My Brush With Fame
...was just a three-line email from Bruce Sterling, but was oddly stimulating nonetheless.

Yesterday, while perusing one of his Viridian Notes, I came across a dismissive aside concerning the Seattle WTO protestors and other like-minded individuals. In an email, I called him on his cheap generalizations and questioned whether he was getting his news solely from the mainstream US media. Bruce pointed out that, for these purposes, he is the big US media, having filed a report on the November 02 protests in Florence of the European Social Forum.

While Bruce's Wired article did make a good argument that the mass of protestors in Italy weren't cohesive enough to be a unified political party, he certainly didn't support the objectionable claims that originally raised my ire:

1. protestors are the only group who take Davos, WTO, etc with total seriousness
2. characterization of protestors as 'street canaille. . .waving their anarchist black flags'
3. further characterization of protestors as 'all commercially underwritten by billionaire BINGOs (Big International Non-Governmental Organizations)'

Financial and political leaders in Central and South America, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe take the IMF, in particular, very seriously. The state of California, forced by the WTO to continue putting groundwater-polluting additives in its gasoline by a Canadian-sponsored WTO ruling, should also be counted. Plenty of NGOs also take the WTO very seriously.

As for those who make up anti-WTO protests: knowing and having talked to a number of people who were at Seattle in '99, I can attest to the fact that many of those protestors were well-educated professionals with positions in respected research institutions, none of whom was waving an 'anarchist black flag'. The employers of these people are hardly 'commercially underwritten', whatever that might mean in this context. While there may be a billion dollars here and there in the larger world of the foundations that back the relevant NGOs, and there were plenty of NGO employees involved in the protests, there were also plenty of farmers, union members, environmental activists, and generally uncategorizables, all funded ( or not ) in as many ways as you can imagine.

These biases exhibited by Bruce aren't surprising, given the assumptions he's hauled into this Viridian project of his. The original defining speech, after all, includes the declarations 'Our movement has no street credibility' and 'We love cops and soldiers'. Protests happen in the streets, much to the discomfort of cops and soldiers, at least in Seattle and Italy.

But Bruce also made declarations that seem more compatible with anti-WTO protests: 'We have moral gravity and sense of urgency', and '. . .presupplied with powerful, malignant, threatening enemies'. The amazing diversity of people who show up to protest after protest, everywhere across the world, is a testament to the widely held urgency people feel about the current state of the world. These many different groups agree that the WTOs and IMFs are to blame for the many and varied problems that bring the protestors together. Surely Viridians, too, see the harm in the environmentally devestating decisions secretly handed down by the WTO.

While the Viridian biases against 'underground' or 'street' cred and in favor of police may well prevent an embrace of anti-WTO protestors, it's counterproductive to disparage other movements with compatible aims. Sowing dissent amongst possible reformers has long been a tactic of the same elites that are now milking the oil economy for all it's worth; there's no need to do their work for them.
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