Bruce Sterling: “Having just put those 200 notes in order, I am now in a position to email the lot of them to anybody who wants them (Contact bruces@well.org). Why not decorate your own website with a free ton of Viridian propaganda?” The mechanics of this mailing list sound wonderful, to wit:

Internet mailing lists, such as this Viridian list,

are a form of publishing in which no money changes hands.

Nevertheless, there are two important forms of para-

economics involved. The first is “reputation economics.”

People tend to contribute to Internet exchanges because

there are useful personal benefits in spreading one’s

ideas, establishing one’s public expertise, and making

one’s name known to other interested parties. This

practice has a long and honorable history, and is well

known in the sciences and in academia generally. These

groups were the original source of the Internet and its

publication practices — along with the military.

The second para-economic aspect is “attention

economics.” This one is more problematic, because this is

where the cruelest forms of exploitation take place in the

Internet’s noncommercial world. It is easy to cut-and-

paste huge archives of found text and images, and to bomb

one’s hapless correspondents with them. The time and

attention of recipients suffers badly, since the work of

distribution can be accomplished in seconds, while parsing

all that text, and finally deciding that it is useless,

can take seemingly forever.

Our first formal innovation is an attempt to steal as

little of your attention as we can. We don’t fondly

imagine that every reader will find all posts in this list

to be equally fascinating. We are going to be covering a

lot of ground here, and much of our content will be not

only novel, but frankly weird. Therefore, we will begin

each Viridian Note with a useful set of its key concepts.

With some practice, we hope that you will be able to

reject a Viridian Note, confidently and without a pang,

within two or three seconds.

This effort, however, may not be enough. You may

still find yourself painfully tempted to actually *read*

the Note. We therefore offer a backup safety system, our

unique “Attention Conservation Notice.” This will begin

each Note by explaining to you, in some brief detail, why

you should NOT read it.

This has never been done before in print-based

publishing, but in the text-glutted electronic context, we

feel this practice makes a lot of sense. By saving your

attention, we are offering you a considerable value-added

service, which makes our Viridian list considerably

“cheaper” in attention-terms than the other, more

primitive lists you may be reading. They cynically

imagine that you are reading everything they spew; we,

however, know much better, and we are on your side…

We will follow the useful design edict to “Look at

the Underside First.” We’ll start each Note by explaining

the areas in which its design and intention fails,

rather than act as attention-hucksters, trumpeting the

work’s supposed benefits and demanding that you

concentrate.

With time, we hope to develop a standard set of

“Attention Conservation” disclaimers that will save you

much mental processing time. In future, the following

warnings may see considerable use in this list:

• “Highly speculative;”
• “Beautifully phrased but offers no
  
  evidence to support its claims;”
• “Of interest mostly to
  
  technical specialists,”
• “Written in postmodernese;”
  
• “Infested with subcultural jargon,”
• “Grimly accurate
  
  assessment, can cause feelings of despair,”
• “Contains violent
  
  partisan attacks,”
• “Writer’s original language not
  
  English,”

and so forth. (At least, those disclaimers

would be of huge benefit in most of the lists that we’re

reading right now.)…

Read more about the Viridian movement here.

…(W)e’re green, but there’s something electrical and unnatural about our tinge of green. We’re an art movement that looks like a mailing list, an ad campaign, a design team, an oppo research organization, a laboratory, and, perhaps most of all, we resemble a small feudal theocracy ruled with an iron hand by a Pope- Emperor. We have our own logo — or we will. We have our own font and our own typography. And we have an entire list of favorite Viridian-approved tie-in products: T-shirts, chrome stickers, socks, solar panels, ultrasonic sterilizers, and so on…. We’re going to be spending a lot of time picking bits and pieces out of the background clutter, and assembling them, and placing our stamp of ideological approval upon them. The future is already here. It just hasn’t been assembled as a cultural ensemble.

Starvation?

The reason I was taking another look at the Viridian site was that an FmH’er [thanks, Miguel] forwarded Viridian Note 00381 to me. Read it and scare yourself. “[Attention Conservation Notice: Nothing new about environmental activists hand-wringing over prospects of mass starvation. Kinda new to wonder if this might go from the unthinkable to a real-life truism in such short order, though.]” At its inception at the threshold of the new century, Sterling conceptualized the Viridian movement as an aesthetic response to impending global catastrophe (“… it’s a severe breach of taste to bake and sweat half to death in your own trash, that’s why. To boil and roast the entire physical world, just so you can pursue your cheap addiction to carbon dioxide…. What a cramp of our style. It’s all very foul and aesthetically regrettable…”) on a rather short timeframe — the little more than a decade until the Kyoto accords were supposed to have made a serious dent in greenhouse gas emissions. Well, we’re a third of the way there and any vestiges of cooperation in keeping the world habitable have been dashed to pieces, largely due to the Bush junta’s explicit anti-environmentalism and its broader dismantling of the fragile framework of multilateral international cooperation and mutual respect as we turned from victim to bully after 9-11-01. This is the fourth year in succession that the world is not producing enough grain to feed itself; the summer heatwave in Europe is devastating crop production figures; its full impact is not even yet know; and it is but a foretaste of things to come as global warming accelerates. “The Viridian Movement is supposed to have an expiration date of 2012. Will we make it that far?” My questions for Sterling and others, then: Is this (and other Viridiana) a wakeup call or a dirge? Upon what does it depend? Can an aesthetic shift make a difference? fast enough to make a difference?