A speech (scroll down about half a page) Bruce Sterling gave at a design conference in Brussels last week, to which I was pointed by Joe Katzman’s piece on his Winds of Change. Sterling describes “a rather extensively worked-out vision in worldbuilding from the point of view of ubiquitous computation in the 21st century”, and a notion he calls 911.net. None of this really appears well-worked-out to me, which he actually acknowledges apologetically several times in the speech, because he’s just a science-fiction writer, folks:

“The actual September 11 event, 9/11, was a rare and remarkable thing. And, with fewer than 3,000 people dead, it’s just not that big a deal as genuine catastrophes go. Politically, theologically and militarily it was huge, but a workaday 911.net wouldn’t fret much about terrorism. Instead, it would have to deal mostly with floods, fires, climate change, earthquakes, volcanoes and (let’s hope never) asteroids and weapons of mass destruction.

So, basically, with 911.net, we are describing a social re-definition of computer geeks as firemen. Native twenty-first century computer geeks as muscular, with-it, first-responder types. I think this would be pretty good for the computer industry. We all need to take the dysfunctional physical world far more seriously. This week, Italy’s flooding, Texas is flooding, Colorado’s on fire. This morning, the brand-new wilderness forests around the site of the former Chernobyl are on fire, spewing radioactive ash hither and yon. Chunks of Antarctica the size of Rhode Island have fallen into the sea. I could go on.

“…This is the sort of activity that humanity is required to deal with

in this new century. If we build a successful method with which to do

this, those useful tactics will spread across the fabric of our

civilization. I believe they are already spreading. An innovation like

911.net will likely serve as a camel’s nose in the tent for a whole

series of ubicomp [ubiquitous computing] applications across society…”