Permanent Crisis and Technosociality in Bruce Sterling's Distraction

Abstract

Bruce Sterling's science fiction novel Distraction (1999) envisions a near-future (mid-twenty-first-century) US in which the economy has collapsed, entire categories of skilled and professional labor have ceased to exist, rampant and endemic joblessness leaves masses of the unemployed to survive on the margins as squatters and scavengers, the infrastructure of entire regions is in ruins (Louisiana is described as “underwater” and the West as “on fire”), and the ongoing crisis has enabled the proliferation of ad hoc governance structures (“State-of-Emergency cliques”), even as democratic institutions survive (just barely) in the eviscerated form of pure spectacle. In this world, where, as one character puts it, “money just doesn't need human beings anymore,” a significant portion of the population have opted out of the money economy altogether. Appropriating biotech that can fabricate nutrition from scrub grass and weeds, the novel's nomad proles live off roadside detritus, which they also use to fabricate the phones and laptops central to their wired, moneyless reputation economy. This paper addresses the relation in the novel between economic crisis, the demise of representational politics (what Slavoj Žižek calls the “divorce” of “capitalism and democracy”), and alternative forms of sociality, particularly in the figure of the nomad proles, and of the urban squatters described as practicing a kind of “digital socialism” in what were once the public spaces of government (Senate office buildings, for example). If the reversion to nomadism most emphatically signposts the dissolution of the social body in Distraction, Sterling's representation of the nomad communities also insists that disaggregation is not the same thing as disorganization. Quite the contrary, as one character notes of the nomads, “organization is the only thing they've got.” We are interested in the ways in which this networked form of belonging both does and does not decode as ethnicity, as well as the ways in which it orients the proles both to structures of authoritarian governance and to the (equally wired) edifice of corporate capital. Along related lines, we ask what kind of resistance to capitalism is imagined in a “digital socialism” where private property and the private sphere are “turned inside out” through rfid (radio frequency identification) tagging and ubiquitous mutual “sousveillance”? To what extent do the disruptive effects of new technologies, as embodied by both the nomad proles and the socialist squatters, represent a genuine political opportunity, and to what extent do they represent a technologically determinist fantasy of capitalist collapse without class struggle, in the spaces of newly mediated social possibility created by permanent crisis?