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State of the World 2006

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Once again, I'm leading a State of the World discussion with Bruce Sterling on the WELL. Bruce has just finished a year-long gig as Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design, and is in Austin for the holidays before setting out for Belgrade and other parts of the world.

India and China are tremendous stories. Even big pieces of Eastern Europe are getting onto the EU carousel. America's being run by corrupt Lysenkoist morons, but, debilitating as that may be for us Yankees, it also means that the remaining 94 percent of the planet has some chance at the limelight. Hey, South Korea could have been full of cloning superstars -- if they could just get over their endemic Asian urge to cook the books.

The USA right now is the buried shadow of the Confederate States of America. You can watch GONE WITH THE WIND, and it's the secret textbook of the Bush Administration. The South lost that war for a reason. The South didn't have it in them to be a major power, because they were bold, gallant, devout, crooked, dumb and full of unexamined anxieties.

The thing is, though: when a culture is "gone with the wind," it's never utterly and entirely gone. You can't make things go away by distributing them into the wind. It's just... up in the atmosphere. The emissions of the past form a smog. A breathable compost. You can't throw the past away and start over with a Year Zero. There is no "away." Tomorrow is this place, at a different time.

jon posted this at 2:15 PM
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