Bruce Sterling - Shaping Things
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Research Started by Sebastian Peschiera
Bruce Sterling the famous fiction writer helped define the Cyberpunk movement. In his book "Shaping Things" he writes short essays about technology and its relation to society, no only in present times but in times to comes. He is particular interested in the topic of cataloging information of everyday objects and environments , basically everything around us. Objects can have information that you can access as easily as the internet. He gives the example of all the obscurities that his wine bottle has: who made it? how much where they paid? how did it get to his hands? he critizices consumerist societies inability to provide the answers or information of these questions. He would much rather be in the know , when it comes to buying things, than not to be. This through technology would definitely push to a more consumerism and society. He then goes on to say that it is the job of future designer to make the device or interfaces that keeps track of information related to the objects, its the job of the designer to be it easy to catalog of all things. He also talks about modeling, and how through increments in bandwith and storage, modeling programs like SPIME 3d can produce finer details than the physical object it models, "more polygons than molecules"(96). By this modeling you can create real counterparts in a virtual environment where the cataloging and information is endless, the system might break apart because of entropy it can become obsolete, but the information pertaining the entropy and the use it was given would've made it worth it. The Spime worlds don't have to be limited by objects it can also detect environments, light, particles, etc you can access it provide more information and store it for later exploration. He concludes the talk about the 3d models by saying that each model should also be aware of the time, perishable items, expiration date..etc. He also talks in his book about the physical problems a digital society has, because we are unable to fulfill human bodily needs through the computer, the digital age slowly take a hold on to people, so we are seeing a turn to the biotechnological age, where things are design in the microscopic level. A proble that Sterling sees is that in order for the biological objects to be effective they need to grow fast, and the fastes growing biological materials are microbes. So he concludes that we could have human microbes, microbes objects amongst others. This biological intelligence would affect humans in ways we have not imagine the problems will stop being the human problems we now have and become post human biological problems. We are not going to utopia or oblivion we are just headint towards a direction that if we are smart would makes us know all the knowledge of our ancestors and have more knowledge than them of the objects that exist in our reality.
Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things,The MIT Press (September 1, 2005)
