What's needed to change the world is a movement that will take advantage of the human desire to fit in. He named his proto-movement the Viridians, after a strong shade adjacent to chartreuse in the spectrum. There's something electrical and unnatural about our tinge of green. Movements, Sterling realized, no longer require mass uprisings, societal dislocation or the sound of gunfire in the distance. They need only an e-mail address and the power of words.
Sterling has that power.
Put him in front of a microphone, and his time and talent seem wasted on books such as the 1992 classic Hacker Crackdown and this year's A Good Old-Fashioned Future . Lists act as a kind of bat sonar, Sterling says. You just fire these screams into the darkness, and if you hear an echo, you fly over there and check it out. Eventually, you write a book about it. Probably a novel.