Introducing Bruce

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2001  by Peter Warshall

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We continue Whole Earth's attempt to avoid single-mind journalism ("editorial policy") and to blow minds with diversity. Bruce Sterling, described by the best historian and critic of sci fi, John Clute, as a brilliant endomorph bull, is equally a surrealist techno-historian, a maverick Lone Star postmodern teller of tall tales, a high-octane devourer and colorcaster for chakra-tic info on climate change, a carny of cyborgian arts and literature, and a wildcat gusher of books and novels (fourteen so far). Distraction, for instance, was given endless gold stars by John Clute, and many benedictions by Stewart Brand.

He's described the Internet as a vanity press and said of Whole Earth: "the greatest countercultural periodical in the history of humankind. Give them your money, donate your blood, if you have to." Hard not to offer him an issue, though he rankles neo-Luddites by portraying technology not as evil, but as mock hero--and those who screw with the mock hero, he loves even more (see Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, or Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, or just read Holy Fire or Distraction). I recently heard Bruce describe a fiber-optic toothbrush that would display your good and bad dental bacteria on a screen while you brushed, and an emerald-foam toothpaste with only good bacteria to be pleasantly swirled like wine. The audience wasn't sure if the toothbrush was imaginative or available at Walgreens. Perfect Bruce; they laughed nervously. He has mastered splicing the old economy with futuristic madness. At the moment. Bruce chortles the Net as "emerging social glue" and commandeers the Viridian Movement (flashier than the greens, more intent on infiltrating households to reduce Greenhouse gassing).

I guess for the record (who's keeping score?) you should know that his writings have appeared in Boing Boing, The NY Times, Omni, Drugs Society & Behaviour, Whole Earth, and Wired, and he's made real-life appearances on ABC's Nightline, BBS's The Late Show, CBC's Morningside, and MTV. He lives in Austin, the Silicon Valley of Texas, with his wife and two daughters.

A secret heroine of this issue is Deborah Tibbetts. The Texas boys zoomed us QuarkXpress files that were not always delightful wormholes on digitati parchment, but deadline-time nervous clutters of paragraphs. No judgment, but Bruce and Dave freely admit to being mag production babes when it comes to page routing from editorial to design. At times, Scriptorium-computerized idiosyncrasies did not produce bit-rot, but unfathomable lunar-rock typographic memorials. Deborah, with her keen and kind eye--and gracious acceptance that this issue would not look like any other Whole Earth--navigated the production process through many midnights, balanced on the tightrope between Bruce's "Make it rot, Dave," and the California staff's "Make it readable, Deborah." Enjoy the old/new Divona text font. There's no more Scala (our usual text font) until Gossip.

COPYRIGHT 2001 New Whole Earth LLC
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning