Digital Gothic: the Techno-cultural Narrative of Bruce Sterling’s Dark Euphoria
In 2009 at the Reboot 11 conference in Copenhagen, Bruce Sterling delivered one of his signature “closing rants” in which he characterised the coming decade as being overwhelmed by a sense of dark euphoria. The primary image he conjured was of a generation “afraid of the sky”, a state of endless freefall – between the duality of shiny techno-futurism and its dark gothic underbelly. A black silhouette spiralling out of control is an image imprint that runs from Vertigo to Mad Men to Gravity and of course most explicitly, to the eerie repose of the falling man on 9/11.
This paper will seek to unpack not only the nature and texture of the fall but the accumulative image bank upon which this this scene is etched. Game worlds, Hollywood cinema and television all prophesize the post-millennial technological catastrophe in a variety of lusty visual forms. What however, does the end actually look like? Down in the weeds as it were; what are the signature tropes of such mediated ecologies – of networks, precious metals, silicon and liquid colour. The tangible stuff that give an aesthetics of darkness its permanent and enduring form?
In this conflicting age of techno-cultural seduction and environmental anxiety - in this Anthropocene of our creation - the desirable sci-fi trope of speculative futurists, “the return to the farm,” is no longer viable. We passed it somewhere on the way down. The image of the Earth, as captured by Apollo 8, co-opted by Stuart Brand, digitised by Google and commodified by Amazon has consolidated its virtual turn. So where does that narrative of affect and virtuality turn next?
The twenty-teens are behind us, 2020 has certainly arrived with a clang, but it doesn’t feel like a “nontwentieth century space”. The darkness from which we seek to emerge persists – the forever war, surveillance architecture, the attention economy and platform capitalism endure, indeed they thrive. Now that the present is no longer rushing up from below, how do we navigate the final Act of Sterling's gothic moment?
