Bruce Sterling cheers as he sees the dot-green future finally arrive. The tipping point has been passed. In an eco-capitalism article in the Washington Post he writes how he feels the net-generation cybergreens are winning from the 20th century fossil fuel dinosaurs:

“Why? Because they’re not about spiritual potential, human decency, small is beautiful, peace, justice or anything else unattainable. The cybergreens are about stuff people want, such as health, sex, glamour, hot products, awesome bandwidth, tech innovation and tons of money.

We’re gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival.”

This is indeed a crucial paradigm shift. Green is shifting from a position in which it was considered alternative, anti-capitalist, anti-consumption, anti-establishment and small-scale, to one in which it is very much scalable, at the core of capitalism, decision-making, power and becoming mainstream thought and action. As for consumption, McDonough and Braungart already showed how in a cradle-to-cradle world consumption can actually be a good thing and consuming more can mean helping more instead of destroying more. Winning over people suddenly became a whole lote ‘easier’.

Sterling goes on to say:

“My own favorite sci-fi planetary-saving scheme for naming, numbering and linking to the Internet every piece of junk we create so that it can be corralled and briskly recycled, creating a cradle-to-cradle postindustrial order and averting planetary doom, may sound pretty shocking and alien.”

In a sense such ‘leftover/product DNA’ could work well in the case one could realize it so that it would only require ‘reading’ and not ‘writing’, if it could become an ‘organic part of the lifecycle’, so that you could ‘scan’ your coffee mug and say: ah, your DNA shows your porcelain is part French, part German and these are your parents, who met there, whose ancestors lived in the soil of northern Italy, but what were you doing on that boat to the U.S. and tell me about how you lost that ear in London and what happened to it? Basically: the lifetime story of a product not merely in terms of what happened to it in general but its ecological meaning, its green-sense. A rather nice viridian design vision …

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 13:34 and is filed under business, future, sustainability, trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.