In Conversation with Bruce Sterling, 16th March 2021

Hazel Dooney: Hi, welcome to the Hazel Dooney podcast. Right now the big news in art – and everything else – is NFTs, non fungible tokens. While NFTs are new to many, including me (I've been busy painting), unsurprisingly they are not new to Bruce Sterling, who is already a collector of NFT art. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with Bruce about NFTs and what they might mean for artists – and everybody else. I'm equally thrilled to be able to share this conversation with everyone listening to the podcast. 

But first, some context. And a warning. 

In 2014, Bruce Sterling gave a talk at the Institute Network of Cultures called Whatever Happens to Musicians Happens to Everybody. It's available to watch for free on Vimeo. In this talk Bruce gives a great overview and analysis of the state of the arts now and the coming of The Internet of Things. In my opinion, if you're an artist and you think everything will be okay now ‘cause you're on Instagram, you are in for a future shock. If you want to survive the coming global changes, I suggest you start thinking about these issues now.

Although it's probably one of his smaller accomplishments Bruce also wrote my all-time favorite blog, Beyond the Beyond, for wired.com from 2002 to 2020. It significantly influenced me and my own blog, Self Vs. Self, which I started four years later in 2006. The blog was a practical and essential tool for my liberation from the traditional system of the art world.

For around 20 years, since the early 2000s, I've looked to Bruce's work to inform me of how things are changing, how I can best respond to that change and strategies I can adapt to make a better life for myself as an artist. He is a prolific author, editor, journalist and art critic. And someone I think of as a practical visionary, who not only forecasts the future with insight and remarkable accuracy but has great ideas on how to handle it and embrace it.

I must warn you, however, that Bruce Sterling is one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction. As such, I beg you not to listen to him because his insights have been known to rot people's brains(!). That said, I will be taking the risk anyway.

Bruce, welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. 

Bruce Sterling: It's harmless good fun. There’s plenty to talk about.

Hazel Dooney: Until someone loses an eye. Or gets locked out of their NFT account.

Bruce Sterling: It’s hairy! I'm on Twitter this morning watching the parade. It's the most entertaining thing that's happened to me during the pandemic. 

Hazel Dooney: I think it's one of the most exciting things that have happened. It’s certainly piqued my interest. Before we get started, I usually just describe where each person is so listeners can get an idea or you know, imagine us a little bit so…

Bruce Sterling: I'm in my bedroom, as people commonly are in Zoom meetings, and I'm in the city of Torino in Italy,  where I am art director for an electronic art festival we have here called Share Festival. So, you know, as well as being a novelist and all the rest of that stuff you were listing, I’m a minor European tech art apparatchik. 

Hazel Dooney: Is that going ahead regardless? 

Bruce Sterling:  Yeah, we've had it. I mean, they can't seem to kill us. We've been at it for 15 years. So, you know, we can consider ourselves European net dot art veterans at this point. I mean, the state finances us. Every year we put on our six exhibits and we show the people of Turin works of technology art that they would almost certainly never see otherwise.

Hazel Dooney: What's the website for that?

Bruce Sterling: It's https://toshareproject.com/SHARE-PRIZE-XVI-ENG . I mean, we just did the webinar afterwards. We have a retrospective website we just launched that’s got a bunch of net art stuff from our 15 years of activism. But we're actually a festival. I mean, we're not a website, we're not a net thing.

Hazel Dooney: Well it’s for someone like me to see it, from Australia.

Bruce Sterling: So this this year during the pandemic… we got it, I mean, we're in code red in Torino right now.

Hazel Dooney: Are you in lockdown again?

Bruce Sterling: Yeah I’m officially forbidden to like go 350 meters from my front door here.

Hazel Dooney: Ah, I'm sorry to hear. That sucks.

Bruce Sterling: We're not supposed to mingle. Streets are basically empty. It's looking very Edgar Allan Poe out there. But our intention this year is to do a lot of outdoor projection of digital art. So you can kind of go out and just go out into the breeze and sort of see these things.

Hazel Dooney: That would be very welcomed. Yeah. I love that. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah well, we’re trying. I mean, we're, you know, servants of our art community here. But we have been very aware of, you know, these fungibility issues in art ever since we first assembled our situation. Among our allies have been www.seditionart.com who are the people I collect with. I would not say that I'm a major league NFT art collector. I don't speculate, I've never, like, realized my capital gains. 

Hazel Dooney: Well major league is, apparently, really major. I'm not sure what to make of the figures. But how did you… when did you first learn about it?’Cause it's really new to me. I'm totally out of the loop with it. I've been distracted. 

Bruce Sterling: I knew cypherpunks in San Francisco well before anybody got around to crypto stuff. I mean, commercial crypto stuff or the kind of crypto coin racket. So I used to write about it. I mean, I had like crypto coinage in one of my sci fi novels before crypto coin existed. And it was just as crooked and underground as I assumed it would become because it's basically an emanation of the Dark Side hacker culture and it’s a money laundry, right?

Hazel Dooney: Do you think… people have been talking about crypto becoming mainstream now and do you think that it is as well or…

Bruce Sterling: Well it’s as mainstream as any other form of organized crime. 

Hazel Dooney: Well art has traditionally, you know, it has a long history of criminal involvement and laundering money and kind of..

Bruce Sterling: Well one of my homes, until recently, was in Belgrade. So if you live in Belgrade, which is a country under economic sanctions quite a lot... I mean, even when they're not killing their neighbors, they've got a lot of economic blockades. They have an entire class of people who are called patriot businessmen who are, you know, basically smugglers and money launderers and it's their business to like, make these things porous. And they are the bourgeoisie. I mean, they're not crooks. They're what Yugoslavia generally does. You know, it's an entrepôt between East and West and they sort of rip labels off stuff, put new labels on it, ship it over the border, and they do backroom deals. And that's not a new thing for them. That's more like a 2000 year old thing for them.

Hazel Dooney: Maybe the rest of the world is catching up.

Bruce Sterling: So you're hanging out with Uncle Vanya, who could like get you a free BMW that's recently been boosted by some Albanian car theft gang. You know, and I'm laughing at it.

Hazel Dooney: [laughing] This is sounding like a dystopian novel.

Bruce Sterling: I mean, less so now than it used to be. I mean, when I first showed up there they’d lost four wars and it was a very cyberpunk novel kind of milieu. 

Hazel Dooney: Your wife is Yugoslavian. Isn't she?

Bruce Sterling: Well she’s a Serb.

Hazel Dooney: Oh, sorry. Pardon me. 

Bruce Sterling: They get fussy, alright.

Hazel Dooney: I’m sorry, I really wish I had checked first.

Bruce Sterling: They’re the planetary kings of ethnic fuss ok?

Hazel Dooney: I wish I had checked first because I was gonna ask you to put in a good word word with your wife because I think she's really cool. But… yeah.

Bruce Sterling: You know, people think she's like the Yugoslav arm candy. They don't realize like Jasmina’s…

Hazel Dooney: Oh, no no no, I never thought that. 

Bruce Sterling: I mean she was a video artist in the 70s and knew all kinds of Marina Abramovic performance art figures. I mean, we've been… oh we go to Belgrade. There's a lot going on there, there's a ton of tech’ art in Belgrade. In fact I can recommend Belgrade. When they're not dying of plague it’s really a party town. It’s just that they’re crookeder than a dog's hind leg and that's their existence. You know, it's not like Australia where the rule of law actually has some kind of purchase on the ground. It's more like you know, Donald Trump all the way up and down. And it's kind of no accident that Trump's wife is a Slovenian you know. Trump is a fast operator and he likes Yugoslav girls, Ex-Yugoslav girls.

Hazel Dooney: Regardless of people's opinions of her, she certainly handles things. Before I mangle attempting to pronounce your wife's name could you give me the correct pronunciation?

Bruce Sterling: Oh she can put up with any name. In Texas she’s Jazz-meena. 

Hazel Dooney: Jasmina Tešanović

Bruce Sterling: It’s actually pronounces Yaz-meena Tesch-anne-oh-vich.

Hazel Dooney: If she ever wants to come onto the podcast, I think she's really cool. So maybe…

Bruce Sterling: She's got plenty to say. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, super cool.

Bruce Sterling: Tešanović  is a sawyer, it’s somebody who saws wood. 

Hazel Dooney: A no mess around background. So, getting back to the NFTs. So you collect, generally, from sedition.com and that's kind of like a fine edition but in digital form. And recently we've seen the Beeple artwork by Mike Winkellmann sell for 69 million dollars but I think that was in cryptocurrency.

Bruce Sterling: It is and it's also a package of five thousand of his works.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, people are saying it's one work but it's really a retrospective. 

Bruce Sterling: He’s selling his lifetime production of digital art so that it can be used as tokens. It’s not like he drew something and somebody said that's worth sixty-nine million. On the contrary he’s using… allowing his artwork to be used as a kind of basis for trading within a crypto coinage financial ecosystem. And that goes with other things like the CryptoKitties scheme in Ethereum, or the CryptoPunk scheme in Ethereum which is several thousand computer generated images of various kinds of rarity that exist as a kind of bumper sticker on a particular crypto holding, right? And that's the part that people don't seem to get, I mean, they're not actually buying art. It's more like you're labeling your wealth with pieces of art.

Hazel Dooney: Well, some would say that people do that with art. But it does seem to have the kind of…

Bruce Sterling: It’s bumper sticker art, you know, or a T-shirt with the name of your favorite sports team on it. Collectible cards like bubblegum cards, sporting cards, or Pokemon. It's very like Pokemon. Where some cards are very common and some cards are exceedingly rare and worth rather a lot of money in the Pokemon Trading System. There's also a lot of objects you can get while playing computer games like the magic sword, the magic armor or the horse with flying wings. And people do sell those, I mean, they steal them and they like retail them to one another. In World of Warcraft they have a long established tradition of digital objects that you can buy, trade and sell. 

Hazel Dooney: Do you think NFT is the game changer that people have been saying it is?

Bruce Sterling: I think it is a game changer. I don't think it's a game changer in the way that the guys who are cashing in think that it is. But, you know, there are long established issues of fungibility of digital art. And when you come up with a method to monetize stuff it generally encourages people to professionalize and do things in a different way. Right? 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah.

Bruce Sterling: In Share Festival we've been exceedingly interested in the ones that are hard to monetize ‘cause we feel like we understand them and we can be their champion. But when… I mean money changes everything. It’s like the difference between being a guy who writes sci fi fanzines and being an internationally known sci fi novelist and I've been both and you just behave differently. Once the cash started showing up and you have to start signing contracts. 

Hazel Dooney: And people respond differently once they think that what you make is worth money.

Bruce Sterling: They do. But, you know, it's not as simple as you would think. I mean, you’d think, okay, I sold a novel and it was a big hit and therefore that's the best thing I did. On the contrary the stuff that I did that was most socially influential tended to be not for profit stuff. It was actually critical things I was writing and not paid for, or speeches that I made at some critical event or even some kind of personal meeting with some kind of mover and shaker where I said, “Have you heard of x?” and he said no and later he marries her.

[both laugh]

Bruce Sterling: That actually has a surprising effect on the world. And the art world is a lot like that, too.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah the artworld is definitely not straightforward. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, it's not, you know. And the stuff that you make the most money on is not the stuff that you will be remembered for, necessarily.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, I mean, I often think that the ‘talking about ideas and all of those things’ doesn't make money. A kind of crude way to look at it, or perhaps a crude way to look at it, is that by creating something with genuine meaning, that is kind of like a better form of PR, or public relations or advertising, and then it kind of spreads the word of what someone is doing.

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, there's a kind of poetry to it. And then people in the open source world have been very big on this for a long time.

Hazel Dooney: What does open source mean, for people who..

Bruce Sterling: Open source like, Linux. What the heck it’s not a platform, now it's kind of a platform. I don’t know. I mean, it's software that's not copyrighted and doesn't have all kinds of intellectual property padlocks on it. 

Hazel Dooney: Okay, yep.

Bruce Sterling: You don't monetize it but you tend to monetize your acts of servicing it. Like, okay, I'm an expert and you can hire me and I'll do this stuff. There are a lot of ways in the computer world now where this kind of open source model dominates but it's only because they've moved the money, they've kind of moved the cheese to a different area of the mousehole there. And, you know, it's still worth a lot of money. It's just not worth a lot of money in a more traditional and straightforward way. So I knew a lot of these people. I even know, like, a lot of open source hardware people, because that was quite interesting. And they're very big in the academy because you can teach your students, they don't have to have 20,000 dollars  just to use the software, right? They can kind of do this stuff. So I'm friendly to them. And I was aware of their movement. And I've met, you know, a lot of the movers and shakers there, and you know, we cyberpunks like them. And Information Wants to Be Free was one of our core slogans. Even though we stole it from Stewart Brand who’s one of our mentors. So, you know, it's been my business during my really rather extensive career now to like, keep track with this stuff. But as a means of production, or even artistic production, it's got limits. I mean, there’s stuff you can do and give away that nobody will pay attention to. You know, it's like being a lonely woman and stopping under a streetlight and holding up a cardboard signs that says, “I need someone to love me”.

Hazel Dooney: [laughing] That is a terrible and really good example.

Bruce Sterling: No-one will… people will shy away from you and literally turn on their heels and flee.

Hazel Dooney: And the people who do come are going to be complete creeps!

Bruce Sterling: It’s an inspiration that’s universal. It’s like, “Why? Why doesn't someone love her?” It’s like, she needs it, you know. It’s like, the world is full of lonely men. Where is the problem? Okay, that's a novelist's problem, right? So the problem with social relations is sort of how people establish the worth of what they're doing. And how they tackle the merits of one another. And it also has a big effect on people per se, like, I don't know, Mike, who's Beeple. But I could see that he's basically traumatised by this thing that's happening to him. And I appreciate that he's like, trying to assume some gravitas. Now he's like, “Okay, I'm going to do better”. You know, “I'm going to be really an artist”. Because he was kind of a meme Joker for a long time. 

Hazel Dooney: I think that is his art. Looking at his art. 

Bruce Sterling: I don’t think that's gonna be his art going forward. 

Hazel Dooney: I mean, I quite like that, I think he's good at that. But, you know, who knows what he's gonna do going forward.

Bruce Sterling: I mean, this is very like the Beatles leaving some club in Hamburg and, you know, becoming the Beatles. I mean, you can see it happening to John Lennon. Some nutty doper kid is  suddenly a working class hero hanging out with performance artists from Japan, you know? It's like a process of self education. And he gets murdered. So, you know, now he's a saint.

Hazel Dooney: So do you think this is or isn't Beeple’s fate?

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, I've seen it happen to people like Beeple and I think this is one of the effects that NFT is going to have. It's kind of underestimated that it's putting artists who used to do just like free rubbish into a situation where they might, where there's a different context for their work. And they're gonna make different kinds of…

Hazel Dooney: An incredibly different context for his work. I mean, you know, Damien Hirst saying that he’s a great artist.

Bruce Sterling: I know what digital art looks like and I know what game design looks like. And I know what non-commercial net dot art and kind of conceptual hacktivism look like. But I don't know what a mature digital art collector scene looks like. I mean, if I had to guess there would probably be Petra Cortright, have you ever heard of her?

Hazel Dooney: I’ve never heard of her. 

Bruce Sterling: She’s a digital painter from Los Angeles who does exclusively digital work, but it's painted. I mean, she uses digital paintbrush tools. So she's got representation in the gallery scene and she's pretty well known. Fine, digital artist, right? So if you assume that everybody was as commercially successful as Petra Cortright they’d probably become a lot more painterly. 

Hazel Dooney: David Hockney did some lovely digital artworks, I thought.

Bruce Sterling: We’d start to see a class of critics arise who would sort of say, I mean, they'd be talking about digital art the way that painting critics talk about impasto, right? Or blending, you know? A new vocabulary of critical assessment would spring up so that you could have an elite of people who were like, at the Warhol top of the food chain, and then you'd have like the normal art school dropouts stuck in the basement where they always are.

[both laugh]

Hazel Dooney: Well I’m an art school dropout but hopefully I won’t be stuck in the basement.

Bruce Sterling: I'm not a digital artist myself, I've been known to do it just to get acquainted with the tools. But, you know, an actual critical class is very useful. I mean, artists don't think this because they just get scourged all the time. 

Hazel Dooney: No, I actually do think it's important.

Bruce Sterling: It places them socially, right? 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah. I do think it's important to have. 

Bruce Sterling: I champion these things and I am an art critic. But I mostly write about forms of art that nobody understands. [laughs]

Hazel Dooney: I think it's really important to have people talking critically about art.

Bruce Sterling: A social structure of, you know, socially constructed validation for people's creative activities. And especially a canon is really important. I mean, one of the big problems in digital art is that it's like 70 years old but nobody knows the people who first started it. It's continually reinventing itself every time a new platform comes out. And there's not like this sense that it's building on a cultural tradition, which it should have. Now it's getting a little better. I mean, there are people who were raised with digital art and really are serious critical thinkers and they're doing these kind of historical canon reassessments of like, “Have you ever heard of Manfred Mohr? Do you know anything about Billy Klüver’s Experiments in Art and Technology?”

Hazel Dooney: It's so… yeah, it's really, it's a foreign area to me, even though… when I went to uni’ in the mid 90s I briefly did a communication design course and the head of that at the university was a digital artist. And so, he would be much more aware of it. And I remember his work. But yeah, it does have a much longer history than…

Bruce Sterling: I know it myself.  I know six packs of these guys. I know Brian Eno. Brian Eno is definitely a thought leader in this area in that he can do installations; he's done a lot of digital art; he's done digital music tracks that are distributed in unusual ways; he had his own website before anybody knew what such a thing was. He's not a musician. I mean, he doesn't play an instrument, he’s a producer who uses technology. The recording studio has always been his number one musical instrument. So, you know, Brian is like a thought leader in this. I mean, he's really Professor Eno, somebody whose opinions I respect a great deal. I mean, you can read things Eno was talking about 30 years ago and think, “Wait a minute, I could do that right now.” So he's a rare example of a musician and sometime visual artist who's had a really profound effect on people like science fiction writers. All my friends think he’s a heavy guy. And we're like, when he breezes by we stand up and salute, even though we're novelists.

Hazel Dooney: As an artist, I don't know as much about him and I don't know him personally. But I have a similar feeling about him. I know, I've looked at those cards of his… he made a set of cards with different questions…

Bruce Sterling: Oblique Strategies. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah Oblique Strategies, I really like those. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, there's a phone app for those. You can carry them around in your pocket now. You can click on them and they'll pop up on your screen and kind of tell you how to get through the day.

Hazel Dooney: I’m actually really heavily into pen and paper. But um, you know, I’m kind of considering maybe doing something within NFTs and I'm not sure, like, I'm kind of…

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, you and everybody else. It's, you know, it is a temptation. I've been collecting  art for a long time. I haven't collected any NFTs because I don't trust the stability of any of the platforms. 

Hazel Dooney: Then what is it that you collect on sedition.com? 

Bruce Sterling: Well, it's non fungible but it's not on a blockchain. Though they're talking about moving it onto a blockchain which involves a lot of technical difficulty, kind of risk of… Well, really everything that blockchain touches dies, basically. If you watch the history of blockchains they're horrible. I mean, they really just sort of appear, suck in money and then vanish with all hands. And they're very easy to rob. I mean, the Russians…

Hazel Dooney: This is a lot different to what I'm hearing on the news! Please go on.

Bruce Sterling: I think it’s the truth. I mean, it's not in the interest of the blockchain industry to say that. But if you've followed what they're… yeah they're super leaky and they just crash all the time. They're always strutting and boasting about how their crypto is bullet proof. But having just crypto around a piece of artwork is like having a picket fence around your house that consists of just one picket that's a kilometer high.

[both laugh]

Bruce Sterling: It does not secure the work at all. Because, you know, the enterprise might die. The guy who’s running the blockchain might give up, right? Or you might just lose your computer. Or you might forget your 20 word long passphrase.

Hazel Dooney: Wasn't this something… I just saw on Twitter that someone was…

Bruce Sterling: Hundreds and hundreds of… There's just like heaps and heaps of crypto wealth that goes unclaimed because people's computers short out. Or they dropped their phone in the toilet. Or dad died and nobody knew his password, he had it secret and he wrote down somewhere but nobody knows where. It’s a debacle in many amazing ways. I didn’t speculate on this. I mean, I could have if I wanted to be a financial speculator. But it's really just a nest of scorpions. It's a very bad scene, the blockchain scene. 

Hazel Dooney: So this is, this has been my first thing that… as people are talking about it and saying, “Oh, you should do this, this’d be great”. And the first thing that I've been looking into is just the security of it. And, um… 

Bruce Sterling: There isn’t any. It's really pretty bad. 

Hazel Dooney: That answers a lot for me.

Bruce Sterling: Not only that but really the wisest decision about any relationship with a blockchain person is to assume that he's a crook; he's a money launderer; he’s a tax evader. And he's got dark reasons to be involved in this. He's not a prophet, he's not a thought leader, he’s not a Silicon Valley saint…

Hazel Dooney: I did notice a lack of thought leaders.

Bruce Sterling: He’s not Elon Musk. He’s going to be a baddie, okay? He’s going to be selling you the Brooklyn Bridge here. That should be your automatic assumption until something is proven otherwise. 

Hazel Dooney: I did notice a lack of thought leaders, established thought leaders or people I recognise as established thought leaders. 

Bruce Sterling: There are people who’ve done well by it. But they go in, they cash out, they exit and they buy an island in Bermuda and they don't want anything more to do with it. 

Hazel Dooney: That's what I was thinking. If I were Beeple, I'd be cashing out.

Bruce Sterling: There are predators all over the place. I mean, the North Korean intelligence services are the worst of the worst. They've been just, like, robbing people in crypto since the idea was invented. These guys are merciless. They're like nerve gas in an airport type of people. I mean, they're really murderous, totalitarian cyber warriors and they're all over the crypto scene. In places you wouldn't expect. I mean, they disguise themselves. You know, they hang out with other hackers. They're pretending to be guys from Silicon Valley. They stole so much crypto wealth that the North Koreans could use it to build hydrogen bombs. They’re under tremendous economic sanctions in North Korea but the crypto thing is just like a huge spigot of North Korean wealth and it has been from day one.

Hazel Dooney: This is shattering a lot of fantasies here, Bruce.

Bruce Sterling: Look it up. There’s huge PDFs. Go to the FBI and look up North Korean hacker. They’re got wanted posters for them. They've stolen enough money to literally arm a nation with nuclear weapons. 

Hazel Dooney: I don’t need to, I believe you. I'm just thinking… I'm so glad that you said yes to talk about it. Because it's such a… people are talking about it as though it's easy and some big solution for artists. And, I mean, I think it's a really fascinating idea. But it's being kind of sold as an easy and secure answer. And I've even heard some people talking about it as a potential solution to art fraud. So there's this kind of assumption that it's clean. And yeah, that's being shattered.

Bruce Sterling: Already, that place is full of plagiarized art.

Hazel Dooney: I’ve noticed that. There doesn’t seem to be anything to deal with that. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, Rosa Menkman, this well known net dot artist, does some pretty cool stuff. She’s had a lot of stuff just repackaged and sold as if it were hers. Because you know… who double checks, right? 

Hazel Dooney: I thought that blockchain was supposed to….

Bruce Sterling: I could just grab your back catalogue and put that on Ethereum or any of the other new ones and if you didn't hear about it, what's the harm to me? It’s like, I'll just sell all this cool Hazel Dooney stuff. Like, cool, Australian girls, they’re in short shorts, guys love that.

Hazel Dooney:  [laughing] Is that my entire artistic reputation?!

Bruce Sterling: As long as I just escape stage left with my bundle of funny money, what are you gonna do?

Hazel Dooney: That's what I've been thinking about, the potential for all of that stuff and how it's made legitimate. 

Bruce Sterling: It’s kind of a faster digital version of the standard art market where a lot of these crooked practices have been around for five or six hundred years.

Hazel Dooney: That is a big part of the art market.

Bruce Sterling: Well in Italy where I am right now art crime is a very well established craft here. [laughs]

Hazel Dooney: Yeah.

Bruce Sterling: How do you steal stuff and forge it? It’s like, “I know!”

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, I have heard that about Italy, that it's just…

Bruce Sterling: They’re in the racket, you know. That’s what they’ve got. That's their regional competitive advantage.

Hazel Dooney: One of my earliest jobs was in a couture shoe shop. And she used to buy all of these beautiful shoes, shipped over from Italy. And it was just a  regular occurrence that she would lose a shipment to the mafia.

Bruce Sterling: Yep. It goes deeper, because like a lot of these Italian shoes were actually made in China and merely packaged in Italy. And then the EU got in their face and was like, “Hey, wait a minute. If you're saying they're made in Italy, they're supposed to be made in Italy.” They simply imported a bunch of Chinese labor and put them in downtown Milan. Italian Chinese shoemakers, there’s just like a caste of them, there's lots. They're like the best dressed Chinese people you've ever seen. They’re second and third generation. You simply like put an extra wrapper around the outside and go on with business.

What we’re seeing with NFT is like a new kind of wrapper. It's like a token. And it's supported by crypto, and various forms of crypto under various platforms, but it's basically a wrapper that you can't get in that belongs to you and nobody else. So I can just copy that, okay. But you know, I can just copy a picture of a Hazel Dooney painting too. And that's not going to get me anywhere, right? I mean either I've got the painting or I've got like a photograph of Hazel's painting which wouldn't get me a cup of coffee, frankly. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah. 

Bruce Sterling: Even though I quite like the paintings, this is not a critical assessment. But it is new and the problem is that the platforms are bad. And the worst problem is that the people are bad. It's very hard to build anything straight with a demographic segment of mankind that is so utterly crooked as crypto hackers. These guys, they're worse than gamer gaters in a lot of ways because they're cleverer and there's more money involved. So they're just super ingenious Dark Side hacker types. They’re got IQs that are astronomical.

Hazel Dooney: [joking] And no social skills.

Bruce Sterling: But you couldn’t trust them with a cat. I mean they're just weird guys to hang out with. And it's hard to point out even one who's jolly and has a good public reputation. On the contrary, when you start hanging out with them you realize that they have sinister reputations and for good reason. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, I’ve stayed away.

Bruce Sterling: Well, they’re just not nice guys. They're not. I mean, there are people in the art gallery scene who aren't exactly nice people either. Like Peggy Guggenheim, for instance. If you actually meet Peggy Guggenheim you're meeting this rich, lonely Jewish girl who is extremely promiscuous and has a major pill problem. But she's a major 20th century art patroness, okay? Peggy Guggenheim is the creme de la creme, is really the elite, even though personally kind of a lot of trouble, right? But you know, it's like, okay, do I want to meet Peggy Guggenheim? Okay, Peggy is quite flaky, right? But if you're a 20th century serious artists and you don't meet Peggy Guggenheim there’s something wrong with you. I mean she's in your peer group. She's even a kind of Duchess.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking of the art world and what I know about it and what I've seen, which is a lot of extreme stuff. And I actually stay very far away from it because of that. 

Bruce Sterling: I’m a fringe figure there but I have to say, as a novelist, I'm kind of on their side. They're super fun to write about. And also there are people in the art world who even though they are very flaky and eccentric are super charismatic. I mean they really light up a room.

Hazel Dooney: I like those people. It’s more the sharks who will chop your foot off if they can.

Bruce Sterling: Ah yeah. But it’s hard to hang out with Brian Eno and not recognize that you're in the presence of genius and this is really extraordinary.

Hazel Dooney: No, I'm not talking about anyone like that.

Bruce Sterling: Even if he's just like sitting around eating shish kebab. Because he’s just such an unusual person, right? 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, I don't mean the people who are creating.

Bruce Sterling: I mean the art world is what it is. It's like hanging out with rich people at Davos. I mean, I've been to Davos. I was surprised how many rich people give off an air of moral solidity. A lot of people at Davos really feel like they're doing the Lord's work, that they're like a force for good. 

Hazel Dooney: What is Davos? 

Bruce Sterling: The Davos World Economic Forum. 

Hazel Dooney: Oh, okay.

Bruce Sterling: A millionaires club. When you hang out with rich people it's surprising how many of them actually have integrity. Ha! Because nobody gives them any credit for that. So you know ‘they’re moguls, they're terrible’. And you meet one personally and they're actually just people who happen to be really, really rich.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah well there's a spectrum. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, there is. It's just that the blockchain world is one of the most sinister worlds that an artist could possibly involve themselves in. It’s like being a rock musician and realizing that your A & R guy is a cocaine dealer.

Hazel Dooney: In the mafia.

Bruce Sterling: Yeah like hanging out in rock-and-roll and realizing that a lot of these guys are like, heavily into substances.

[both laugh]

Hazel Dooney: [jokes] “What, you've never heard of heroin?!”

Bruce Sterling: Yeah. But it's like going to Ibiza, which is a big music scene. And I hang out in Ibiza, I'm about to go there. And you know, it's a very pretty island and everything's groovy and people are dressed in a super fashionable way. And there's just like tons of human smuggling and narcotics in that place. Tons. Sex tourism. They’re bringing in yachts full of fresh girls. They’re dancers, Demimondaines. But they're basically hamburger for the sex trade. I mean, Ibiza is a rare area where there's a lot of sex trade for women. It’s traditionally been a place where women can go and have sex with a stranger and then go back to their banking job.

Hazel Dooney: Kind of like Africa but not as dangerous. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, sorta. I mean, there are areas in Africa that are kind of well known.

Hazel Dooney: Eww.

Bruce Sterling: Anyway it’s this dark underside and I don't like to spend my entire time harping on this during your podcast. But I did write a book about computer crime so I kind of know a lot about that. 

Hazel Dooney: I'm really pleased that you're being so frank about it. Because, you know, far more than… you're familiar with this in a way that hardly anyone is and the way that it's being reported and the hype that's being generated... I mean, even the guy who who bought the Beeple piece, I was reading on your Twitter feed that he is involved, he has a company in NFTs.

Bruce Sterling: Yeah. That’s kind of the point. I mean, he's buying them as trading tokens, right? I mean, the guy's got a platform.

Hazel Dooney: And it’s kind of marketing for his company.

Bruce Sterling: He’s gonna set up shop and sell Beeple’s stuff. He’s not gonna sit there looking at 5000 works of Beeple every day. What’s he gonna do, put ‘em over his couch? That's 5000 different digital properties. Of course he's come up with some kind of platform to deal with it. That's why it's worth sixty-nine million, right? I mean, 5000 divided into... 

Hazel Dooney: When you talk about it like that, it makes complete sense. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah it's not crazy. If somebody said, “I bought 5000 David Hockney paintings”, how much would you expect to pay? A lot, right? 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah. But that's not how it's being reported. 

Bruce Sterling: It’s like the Hockney estate, I've got everything that's left. And I’m like, okay, yeah, you're gonna pay a lot. 

Hazel Dooney: And I’m an art dealer! [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: Well the problem is that the whole thing is likely to, I mean, the entire crypto chain is likely to collapse. Because most of them do. 

Hazel Dooney: I was looking at the different platforms and ways to make an NFT and I couldn't figure out if there was a really secure one. It seemed kind of all over the place.

Bruce Sterling: No, they're inherently insecure, for a lot of social and cultural reasons. Like, you know, Bitcoin could be banned in your country, the way it's periodically banned in China. And under those circumstances how are you supposed to get your art? You'll have to, like, burrow through the Chinese firewall. You'll become a digital criminal just trying to look at your own art.

Hazel Dooney: Oh, I don't even know how to do that.

Bruce Sterling: It's all about VPNs. But you know, the Chinese know it's all about VPNs. They'd be all over you like literal white on rice. And you know, you'd be in a lot of trouble just because you happen to own some of this stuff. You can get tax trapped for it. They change the tax laws and suddenly your holdings are a terrible financial burden over your head. You’ve made all this imaginary profit they want you to pay real money on it. You don't have any way to realize it. I mean, it's a very, very hazardous and very insecure gamble. 

And something that people don't talk about much, that the cognoscenti know, is that it is based on crypto but there's forms of quantum computation that could crack open this cryptography, in theory. I mean it's not absolutely mathematically bulletproof because there are new forms of computation that can destroy what these computers have done all this time, right? So if you go looking… and among crypto theorists  there's a lot of argument about it. And we do have quantum computers now. I mean, they're, like, really starting to build ‘em. They've got liquid helium pipes and they're doing all this arcane, sci fi ish stuff. But they're real machines. And there's a possibility that people might wake up one morning and realize that the entire structure, I mean the mathematical structure that they brag so much about, has just disappeared like a puff ball. It's just cracked. 

Hazel Dooney: I have been wondering about that but haven't had any of the knowledge to really even know how to begin to research it… and I think it's like that for a lot of people. What do you think of something like Bitcoin or… are any of these cryptos stable? Let me ask a better question. Do you do you use it?

Bruce Sterling: It doesn't matter what… well yeah, I've got cryptography. Of course. I mean, I've got a password on this computer. And I'm a journalist so I used to encrypt lots of stuff because I didn't want to put my sources into danger.  But I'm not, like, super paranoid about using crypto. And also, if you're hanging out with cops, as I do [laughs] they rarely consider crypto to be any form of security. If they find a bunch of people using crypto they arrest one and they turn him into an informant. And then he rats out the rest ‘cause he's already got the encryption and they're just kind of done. They have a false sense of security, like, “the police can't listen to our phone calls, we have ADS-grade equipment." And it's like, Susan, you know, the wife of so and so with a cocaine problem, has flipped for the FBI and you're just freaking done.

[both laugh]

Hazel Dooney: I guess there only has to be one weak link.

Bruce Sterling: They don’t tend to be afraid of crypto but now they actually kind of rub their hands together when they see a group of crooks trying to use this stuff. It's like, oh, they've got a little sandbox, right? All we got to do is get in there and you're over. So who's actually running these blockchains? It's like, who's the chief technology officer? 

Hazel Dooney: I don't know. Who is? 

Bruce Sterling: Nobody you would know. You know they're all for-hire mercenaries and you can just bribe one. Just go ahead and offer him a million dollars and a yacht and the girl and see if he just doesn't give you the key to all the NFT. Why is he loyal to this  fly by night scheme, right? I mean, just bribe them or arrest them, right? Just crack ‘em, like a nutshell. It’s like, there's a person there and they're running it, right? I mean, even if  the crypto’s great…

Hazel Dooney: And they have no relationship at all with anyone who's using that service. Why would they be loyal to it or why would they protect it? 

Bruce Sterling: Well I've been running ‘em down relentlessly about it. But I want to express my positive feelings about giving digital artists money. Because I do that.

Hazel Dooney: How can it be done in a great way? ‘Cause you do it. I've had a look at your collection, it’s cool. There’s some really cool stuff and… how is the way that you're doing it different to this?

Bruce Sterling: I do it on seditionart.com where they've got, like, a 50/50 split with the artists. And they're pretty good gallerists at Sedition so they know people who are serious movers and shakers. Like, say Memo Akten. Memo’s been doing a lot of kind of theoretical work about green NFTs. He wants to build solar power ones and do kind of like a United Artists thing where the artists are like doing the cool stuff. Okay. I’ve got tons of respect for Memo, I’ve seen some of his speeches. He's Turkish programming genius Memo Akten! I bought some of his digital art because I really like this kind of kinetic stuff. He does these kind of cool, like kinetic audiovisual toys. They're 3D objects, right? So he's on Sedition and I'm cheerfully paying real money for Memo. I mean, I pay attention to him, consider him a significant cultural figure. I like his art quite a lot. I respect him as a creative artist. I don't mind Memo having some of my money. I’d cheerfully buy him lunch if we met and I'm not going to subcharge him anything, you know. But, you know, I am a guy who's involved in his industry, I’m art director for Share Festival. So, you know, I'd like to be on his good side and maybe he’ll show up for our Fair, right? But I think it'll make some difference if he has some fairly stable form of income and doesn't have to, like, do these extremely ingenious things for no financial reward at all. Because then the work tends to become very academic. And I see a lot of this and we get a lot of technology art proposals at Share Festival that are basically people's doctorates.

Hazel Dooney: It does seem to be have been a largely academic thing.

Bruce Sterling: It’s more like a design research project than an actual artwork and it’s because they're trying to come up with a method to monetize their creative activities, right? And I'm inclined to think that maybe that ought to be a bit more straightforward. I mean, I don't want to pay a million dollars for Memo Akten and it’d be a shame if nobody but Elon Musk could ever see his work. But he's an artist of that caliber. That might, in fact, be a just thing for him. Why isn't he rich? Why doesn't he have what a normal rich artist in say, Montmartre in Paris in 1930s would have? Why doesn't he have the Hispano-Suiza and you know, a French Caribbean girlfriend? Why isn't he rewarded like Man Ray was rewarded? Man Ray, who’s one of my favorite artists, was super into hacking. He was, like, doing weird stuff with cameras as machines, rayographs and all the rest of that.

Hazel Dooney: I love his work. They were beautiful. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, I'm quite the Man fan. But if you read about Man or read his autobiography it’s like, how's he getting by? Well, he's subsidising this work by doing fashion photography mostly. It wasn't until very late in his life that his canvases became really…

Hazel Dooney: It's a very long apprenticeship, art. For most people.

Bruce Sterling: It can be or, you know, you can be struck by lightning at age twenty. You can be hanging out with Andy Warhol and be like a Black street kid and suddenly skyrocketed into international fame. I think that's kind of interesting. I mean it’s not fair or just but it's like super cool. Like, I'm in the garage and I become the rock star, you know? It's like, why not? It attracts a certain personality type..

Hazel Dooney: I think a lot of artists might enjoy risk. 

Bruce Sterling: Becoming a famous novelist is like that. I mean, novelists don't make tons of money unless they're writing something that gets made into a movie. But you can suddenly be surprised by the amount of fame that you have, you know? And there's kind of a tidal wave of it. And there's no way to turn off the tap, right? People just recognise who you are, no matter where you go, and it can really get on your nerves. 

Hazel Dooney: I was about to say it's another thing for people to deal with that I'm not sure... like it's kind of seen as the ideal but…

Bruce Sterling: It's part of the literary world. It's kind of one of the occupational hazards. Like Haruki Murakami, famous Japanese novelist.

Hazel Dooney: I love his work. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, he fled Japan. He was so famous domestically that he couldn't live. I mean, everybody on the street corner knew him and the wife. I met him and I was interviewing him and he was telling me about the stress. 

Hazel Dooney: I don’t think people realize how stressful things like that are.

Bruce Sterling: Being the spectacle, like “Mr. Murakami, may I please have your autograph?” You know, he’s trying to go out and get the wife some pretty shoes. You know, she's a gorgeous woman, by the way. 

Hazel Dooney: I'm not surprised.

Bruce Sterling: They're making the life of Mrs. Murakami miserable, right? She wants to be on his arm, she’s tucking him into bed at night, she brings him coffee. Why does she have to get hammered over the head by this guy's unbearable celebrity? When she married him he was just a jazz DJ in an obscure nightclub. You don't want to see your nearest and dearest punished in that way. And we're gonna see a lot of similar stories. I mean, like, what's Mrs Beeple’s story and the two little Beeples? Because he's got two kids. I feel a sense of dread for them, really. I mean, they're going to be a kidnapping threat problem. The fame and the wealth kind of hops on people out of nothing. It's like winning the lottery, a really big win, like a hundred million. A lot of people die after that.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah a lot of people don't do well after it.

Bruce Sterling: They buy a motorcycle and they just go straight off the cliff. They don't know how to behave and they're surrounded by hucksters and predators, suddenly, who are like… 

Hazel Dooney: It’s like a magnet. Yeah. 

Bruce Sterling: There’s gonna be a lot of human interest stories like that around NFTs. 

Hazel Dooney: And for someone who needs to…  like, an artist, writer, thinker. Someone who needs to go into themselves, who is receiving that much attention, I think that is kind of counterproductive. I mean, I'm not sure how you could be enormously successful without any kind of public presence. But that kind of attention…

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, the other way to do it is to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Who was the pseudonymous inventor of the blockchain, right? 

Hazel Dooney: Is he real or a group of people? 

Bruce Sterling: Oh he's a guy. I think he's one guy. He just somehow had the wisdom to never surface after doing this. And he really put the cat among the pigeons. A lot of people think he's dead. ‘Cause he just doesn't seem to have any presence. 

Hazel Dooney: Well done. Well done to him.

Bruce Sterling: He owns tons of blockchain. I mean, he was there when they started the thing and he's got the original blocks. So in theory, he's one of the richest men on earth. But he's never realized any of the wealth, he doesn't move it from one quadrant to another. He’s either sitting on it waiting to become Croesus. Or else he's dead. Or maybe he's just bored.

Hazel Dooney: Maybe he wasn't in it for that. I don't know.

Bruce Sterling: He’s one of the most interesting figures in contemporary society because literally nobody knows who he is. And there's been all kinds of effort to figure that out. And to have, I mean, a blockchain, even even just one, which in Bitcoin has more wealth than the entire North / South Korean won.  I mean, there’s over a trillion dollars in liquidity in Bitcoin right now. So this is a guy who has built a mountain of a trillion dollars of imaginary crypto money and he's just not even... he’s just less than a phantom.

Hazel Dooney: Which kind of adds to the mystique. 

Bruce Sterling: It's very cyberpunk novel, right? 

Hazel Dooney: That’s why I thought maybe he was fictional.

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, his white paper was not fictional because of the math work. And obviously he's a mathematician and a coder. He's an earth shaking mathematician and coder with no public presence.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, well done, I reckon.

Bruce Sterling: Awesome. So, you know, you're looking at the original seed of all this NFT mania, okay? And it's coming from a ghost. This isn't like Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. This is like a pseudonymous internet figure who just kind of dumped a PDF and ran. And he's the bedrock. It was his idea.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, when you think of stability and accountability…

Bruce Sterling: It’s like, “I’d like to build a museum here, I think I'll build a museum on this marsh. Oh, I needed some pilings. It’s nothing but the will-o'-the-wisps.” Kind of weird. Really weird, like, you know cyber weird in a very cyber fashion. Super interesting and I followed it for a long time. I mean I'm a guy of a dark temperament. I've been a crime writer and it’s my instinct to look for the underside. But there's just like heaps and heaps of underside in crypto. And it's super underside. I mean, crypto is the tool of intelligence agencies. It's for spies.

Hazel Dooney: That's what I thought. And so I was kind of surprised to see it becoming really mainstream. And even some people I know who…

Bruce Sterling: Spies use it all the time, especially cyber spy agencies like the FSB and the GRU. They routinely pay off their mercenaries in crypto and they've got lots. I mean, that's how they try to upset elections and do all this other kind of, you know, cyber warrior hacker stuff. I mean, crypto is their currency. So people say that governments don't support it but spy agencies radically support it. They really, really love it. Especially the Koreans are just really can't steal enough. 

Hazel Dooney: I think everyone might be terrified of North Korea.

Bruce Sterling: Their thumb-prints are all over it they're, like, methodically going around rattling every possible hotel door, they've got crowbars… 

Hazel Dooney: Well, they're not even afraid of making threats in the media. 

Bruce Sterling: A lot of other agencies like crypto because, you know, crypto is spyware, right? The NSA are like the kings of crypto and if anybody ever vaporizes blockchain, crypto, Bitcoin blockchain for quantum computers, it will probably be the NSA because they've got a huge budget and gigantic machines and all kinds of mathematicians. And they could easily get a hammerlock on the thing and just either vaporize it or threaten people with making it vaporize. People talk about the CIA underwriting cultural stuff in the Cold War and they did. I mean, there's a lot of spies who were patrons of the arts, right?

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, yeah they did. 

Bruce Sterling: Spies who were patrons of the arts, right? They’re involved in crypto, there are just spies all over the place. They got a bigger budget than you. They're the advanced persistent threat. They never stop. They just keep trying, they've got all kinds of underhanded methods to subvert you and cause you to become a traitor. That's their job. That's what spies do. You know, they got all kinds of means motive and opportunity to recruit you, recruit your wife. You know, turn you into a source. You know, they like to send you a girlfriend, a yacht, whatever you want. Just read the history of spies, they’re the second oldest profession! 

[both laugh]

Hazel Dooney: Yeah I had a friend, actually, who was in intelligence.

Bruce Sterling: There are just heaps of them and they love crypto. Like Alan Turing, maybe the inventor of computation. He was a spy and a crypto guy. He was breaking German cryptography, that was Turing's job. He might have won the second world war. A gay spook. It’s the truth. I mean, it sounds a bit novelistic because I’m a novelist but that's who Alan Turing was.

Hazel Dooney: [pause] I was just thinking how provocative that is. Just enjoy how provocative it is. 

Bruce Sterling: There's a kind of beauty to it, actually. 

Hazel Dooney: There is, I think. I enjoy it from a distance. 

Bruce Sterling: I think I’m gonna get closer ‘cause I can kind of see the conflagration spreading among… I mean I'm not going to become a blockchain entrepreneur. But I think, you know… first of all I have to because it's going to change my situation here with my art fair. Traditionally we've done fungible stuff and we suddenly have to figure out how to deal with non fungible stuff.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah I was wondering how it would affect that.

Bruce Sterling: Well I'm wondering what it’s gonna do to other forms of technology art that I'm interested in, like say kinetic art or device art, right? Or VJ art, so what if the musicians are doing NFT, what about the VJ's who hang out with musicians? How will it effect moviemaking, right? Because normally if I have a contract to do set design for a movie, I just kind of do it and everybody tears it down. But what if my special effects are all NFT special effects, right?  

Hazel Dooney: Then everything's for sale.

Bruce Sterling: Well if you hang out with movie people there's a lot of collectibles after a movie passes through, right? You can sell the clothing of the actress, you can sell set designs.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah sometimes it ends up in museums.

Bruce Sterling: But you don’t NFT them, right?

Hazel Dooney: Yeah that’s what I’m…

Bruce Sterling: So it'll spread and it'll fail in a lot of places. There's going to be places where it's tried and just falls over. Like Second Life… it had a kind of, not a non fungible token thing, but an internal market for artistic creations. And it just kind of lost its vogue. There was a period where you could earn a pretty good living making cool stuff on Second Life.

Hazel Dooney: What happened? 

Bruce Sterling: It just lost its  vogue. I mean, it just became non fashionable.

Hazel Dooney: So the value declined then. 

Bruce Sterling: Like a Broadway show that ran out of oomph. Just taken on the road and the public is fickle. Like, I might be on a platform, an NFT platform, and realising that nobody likes the interface. They prefer this other NFT platform. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah I was wondering, what happens then?

Bruce Sterling: You’re either stuck or you break whatever contract or agreement you have and try to sell it again and again. But then your collectors are gonna get mad. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, then that takes away the point of it being the original. You can't say “Well, that's not the original anymore. This is my new original.”

Bruce Sterling: It’s gonna be a real struggle and it'll be hard to keep up with it. And also hard to figure out which ones are good. And I was like, why do I really want an NFT thing? Do I really want, like, a cool video from Grimes who is Elon Musk's girlfriend? Okay, I happen to be quite the Grimes fan. I like Grimes rather a lot. I was a big fan of her music before she ever became involved with this billionaire. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, same. I love her music. Not a fan of the video. 

Bruce Sterling: Well she's the little Texan cyber NFT princess creature with her child, you know, she’s more interesting than she was before. But also the effect on her art. And I was like, okay, why do I want to buy a Grimes thing for six million? 

Hazel Dooney: I think she's really interesting. I didn't really think the video was much.

Bruce Sterling: I consider that one of the most interesting romances of the modern era. Elon Musk and Claire Boucher are really like Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas.

Hazel Dooney: I like her a lot. I think she's really cool.

Bruce Sterling: I’m quite the fan. I’m hoping the best for the child with the unpronounceable name. It’s nice that she had one, it’s like, good for her. 

Hazel Dooney: I gotta say I'm always interested in what she does, whether I like whatever that is or not. I'm interested in where she's going. 

Bruce Sterling: As a critic and you're trying to talk seriously about Claire's work, like what's Claire's best record? When was she at the height of her creative powers? It's kind of hard to do that now without figuring in the romance with the billionaire. This bizarre involvement. Like she's got her own pet rocketships. She’s just… into a… space. 

Hazel Dooney: I can't name a song of hers since that relationship started. I listened to her music a lot before that. But I just kind of lost track of it and I didn't even…

Bruce Sterling: Miss Anthropocene is not one of her best records. It's just kind of like angry and resentful. 

Hazel Dooney: Now? 

Bruce Sterling: Normally when she's on top of her game she's sort of astral. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, that's what I love so much about her. It's like a different dimension.

Bruce Sterling: It’s a little difficult to follow her orthogonal leaps of musical imagination but they're really there. She’s really kind of a cool electronic composer and somebody whose work I used to play, you know, a great deal. And I still do. I've got playlists with a lot of Grimes material on them. But if you're gonna, like, be  a rock musician or musical critic or whatever… it's kind of difficult to assess her creative contribution. ‘Cause she did have one. And also she did a whole lot of video.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah. She did some really cool stuff that I really like and I just lost track of it. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah she’s like a fashion trendsetter. I mean, she can actually dress. She can dress the way that a millionaire’s or billionaire’s mistress would dress and that's a long established kind of feminine leadership. To be the mistress-in-title of Louis 14th you know it’s, like, you better freaking dress up girl. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah. I’m just imagining it and yeah, she totally pulls it off.

Bruce Sterling: If you're a ballerina and the father of your child is the Grand Duke of Russia, you better have the sable fur coat, okay? It's kind of a necessity. Other women will talk if you don't. So yeah, she's doing quite a lot of that. And it's kind of getting into Lady Gaga territory. It's like she's actually, like, somebody who can make or break designers.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, I gotta confess I haven't paid as much attention to that. 

Bruce Sterling: Maybe toss in a heap of NFT on the top of that particular conflagration, that's not gonna slow it down okay? Claire’s gonna get even more Claire after this. It's gonna be pressing her in some quite interesting Claire spaces. 

Hazel Dooney: I think that’s part of her appeal, that she'll only become more as she is.

Bruce Sterling: And I actually see signs of motherhood as maturing her. I don't know, she was a woman who obviously lived dangerously and she frequently talked as if she expected to die at any moment. But the fact that she's got this dependent kind of clinging to the apron there, I think that's stabilizing her.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she lives for 100 years. 

Hazel Dooney: I’m definitely interested in seeing how her work goes.

Bruce Sterling: Well, she's kind of one of the exhibit A's in the NFT injury clinic.

Hazel Dooney: I prefer her music to her NFTs anyway, but…

Bruce Sterling: She’s a serious artist and a person with a lot of political and social levers to pull who's like neck deep in this thing. I don't think she ever made that much money in one hit. I mean six million. Even if Elon Musk falls out of his jeep and breaks his neck, she is going to be a wealthy and influential woman just from her own get up and go.  

Hazel Dooney: I saw that Elon Musk created a song with a little video clip about NFTs that Beeple then bought for something-or-other million dollars. 

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, Musk is interesting. It's like, okay, he's a very weird guy with a very sci fi sensibility. But he could buy the art world with his petty change. I mean, he's one of the richest men in the world and he's got a billion in Bitcoin, billion and a half. It's a lot even in the Bitcoin world, you know. He could throw his weight around if he wanted to. If he wanted to declare a gallery to be the winner of the NFT galleries and just name it The Musk Gallery it would instantly win. There would be no competition from the like of Christie's.

Hazel Dooney: [laughing] This is sounding like a dystopian science fiction novel.

Bruce Sterling: Oh, you know, I'm not an Elon devotee. I mean, he's got a lot of disciples. But the guy really breaks the tedium for me. He’s a genuinely interesting figure. He’s not more sinister than Jobs, or Thiel. 

Hazel Dooney: No and, you know, he brings it. He brings the ‘Elon Musk’ to whatever he does.

Bruce Sterling: He’s a kinder and more charismatic figure than Edison. Like, Thomas Edison Jr. committed suicide. Edison’s son could not live with the burden of being around Edison. Whereas I think Elon Musk's many children by several women are probably going to be doing pretty well.
I mean, he is a sultan with a harem but you know, he's gonna kind of look after them. What the heck?

Hazel Dooney: Uh. He seems.. well intentioned… in many ways.

Bruce Sterling: Well, ask the first wife about that. She's been pretty vocal about it. It'd be fun to write his biography. Especially in the years after he's dead. It’s be like what the heck?

Hazel Dooney: When everything comes out. 

Bruce Sterling: Like sixpacks of steel rockets. Like yah!

Hazel Dooney: I like that he doesn't pretend to not be completely eccentric. He's not trying to be normal. 

Bruce Sterling: Less eccentric than he pretends. I think he deliberately builds his own legend. He’s kind of a combination of P.T. Barnum and his own freak.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah and people love it.

Bruce Sterling: And he's also a guy with enough charisma to actually sustain the attention of someone like Grimes, which I think kind of speaks well for him. I think she actually likes having him around. I mean, she doesn't need to be in that romance. She likes to hang out in the launch controller room because she's, like, a little techie. But I think she's actually got some kind of adult relationship with the guy.

Hazel Dooney: Seems like it. You've made me a bit more interested in her NFTs now. Maybe I'll revisit them.

Bruce Sterling: Well, I don't know. I keep expecting to run into them one of these days. I mean, it would have been quite easy to meet her.

Hazel Dooney: Oh, it would be a reasonable thing to expect, would it not?

Bruce Sterling: I'd like to, we should go eat tacos and try and figure out what's going on. She’s Canadian and he’s South African and now their adoptive Texans and it’s like what the heck.

Hazel Dooney: Do you live in Texas at all anymore? ‘Cause you're from Austin. 

Bruce Sterling: I have a legal residency there and yeah, when it's not a pandemic, I tend to show up in Texas quite often. I have very extensive family connections there. 

Hazel Dooney: Friends of mine, a lot of people I know say it's their favorite place in America.

Bruce Sterling: You’re an Australian, you could get it about Texas pretty easily. Like lots of outback, you know, funny hats, weird drawl, weird accents.

Hazel Dooney: [laughing] Yeah that’s us.

Bruce Sterling: Food’s kind of simple and good. You know, a lot of open sky out there. People aren’t afraid to take risks, they kind of think big. Politics is kind of a mess. Australian politics is nothing to brag about. 

Hazel Dooney: Not lately. I don't know if you've seen the news but, uh, yeah.

Bruce Sterling: It’s an area that Australians would find of interest. And, like Australia, it's really big. People don't realize how just how large Texas is. It’s really a big chunk of a major continent. And, you know, Australia has got a lot of cultural varieties that people don't understand. Melbourne is a lot different from Canberra and Perth, Brisbane. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah we are much more different than people assume. But I think, you know, we're largely… often irrelevant to the world.

Bruce Sterling: Well, you know, you are until you're there among them. I mean, there's a lot of net dot art stuff that seemed very irrelevant that I took an intense interest in. That really seemed like a peculiar and arcane minority thing. But then it would, in fact, blossom a decade or so later. Like some quite conventional form of cultural practice. 

Hazel Dooney: I do think because we're so far away the net is, well for me it's certainly a lifeline and something of enormous interest to me. In part because I'm just so far away. 

Bruce Sterling: Well it's an issue but, you know, the same is true for Brazilian artists and even true for Texan artists, to an extent. Because you've got like regional texts. An artist like, say, Julian Onderdonk is super famous in Texas, utterly unknown anywhere else. Just a landscape painter who went out and painted sentimental Texan landscapes. Texans look at these things, they just burst into tears. Nobody who wasn’t born there’s ever going to let feel that, right? But that's not such a bad thing to tell the truth.

I mean, I hang out with lots of poets and writers from minority languages. If you're writing in Albanian and Albanian literature is your world and you're the best known Albanian poet, you’re the biggest Albanian poet in the world. And you’re, like, literally the biggest poet there is. 

Hazel Dooney: It might be a happier life than Beeple’s.

Bruce Sterling: It’s a little less global, it’s kinda quieter. But you can get a lot done. 

Hazel Dooney: I think there's a lot to be said for a happy life and getting a lot done. And I tell you what, you've really challenged what I've thought about NFTs. This is not how I thought it was gonna go and I’m so glad.

Bruce Sterling: Well it’s just started. It’s really gonna be a fireworks show. I think some of the interest will taper off when people can actually go to art galleries. I mean, the fact that people are like living and breathing through their screens, like we are right now, this makes it seem very close to us ‘cause there's really not a lot else going on. 

Hazel Dooney: People's behavior online over the last year has been a trip. Like, a lot of things that have happened…

Bruce Sterling: If you look at the history of other plagues people quite frequently just go mad. And people have been in lockdown on and off for a solid year. So it's not really surprising that people should act crazy and it's not surprising that art world people should act especially crazy. So there are aspects of psychic..

Hazel Dooney: Totally!

Bruce Sterling: I mean it's super funny. I can't watch it and not crack up laughing. It's really improved my mood a lot!

Hazel: [laughing]

Bruce Sterling: If they’re not stuck in the deep freeze they’re losing their shit over crypto fever.

Hazel Dooney: I love that video you shared of Charlie Chaplin on a conveyor belt with tiles as an illustration of blockchain.

Bruce Sterling: Getting mutilated by a machine they don’t understand… I understand the machine better than most. So I know it’s really covered with sewage. I mean that’s a really dirty machine, okay? It’s dirty in ways that, like, make the coal problem minor. People worry about the environmental impact. 

Hazel Dooney: I was wondering about that. People have raised that issue.

Bruce Sterling: There are levels of moral uncleanliness in that industry that are much worse than their tailpipe pollution, which is considerable. Let's not kid around about it. It’s just... other effects are much worse. It’s a money laundering racket. It’s a tax evasion racket. It’s a patriot business man Serbian sanctions breaker’s dream. It’s a spy’s dream. And there are just, like, heaps of them and  that’s who you're gonna meet, right?

Hazel Dooney: Yeah well I’ve been trying not to. I’ve been trying to reduce the number of people like that in my life. I've been actively working on that.

Bruce Sterling: Well I kinda overblow it a little bit. It used to be very funny in the 80s when I was like a notorious cyberpunk and I would enter some room full of computer programmers and they would go pale and visibly tremble. It was like, “Oh my god, it's a cyberpunk. He’s one of the real ones.” They were expecting me to pull a Johnny Rotten or whatever, like trash the hotel room. [laughs]

Hazel Dooney: Well, you never know. [laughs]

Bruce Sterling: They were a neck beard contingent with plastic pocket protectors that didn't meet a lot of punks. So it was really kind of shocking, you know? [both laugh] But I'm not in fact a very fearsome person, personally, and if you get to know me I'm actually very jolly in the way a lot of blackly humorous writers are.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah. I gotta say, your Twitter feed has been getting me through the pandemic ‘cause it’s just someone who can crack jokes about this whole thing.

Bruce Sterling: There are a lot of jokes. I mean, not all of them are as funny as they ought to be. But it is very funny and it's kind of a welcome psychic relief in that way.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah for sure. And thinking about NFTs is some kind of…

Bruce Sterling: It’s all over, it's just raining. Raining buckets of soup on people who've never gotten money for what they were doing. I mean, they’d get hired to do it but they were never actually able to sell it. So it's kind of amazing. It reminds me of a time when Abbie Hoffman, noted Yippie and hippie revolutionary, went to the New York Stock Exchange and just started throwing buckets of $1 bills and all these stock brokers – who had millions, of course, they're wealthy people – they just started scrambling because it was cash on the ground, right? They just abandoned what they were doing, which was generating thousands and thousands of dollars on the spot, and they had to pick up the dollar bills, right? I mean, they were hypnotized. So he created this fantastic Yippie publicity stunt for you know, maybe five hundred dollars. Just utter consternation, businessmen scrambling on their knees. 

Hazel Dooney: That is how it feels in the art world at the moment. It feels like a lot of people had a real hell of a year and are just, like, scrambling for this thing. 

Bruce Sterling: God bless ‘em. Maybe this will see ‘em through ‘til the vaccines spread and the plague goes into abeyance. But we're coming back to a world which is not the status quo ante. We're really entering a decade with a very different cultural sensibility than the one that began when the plague hit. 

Hazel Dooney: Do you have any thoughts on that? 

Bruce Sterling: Well, this is one of the signifiers, right? In some ways it's a sign of the emergence of a big tech oligarchy. Because it wasn't like Amazon or Google that launched this invasion of the art world. Although they have, I mean, Google Arts has done a lot of Medici-style stuff. But we're actually entering an era where the big tech platforms are genuinely the dominant industrial and political players in the world. And that really had to have some kind of impact on conventional art. It just had to. Art follows wealth and power and all the wealth and power is in the boardrooms of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent. That’s not where the artists are right now. The artists are actually in the clutches of these blockchain creatures. But a lot of these guys made their money in the tech business so they're kind of, at least, Big Tech hangers on. But we’re entering a situation where it's just kind of accepted that an oligarchy rules. We’re gonna have to come to some kind of living arrangement with them. And you know, they're not that bad. I mean people are afraid of ‘em but they're actually much less menacing than the oil majors. Like, there's tons of wars for oil, there's never been a war for a platform.

Hazel Dooney: Well, I think it's because of the level of control they can have. 

Bruce Sterling: There's a ton to be fearful about but these other guys have tremendous levels of control. When you're working for a coal company. I mean, just think about Australia and what coal companies have done to Australian politics. The misery that’s inflicted on their employees or the wreckage that they brought to the Australian landscape.

Hazel Dooney: To sacred Indigenous sites with artworks that are tens of thousands of years old. Yeah don’t even start me on that. 

Bruce Sterling: Google’s a very powerful company. But you know, those guys, I wouldn't say that they're angels but they're, like, drenched in unicorns tears as compared to Australian coal companies, alright? They’re very rich and powerful but they're not actively malignant in the way that other industries sometimes are. And they are the underpinnings of the Biden regime. So if there's four years of Biden, we're going to be living in a very different USA. And you know the Europeans are also struggling to come to terms with this. I think they're going to do something with NFT because they kind of talk about doing blockchain stuff in Europe. But it's a development that actually plays into European strengths because of their cultural exports. I mean they might be able to come up with a European digital art scene and underwrite it because they do, they underwrite my fair. I mean, my fair is not a major fair. But you can see, like, the Venice Biennale or other kinds of major players getting involved in this and the state will happily throw money at them.

Hazel Dooney: So is there potential for it to be more legitimate and less, kind of…

Bruce Sterling: Yeah more regulated. 

Hazel Dooney: So there is a potential for that?

Bruce Sterling: Well the champagne bottling system… champagne only comes from the county of Champagne, okay? So that's the DOC trading control system. That's European and well understood and super profitable. So imagine them building the digital equivalent instead and rolling it out over their population of four hundred forty million, saying, “This is the approved way. It's safe, it's green.” Yeah, I mean that could be a very different art world than we've seen, right?

Hazel Dooney: That would be something I'd be really interested in.

Bruce Sterling: It would be a different intellectual property system than we've had and it would make digital art more like cinema, or you know, radio. Other kinds of regulated means of expression. It would not mean that people stop making the free stuff and giving it away. People aren't going to give up on memes just because you can NFT a meme. There's going to be a ton of free stuff around. The open source ecosystem is like eighteen years old, maybe twenty now, it's pretty well established. I mean, I give away a lot of stuff and I'm a writer. I should probably be writing short stories now instead of hanging out with you on some Zoom meeting but we might be accomplishing  more here than I would by, you know, publishing short story number seventy-something.

Hazel Dooney: [misunderstanding due to Zoom time lag] Well maybe you can say it’s the madness of the plague, effecting your decision making. But you seem to be taking it pretty well.

Bruce Sterling: I've got a lot of colleagues who are very money centric. They actually think that if the population likes it, it must be important. But that's only true for them. They’re just writers and they really like attention. They get a lot of attention and they think that's great. It doesn't occur to them that they could intervene in some subtler fashion in some small group of cognoscenti and really tear the living hide off of stuff! [laughing]

Hazel Dooney: That's what I think you are really good at [laughing] and it's a really subtle thing. That’s what I look at a lot.

Bruce Sterling: ‘The Cyberpunk Guru’ was hung around my neck around thirty years ago. Like, “There are a lot of cyberpunks but he's, like, their guru.” And I was like “Yeah.” That was actually a fair cop, I am the cyberpunk guru.

Hazel Dooney: And that's why I came to you!

Bruce Sterling: They kind of nailed that one to my forehead, it’ll probably be on the tombstone. But I find it funny, you know, it doesn't really hurt my feelings. It’s kind of okay and it gives me entry into scenes that I might not see otherwise.

Hazel Dooney: [pause] Well, you’ve really blown my mind.

Bruce Sterling: People often say that, I hate to tell ya.

Hazel Dooney: I like it. It’s cool.

Bruce Sterling: It’s my stock in trade, you know.

Hazel Dooney: Pretty cool thing to be able to do.

Bruce Sterling: We do that (in science fiction). All you want. Make more! I'm not running out of material, okay Hazel? I got lots. [laughing] When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah you seem to be, like, just surfing the weird and that's also why I like following you on Twitter. Because it's kind of reassuring that someone's kind of… well, the weird turn pro. And I really appreciate that you've been – well, I knew you would be – but I really appreciate you being so frank about it all. 

Bruce Sterling: Well I think it's important that people get some traction if they're actually going to do anything with it. I know this may sound discouraging to people and, yeah, but this is how things actually are. This is a bit of my Eastern European temperament. I didn't marry one of ‘em for nothing. But, you know, there's a kind of… you have to actually get to grips with the grain of the material in order to, like, do good design, right?

Hazel Dooney: For sure. It is a medium that people have to understand.

Bruce Sterling: You need to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and not get too squeamish about it. I mean, this is an authentic emanation of the way our society really is, right? And in order to be a contemporary artist who's actually doing something meaningful and helpful and enlightening you really kind of need to shed the blinders and, like, get next to it, right?

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, for sure. Sure, I mean otherwise it's just not… otherwise it’s deluded.

Bruce Sterling: We could have spent all our time writing about elves or fairies or you know, galactic princesses but as cyberpunks we actually wanted to go out on the street. It was like, go out and actually talk to people and, like, what's the lived experience of this, right? And that's how it is. I mean, it’s no worse now than it was in the 1930s, in Paris, which was probably the greatest gathering of creative artistic talent since the Renaissance. Just the number of people in 1930s in Paris who were  internationally famous and whose work is worth incredible amounts of money. All their names would be recognizable. You know, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, André Breton, there’s a long list of them. Surrealists, Cubists, they all knew each other. They're all in the same bar. If you look at their objective situation, it's a fucking Depression and Nazism is coming. Really, really bad. Like, worse than us. Super scary. A lot of them are heading for concentration camps and they're gonna lose everything. And yet they're like, super on top of their art game. And why? Well because they're not sissies, that's why.

Hazel Dooney: [laughing] I reckon that’s really good…

Bruce Sterling: They wake up in the morning and they want to fucking get it done. They’re hanging out with each other, like “Let's push it!” Let’s not screw around here, like “Shock the bourgeoisie, take no prisoners, revolution of the mind!” And I was like “Yeah!”

Hazel Dooney: This is the speech, this is the speech for everyone, all artists through the plague. Not run to NFT but…

Bruce Sterling: André Breton, the surrealist, okay? He wasn't their guru for nothing. He was the the torch who lit our steps. André Breton, not an artist, right? Critic. Psychoanalyst, actually. He was a medical orderly from a madhouse. That was his job.

Hazel Dooney: Well I've met quite a lot of those and I really liked them a lot.

Bruce Sterling: I'm quite the Breton devotee. I totally get where he's coming from.

Hazel Dooney: [laughing] No shit.

Bruce Sterling: I’ve read a lot about him. I read his poetry and…

Hazel Dooney: I don't know a lot about him but I'm gonna read more.

Bruce Sterling: I’m quite the fan. Not a kind man to women, Breton. Considered them as wild animals he could capture, basically.

Hazel Dooney: [pause] Well, that kind of was the times.

Bruce Sterling: Great art critic and an inspirer of great art and of other people.

Hazel Dooney: Fortunately, I'm okay with separating people from what they make. I don't necessarily want to be around them in my lifetime, but… yeah, I don't think someone has to be a nice person to make something great.

Bruce Sterling: I never heard of a guy with an important art collection that was made only by nice people.

Hazel Dooney: I know.

Bruce Sterling: Who would do that? “I like to listen to music, but only by nuns!” [laughing] 

Hazel Dooney: It’s such a strange, strange thing. But also, how boring. It would be like if you'd written all those books about elves and fairies and princesses. Such a nice person and so boring.

Bruce Sterling: Well let's not be unfair here. I have a lot of colleagues who do that, God bless ‘em. 

Hazel Dooney: Yeah God bless ‘em and, you know, I'm sure that someone really loves it. It's not my cup of tea.

Bruce Sterling: I'm not gonna fuss about my colleagues, although I used to. We used to have some pretty good critical fights over what science fiction ought to do. But it's a bit unseemly, after a while. But it's good and I mean once you know how to do that you can sort of critically assess other stuff and then it's kind of more interesting.

Hazel Dooney: I'm still learning how to do that without being totally insulting, which is not my intention but.. yeah I still have a way to go with getting better at doing that.

Bruce Sterling: Well sometimes, you know, I mean there are ways to work around it. Like trying to explain why you find something attractive or also just like cultivating a relationship with art you don't like, right? Because, I mean, my wife is always complaining because I'm playing music that no sane person would listen to. [Hazel laughs] I mean, I'm like interested in the full gamut of it, right? I actually liked listening to Grimes, she's not one of these people. But I listen to a lot of stuff like computer generated music with no human intervention. And not even ambient stuff just… I listen to stuff like sample collections of synthesizer noises.

Hazel Dooney: Why do you listen to those?

Bruce Sterling: Well people sell those. They invent new noises for discos, for your techno track or your trap track or your ambient whatever.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah I’ve seen them on a program, like an app, where you can press different buttons and they have different sounds.

Bruce Sterling: Well they invent them and then they do sample tapes and they'll put the sample tapes up and you just listen to them. You know, I listen to them. I put ‘em on. It's like, “Okay, what machine potential’s coming out of these devices this week?”"

Hazel Dooney: Is that part of your creative process?

Bruce Sterling: It’s nothing like music, right? And I don't even enjoy it. It puts me in touch with the potential of a particular art form in a very immediate way. It’s like being a painter and going down and seeing what they've got in the pigment tubes.

Hazel Dooney: I do that, yeah. 

Bruce Sterling: Of course. And, like, racks of pigment tubes – is that a painting? No. Should you be interested? Yeah you should, actually. And you have a relationship with that rack of pigment tubes that non artists or non critics don't have to a rack of pigment tubes.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, when you put it that way, yes I do. I go through everything in an art shop regardless of whether or not I might use it because it's a potential tool.

Bruce Sterling: Try writing something about that, right? Because nobody's gonna get offended. It sharpens your apprehensions of what's going on. It's like, “Why is this important?” Like, “Who else did this, is there like a better way to do it?” Okay, yeah, it's kind of industry boosting as opposed to “I paint great and you don't.”

Hazel Dooney: I definitely try not to say that.

Bruce Sterling: Well, it's a little bit depersonalising but it's also sort of getting at the root of something that most people don't want to write about. It sort of goes inconsidered, right? One of the things we do at Share Festival, that we're well known for, is that we always distribute tools. Literally put together backpacks full of technology art tools and give them away to attendees.

Hazel Dooney: That’s one of the coolest things I've heard.

Bruce Sterling: Well you can look ‘em up. You can go onto my Medium page and look at me writing about these tool sets and why we've done them. They’re the Share Festival Art Maker Bags.  We’re on Share Festival Art Maker Bag number five here and the latest edition is not very good because everybody's hiding from the plague.

Hazel Dooney: If you don’t mind me asking, what kind of things are in them? I'm really interested in the tools.

Bruce Sterling: Well the first one we did was kind of a creativity bag. It's like, how would you make these kind of art devices or installations? I mean, we went and queried a bunch of tech artists that we know, like “What's in your bag?” Needle nose pliers, magnifying glass, tweezers, some kind of exacto art knife, cutting board, measuring tools, maybe a T square. You know, standard craft gear. So we put together this thing but it weighed like 40 pounds. I mean it's just like loaded down with weird crap. Lots of Italian devices though, really nice set of tools. Probably the best one we ever did. And then the second one was more practical, like “What do you do to maintain your creations?” So you're out on the road with your gizmo and it breaks down how do you fix it? So this one was actually a portable tool set for road repair. So it had lots of duct tape and little plasticine stuff, a hot glue gun, zip ties, soldering iron. 

Hazel Dooney: That’s all really cool stuff. I have half those things in my studio.

Bruce Sterling: And then on the third one we were trying to do stuff that was more related to the theme of the show. Like okay, we got a lot of electronic art in this, we got soldering irons, Arduino gear, a potentiometer, a volt meter, your standard electronic hacker stuff.

Hazel Dooney: I’m gonna have to Google those.

Bruce Sterling: I don’t know if there’s a standard for it but we were trying to set a standard for it. And we're better critics for understanding the means of production.

Hazel Dooney: For sure. Yeah, of course.

Bruce Sterling: Yeah, like “There’s not very much Cerulean blue in her painting because that's fucking expensive, that's why. It’s made from  ground up turquoise, that's why.” Okay now, that's a handy thing to know, right? So we're into that because, you know, we're into means of production and render open source and render spreading knowledge, access to tools and ideas. We like demonstration projects of unusual technologies. We've been at it quite a while and Torino is a manufacturing town, there's a lot of industry here. So, you know, from a Turinese perspective this kind of makes sense. I mean this is kind of a muscular Detroit-style car making town where people kind of like to make stuff. That's one of their regional competitive advantages. So when you show up at an electronic art fair we usually have some machines. We got stuff that goes bang, right? It suits our regional Italian temperament here. I mean, we're really trying to establish a relationship with our population and kind of like, curate. I mean, we're curating, we're not making this stuff. Lately we've been starting to collect stuff that artists we know make. We've been thinking about like a gallery or a manufacturing scene, because it's kind of a missing piece.

Hazel Dooney: Is it all digital, that you're talking about, or no?

Bruce Sterling: A lot of digital mechanical stuff. Like Arduino-style actuated machinery, right? It's a digitally powered or maybe 3D printed. I mean it's digital manufacturing but a physical object.

Hazel Dooney: I'm really interested in those. Probably won't do them myself but I'm interested.

Bruce Sterling: One of our hits, I mean our prize winner – and we distribute prizes – was a 3D printed Swiss clock. 

Hazel Dooney: [in awe] What?

Bruce Sterling: Yes, and it works. I got one sitting on the shelf over there. It’s literally made out of 3D printed plastic. It's an 18th century escapement model. Big. Plastic springs. The whole thing out of a nozzle of a 3D printer. Fantastic little object. We brought the guy over from Switzerland. He's an actual Swiss clock designer, he’s just into 3D printing. He’s like, “I can make one, you can wind it up and it’s gonna go.”

Hazel Dooney: These are the amazing intersections. Yeah. Wow.

Bruce Sterling: Super interesting to Turinese manufacturing people. They're like bringing guys over from the assembly line, like “Look at this freakin’ clock.” It's made entirely of plastic, the whole thing's open sourced, you can go download the parts, print it out yourself at home and assemble it yourself – if you're a watchmaker. I don't recommend it, but it's all there, right? And yeah we're patrons of stuff like that. Absolutely.

Hazel Dooney: That kind of stuff is what I would love to see more of.

Bruce Sterling: We’re pushing as hard as our little Italian hands can push it. We're like super into that, we’ll be your pal.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, this is the kind of thing that I would love to…

Bruce Sterling: Well we’re in Torino, okay? Drop on by, you know. We got wine, we got espresso, it’s like, let's see you happy.

Hazel Dooney: This is like a real contrast to the whole NFT thing.

Bruce Sterling: Share Festival is like, if an art fair was in Italy and your art director was a cyberpunk science fiction novelist, okay? Share Festival looks pretty much exactly like that. Really, really like that.

Hazel Dooney: [laughing] Which is great! I’d read that book. I'd like to live that life.

Bruce Sterling: We're actually intensifying our ties with the conventional Turinese art world, which is very big. And we've got Artissima here, all kinds of galleries. And it used to be that we were just considered the weird hacker whiz weirdos over in the garage. ‘Cause we were. We've got a lot more cultural credibility now and the NFT fad is definitely playing into our hands. I mean even if we don't collect NF T ourselves, within the Turinese cultural scene this is like… the fact that it even happened at all makes us much more like players.

Hazel Dooney: Well, I mean, I don't know how to say this without sounding like I’m criticizing someone else but to me it's like the legitimate side and the side that I can see growing really beautifully. As opposed to all of the…

Bruce Sterling: It’s kind of like building ships in a bottle, which is like a big hobby thing for people. And it has, if you look at the things that I admire in tech art, building a ship in a bottle has a whole lot of virtues. It’s technically difficult, really remarkable, people like to look at it, it’s got a long established tradition, all kinds of…

Hazel Dooney: You’re speaking my language! This is stuff I love.

Bruce Sterling: Yeah but nobody cries at a ship in a bottle. I mean it's not great art, it doesn't move people to the depth of their being. It’s a handicraft, right? So it's kind of impossible to amp it up. It’s like, maybe…

Hazel Dooney: But don't you think great art has those qualities as well but the ship in the bottle is missing something?

Bruce Sterling: Nothing lasts unless it actually has a powerful emotional effect on people and it puts them into a different space, right? But I'm not, like, wedded to this. I mean, we actually see a lot of stuff that's basically ships in a bottle and we don't mind the curio stuff. But we are curators and we actually have to come up with some kind of ideology.

Hazel Dooney: I think I misunderstood you just before. Yeah, now I'm only just getting what you're saying.

Bruce Sterling: We actually sort of have to understand where people should be putting their cultural energies. I mean the Swiss clock thing is great. It’s just that it doesn't really go anywhere. You can't build a better 3D printed Swiss clock and get the same sense of wonder kick. It’s another one that’s like this one. It’s like, no. A lot of technology art has that sense of wonder problem. It's like, amazing once, right? And a lot of sci fi has that problem. It's like the idea of a robot or a time machine. Good God it's mind boggling! But, you know, time machine novel number 5073, not particularly compelling, right? It's a strong idea but it's just kind of done. So we have long discussions about this. I mean, every year we conjoin our jury and we have people from outside our world and we sit down, we've got 150 things and we have to pick out 6. And we're like, what about this one, what about that one, which one wins the prize. And you know, these discussions, which are very private and rather arcane, have had a major effect on me as a creative figure. I mean it's really changed my life. And just opened my eyes to things that I would never have seen if I'd been minding my own business writing sci fi novels in Austin, Texas. And you know maybe that's of benefit, maybe it isn't. But it's also just part of who I am as a contemporary cultural figure. A sci fi writer who was presented with opportunities to do such a thing – and took ‘em. And I wouldn't say that there weren't downsides to it because there were but it’s kind of okay. It’s super interesting in a lot of ways. I’m a guy who bores easily and this is kind of my milieu, it’s my metier.

Hazel Dooney: One of the reasons I started the podcast is I was getting a bit bored. I spend a lot of time in the studio, very happily, but then the adding the pandemic… I just wanted to talk to people and listen to people talking about ideas and things that I hadn't thought of, things that I might not understand yet, things I would never have considered, things that will take me a while to think about, things that I might come back to later.

Bruce Sterling: Well you know there are a lot of people who sort of vanished into that. Like Coleridge, the famous romantic poet. He was a very charismatic talker. And he was just kind of mesmerizing. And he was really a pretty good poet but he preferred to hang out and shoot the breeze with Wordsworth rather than actually put his ass in the chair and write a poem. [laughs] He kind of vaporized. It’s like being a huge part of the scene but not getting the work done. It can interfere, between one or the other. I'm not really a social butterfly guy but I used to have really huge parties.

Hazel Dooney: If you ever have another huge party can I come? [laughing]

Bruce Sterling: You’d die, okay? I mean we're in plague conditions here. We are kind of plotting and scheming a little bit, like, maybe we ought to be doing more really good public events.

Hazel Dooney: But going back to what you were saying about time and that poet vaporizing, yeah for sure. I mean that's why this podcast is after studio hours ‘cause the stuff that I like making takes a lot of time to do and I think a lot of people can get lost getting distracted.

Bruce Sterling: Oh I think a lot of people have vanished into Zoom meetings because it's kind of what they do every day. But at the end you sort of have to wonder, what did you ship? And real artists ship, as Steve Jobs used to say. Maybe it's a proper time for me. Old men become sententious, you know, we're very talkative and kind of know a lot. You end up becoming rather professorial after a while. And in fact I do a lot of teaching, because people ask.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah well, I asked you to talk here.

Bruce Sterling: And I’m hitting ‘em over the head with this, like, “Do you know this, do you know that?” And of course they don't. But you have to wonder, you know, why am I not writing novels? I mean, why am I like here in this class talking to strangers?

Hazel Dooney: [laughing] Why are you on a Zoom call to this podcast?

Bruce Sterling: Well I learn stuff. My own teachers could have been doing something else too, right?

Hazel Dooney: Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Bruce Sterling: I had mentors in the literary world who would go out of their way to show me the ropes.

Hazel Dooney: I get the sense that… well, you've been really kind and generous to me and I really appreciate it.

Bruce Sterling: Well good luck with it. I think we're boring ‘em to death now, haven't we shot way past forty minutes by now.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah, we've doubled the time we said we do so let's wind it up.

Bruce Sterling: Eighty? Is this an hour and twenty minutes? Like let them go, okay?

Hazel Dooney: No, no we've hit two hours, I think. 

Bruce Sterling: Two hours?!

Hazel Dooney: Nearly.

Bruce Sterling: You’ll never get ‘em back. You better edit it.

Hazel Dooney: [laughing] They’re telling me they like it so.. we'll see Bruce, we’ll see.

Bruce Sterling: Alright.

Hazel Dooney: Thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

Bruce Sterling: Maybe our paths will cross in some time zone one of these days. I've been to Australia. Weirder things have happened.

Hazel Dooney: Yeah? If you come, let me know. Thank you again, so much. 

Bruce Sterling: Ciao.

Hazel Dooney: Ciao.