Nik from FoAM sent me this conversation between Bruce Sterling and the designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. One passage from it has been in my mind all week:

Maybe there’s something beckoning over the horizon that’s not design and not futurism but just something we might call speculative culture... My suspicion is that we’re going to be seeing a lot of mash-ups. I think what you’re seeing right here is a mash-up: there are people from very different lines of work put in a temporary situation, we got here via the internet, we know one another through these new electronic means of communication and we’ve been slotted into a space and we’re going to leave a kind of stain on one another. It looks like a stain now but could just get thicker, it could gel, it could take on the aspects of a sensibility after a while. When I talk to my own students, I think these formal distinctions that mean so much to me mean very little to them. It really has to be explained to them that there used to be differences between these lines of work. There really is no word for their kind, there isn’t a 20th-century word for their polymathic approach to disintegrate disciplines and genres.

I don't know about "polymathic", but the rest of that description resonates strongly with my life in recent years - and with the perpetual difficulty I have in describing what I do.

On the odd occasions when I see my old tutors, they're glad to hear I've had a few things published and they express a hope that I'll be able to make a living as a writer before too long. My other activities - experimenting with how the internet can reorganise education, or how to turn empty buildings into sociable spaces - they view with bemusement, or concern that I may be spreading myself too thin.

Reading English at Oxford, it seemed to be assumed that you wanted to be a novelist or a critic - and that you would either succeed in this, or else end up in management consultancy, advertising or something similar. (Journalism was a disputed zone between success and failure.)

Somehow, instead, via unemployability and a general restlessness of mind, I found my way to the attitude and way of working which Sterling sees in his students. It's an approach I recognise, too, in graduates of the course which Anthony and Fiona teach at the RCA - a number of whom have been drawn to my projects over the last couple of years.

I'll probably never be able to explain this to my old tutors, but I know that there's no simple boundary for me between writing, hosting conversations, starting organisations or any of the other things I'm lucky enough to get to spend my life doing. 'Speculative culture' is as good a name for the whole tangle as anything, though. 

The rest of the dialogue is pretty collapsonomic, too. Nik told me this passage made him think of Dark Mountain:

I see these barriers not so much breaking down as sinking into quicksand, I see the signs of it all over the place. I mean we’re in this grim, chilly, abandoned industrial building with a couple of digital signifiers to cheer us up. It’s not an accident that we’re squatting in the remnants of Victorian industrialism and blueskying and networking. I’ve seen huge bursts of successful creativity out of situations that really look very dark and delimited; 1989 or situations in Eastern Europe or even China. Societies that really look sombre and doomed over the 20th century sort of wake up suddenly and they’re doing very inventive things for no detectable reason and not because they’re useful or practical. I hate to say I’m optimistic about it but there are just tremendously powerful forces loose. It’s a fascinating, revolutionary time to be alive even if it’s destroying your prosperity and wrecking your industry. 

The thing I’m more worried about is how can I say anything which someone will be able to see in 20 years in the form in which it was created, anything, even a chair would be good. That’s a serious problem, it’s like a new contemporary problem, how do we make something work in a situation where the means of production are in a maelstrom or things are politically or financially falling apart? I don’t expect the bookstores are going be there, I don’t think the libraries are going to be there, I certainly don’t expect Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Twitter to survive 20 years, I don’t expect Microsoft to survive 20 years, I don’t expect NATO to survive. I don’t know about the EU. This is not like a gospel of despair or anything I just really think we could do something magnificent by just rising to the scale of the actual problem.