Shaping Things
around deserves an explanation since the
book’s design, as part of The MIT
Press’s "Mediaworks Pamphlets" series,
intends a purposeful strategy by author,
editor, and artist, Lorraine Wild. Inspired
by books published in the 16th
century that were "small enough yet important
enough to carry in one’s pocket"
(Wild 149), the book does, indeed, differ
in size from most academic books and slide
into places most others do not. But its
dimensions are not what stand out; rather,
it is the design and formatting that’s
hard to miss. As mentioned above, the
author makes use of the print medium to
make his case for better industrial design:
Font color, size and type vary; text is
highlighted, underlined, and bracketed;
ideas are connected across pages by green
string-like hyperlinks. In sum, concepts
are instantiated with tools the print
medium makes possible.
While some critics may not appreciate
this aspect of the book, this reader does
and comes to wonder if what this series
offers (and why it fits so well with Sterling’s
work, as well as Hayles’ and others
who have published in it) is that it is
an approach to invention that is quite
classic in nature––that is,
it instantiates abstract ideas in concrete
form, just as something like a parable
does. In Mark Turner’s The Literary
Mind, he argues that parables are
a kind of "narrative imagining––the
understanding of a complex of objects,
events, and actors as organized by our
knowledge of story" (5). Yes, he is talking
about stories, particularly the
doubling of stories (as they arose out
of oral cultures) to both literal and
secondary readings as a way of making
a salient point. But we can just as easily
see that design and formatting can function
similarly. What I mean is that if we see
a parallel between the literal story of
a parable and the design of Sterling’s
book (or the series, in general), then
perhaps we would see that Sterling’s
tricky discussion about "technosocial
transformation" (Sterling 5) is as concretized
by the book’s design as the secondary
reading is by the literal reading of a
parable, for all parable means etymologically
is putting things side by side for comparison
(Turner 5). In essence, the book’s
design is the visual equivalent of conceptual
imagining––which seems
appropriate for this present day technoculture,
one so inculcated by the processes of
instantiating words through inscription,
print, or computing that we think visually.
The irony of the book is, of course, that
it is still a book, an object that Sterling
would call a "product," with all of the
baggage that comes with it (10) instead
of a "sustainable, enhanceable, uniquely
identifiable" spime that is "made of substances
that can and will be folded back into
the production stream of [the] future
(11). However, there is little way around
this problem of predicting the future
with today’s technology and cultural
mindset, but certainly Sterling tries
and succeeds.
References:
Turner, M. (1996). The Literary Mind:
The Origins of Thought and Language.
NY: Oxford University Press.
