What Goes Into the Sausage?

Written in March of 2006

Well, I missed last week due to a confluence of good and bad news: I got commissioned to produce something in another medium and had a crisis on one of my comics serials foisted upon me in the same 24 hours, and that just ate my Ministry producing time.

This week has similarly been nothing but chaos, ending up with me working on less than six hours' sleep today. My leg's given out again and I'm back on my cane, I can barely see out of my left eye and this needs to be with Jen in a couple of hours. Let's see what I've got.

Life's A Riot With Meathook Vs. Noospheric

I'm currently developing a new project that has proved to be an absolute bugger to break. It started off as no more then a collection of intents, and a publisher-a small outfit I've been friendly with for years who need an "anchor" book for the direct market. The artist is in place, the format (32 pages, no ads, colour, USD $2.99) is in place, I even know the style I'm going to be producing it in. All I'm missing are the story and the characters and the title.

Yeah. It's like that sometimes. Makes no sense, does it? That's because you never get to see what goes into sausages.

Did you ever hear My Bloody Valentine, around the time of "Feed Me With Your Kiss"? An ear-wrecking field of noise where they didn't play the note, so much as all the notes that get you to the note? It's kind of like that, without the note at the end. Just a field of dissonance. A song turned inside out and wearing its guts as its skin. A pretty picture, no?

So, at this point, I'm playing wak-a-rat, running around with a hammer hitting all the bits that stick out and go off the progression to a note.

I've made more mileage out of mining the material of the 20th Century than most, and there's still tons there left to go, things that need reconsideration after that fastest of centuries. But I'm really trying not to go there, for this project. Four years after the end of Transmetropolitan, I'm going back to social speculative fiction, to see how the landscape's changed. I'm hunting outbreaks of the future again, in a longform work.

I wouldn't think there's much doubt that things are getting strange again. And not the good kind of strange. A woman married a dolphin yesterday. Seriously. A US senator has declared that no woman can get an abortion in his own state unless she's a committed Christian virgin who's been beaten to within an inch of her life and anally raped. He said it on television. Quantum physicists are teleporting light. The truth behind that old "where's my bloody jetpack" view of the future is that the future is clearly not going to be that simple. In the last few months, I've started to get the feeling that maybe old miseryguts J. G. Ballard isn't right all the time, and the near future, at least, is going to be anything but banal. Unless, of course, you're already so dead inside that anything short of Jesus Robots descending en masse from the centre of the sun dispensing immortality juice and flying cars makes you yawn.

The future's getting weird and scary. My futurist friend Matt Jones said to me the other day that, in one sense, the future is a race between the Bright Spime Future and what other smart friend Dr. Joshua Ellis has termed the Grim Meathook Future. What's the Grim Meathook Future? Take a look at New Orleans-what is now called the K-Hole, the hole that Hurricane Katrina left in the United States. Everyone knew in advance that the 2006 hurricane season was going to be a freak one. The K-Hole is the remains of a massive system failure. That's the Grim Meathook Future: infrastructures that cannot cope. Dead bodies laying for two weeks on the street corners of the most powerful nation on earth: that's the Grim Meathook Future. Things turning backwards. I live on an island that's just been informed that there's probably not enough water to go round this summer. Turn that sentence around in your heads a few times. So, anyway, it has to encapsulate that too. Whatever else it is, it's the story of a race between two futures.

Oh... Spime Future? No, I'm not totally convinced of the Spime Future, or, as it is also sometimes known, The Internet Of Things. The idea is close to that of the noosphere, an invisible world of information flows. A Spime is an object (or blobject, or blogject) that exists as, around and within a constantly-updated, totally-recorded flow of information. In Sterling's words, "A Spime is an object that ate and internalized the previous industrial order."

In practise, it's probably going to turn into that dumb idea of internet fridges that email shopping lists to the supermarket. If it's anything like my local Tesco online delivery service, the groceries won't turn up for four days and will be missing half the stuff you ordered anyway. Bruce Sterling wrote an excellent book on spimes called Shaping Things, published by MIT Media Lab, which I recommend to you. A lot of people are thinking about this right now, and the conversation will soon start leaking into the wider world. There's also a fair chance that more and more people will be implanting hacked Radio Frequency ID tags and the like into themselves over the next few years. Which leads me to:

There's a middle distance between the complete collapse of infrastructure and some weird geek dream of electronically knowing where all your stuff is. (I'm cheating: the end result of pure spime theory is electronic omniscience, which is not a useless concept.) Between apocalyptic politics and nerdvana is the human dimension; how this stuff is taken onboard by smart people at street level. You all know Bill Gibson's saw from his cyberpunk novels, that the street finds its own use for things. It still holds. But, right now, I think there's an urgency and a sense of envelope-pushing in exactly what uses are found for these things.

Josh says it in the GMF text: "I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There's the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future."

And that's where the story lies. In the spread of possible futures, and the people down on the ground facing them. The story has to be about people trying to steer (or condemn) other people to one future or another, using everything in their power. That's a big story.

That's what I'm working on right now. Aren't you sorry you asked? I told you I was tired.

§

Thinking a lot about Augmented Reality as Activated History: smartphones/street computers drilling down into buildings'pasts.

§

How many people could you house inside a dead whale?

If you shored it up inside? Biodegradable new floodplain-shanty housing. 

§