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ViridianDesignMovement
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesBruceSterling is currently heading the Viridian movement. It's a design movement, designed by Bruce Sterling. They focus on Greenhouse Effect related product design. More or less.
Summary from the movement's features, taken from the cited page:
- The movement has a built-in expiration date: 2012, a date in the Kyoto accords.
- It center its focus and activity around the Greenhouse Effect.
- They have moral gravity and sense of urgency.
- No physical locale.
- They come presupplied with a powerful, malignant, threatening enemy, the Global Climate Coalition.
- No tolerance for anything spiritual or mystical.
- No street credibility.
- Specifically interested in OLD PEOPLE.
- They have a special fondness for environmental crime units, anti-poacher-units, post-disaster National Guard units, emergency civil engineers, the Red Cross and so forth.
- They are futurists.
- Their pet drug is [Viagra].
- etc.
Viridian Note 00283: Geeks and Spooks
This is a speech at "Global Challenges, Trends and Best Practices in
Cryptography," the Information System Security and Education Center,
Washington, DC, 2001-11-20, by BruceSterling. In it, he says that
crypto is stuff fought over by geeks and spooks, and both have failed
us politically. And then he turns to one thing he'd like to see in
the time to come:
"I want a democratic, citizen-to-citizen device that will bridge those
social barriers and language barriers. I think we could invent devices
and means of verification that would strengthen the global social
fabric that terrorism wants to rip. It wouldn't be easy or simple, but
it's not beyond our ingenuity. Our social capital sustains all
civilized societies, and it is all about trust. So let's invent new
MethodsOfTrust?."
And he describes something that seems to come straight out of
DavidBrin's TransparentSociety:
"The point of this device would be to arm the population in
surveilling and recording acts of unconventional warfare. You don't
shoot anybody with it; but if you see anything weird, suspicious and
asymmetric going on, you formally act as a MediatedWitness?: you hold
this device up, and you start looking and talking."
Oh and he links to the NetWar book and says it has the best analysis
of the BattleOfSeattle?.