The next next world

At the end of Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling lays out what the post-spime world might look like.

The step after the Spime Wrangler-- tomorrow's tomorrow-- is neither an object nor a person. It's a Biot, which we can define as an entity which is both object and person.

A Biot would be the logical intermeshing, the blurring of the boundary between Wrangler and spime. This is happening now, but we can't perceive and measure it.

Today, every human being... carries a load of industrial effluent.... A human body can be understood as a sponge of warm salt water within a shell of skin; so everything we emit [or manufacture or consume] ends up partially within ourselves.

Some artificial substances are bioaccumulative; our metabolisms preferentially suck them out of the biosphere and try to make structure out of them. These processes are involuntary and take place beneath our awareness. (134)

A Biot is somebody who knows about this and can deal with the consequences. He's in a position to micromanage and design the processes that shape his own anatomy. (135)

When will be get to the Biot Age? Sterling guesses around 2070. What kinds of technologies will a Biot technosociety create?

In a Biot world, the leading industries are not artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, or spimes, but technologies for shaping human beings.... The driving technologies of a Biot technosociety would be cybernetics, biotechnology, and cognition. (135)

Because some of the most advanced, valuable technologies will be incorporated into the body, or lived with every day (with full awareness of the biological impacts of that contact), and because of the need for more environmentally sustainable design and manufacturing, a Biot technosociety would prefer

technology that can eventually rot and go away all by itself. Its materials and processes are biodegradable, so it's an auto-recycling technology.... It means room-temperature industrial assembly without toxins. (143)

But there will still exist two other kinds of technologies. One will be

artifacts deliberately built to outlast the passage of time. This is very hard to do and much over-estimated. Many objects we consider timeless monuments, such as the Great Pyramid and the Roman Colosseum, are in fact ruins. (143-4)

The other will be

the kind [of technology] I have tried to haltingly describe here. It's a fully documented, trackable, searchable technology. This whirring, ultra-buzzy technology can keep track of all its moving parts and, when its time inevitably comes, it would have the grace and power to turn itself in at the gates of the junkyard and suffer itself to be mindfully pulled apart. It's a toybox for inventive, meddlesome humankind that can puts its own toys neatly and safely away. (144-5)

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