A Landscape of Dreams | John Michael Greer
Oct. 7, 2015 (Archdruid Report) -- Maybe its just the psychology of selective attention, but tolerably often when I want to go into more detail about a point made in a previous essay here, stories relevant to that point in one way or another start popping up on the news. Thats been true even during this blogs forays into narrative fiction, so it should be no surprise that its happened again -- even though, in this case, the point in question may not be obvious to most readers yet.
One of the core themes of the Retrotopia narrative Ive been developing here over the last month or so is the yawning gap between the abstract notion of progress that we all have in our heads and the rather less pleasant realities to which this notion has been assigned. The imaginary Atlantic Republic, the home of the narratives viewpoint character, is a place where progress as we know it has continued in exactly the same direction its been going for the last half century or so. Thats why its a place where income is concentrated in ever fewer hands, leaving most of the population to struggle for survival via poorly paid part-time jobs or no jobs at all; a place where infrastructure has been allowed to fall into ruin, while investment gets focused instead on a handful of high-tech services such as the metanet (my hypothetical 2065 improvement of todays internet); a place where people make do with shoddy, wretchedly unpleasant consumer goods because thats what a handful of big corporations want to sell them and there are no other alternatives, and so on.
Now of course the immediate response of many people to this characterization can be summed up neatly as but thats not progress! Au contraire, the changes just noted, unwelcome as they are, are the necessary and inevitable consequences of exactly those technological transformations that have been lauded to the skies in recent years as evidence of just how much weve progressed. In the same way, my imaginary Lakeland Republic, with its prosperous working classes, its thriving urban centers, its comfortable clothing, and the like, has those things because it made certain collective choices that fly in the face of everything that most people these days understand as progress.
For instance, to cite a detail that sparked discussion on the comments page last week, the Lakeland Republic has abandoned computer technology -- or more precisely, after the Second Civil War and the crises that followed, it rebuilt its infrastructure and economy without making computer technology part of the mix. There were a variety of reasons for that choice, but one was an issue Ive raised in these essays several times already: when you have an abundance of people who want steady employment and a growing shortage of the energy and other resources needed to build and operate machines, replacing employees with machines is not necessarily a smart idea, while replacing machines with employees may just be the key to renewed prosperity and stability.
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