# The Archdruid Report

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

## Wednesday, September 21, 2016

### A Time for Retrovation

It's been a little more than a year now since I started the narrative that wrapped up last week. The two weeks that Peter Carr spent in the Lakeland Republic in late November of 2065 ended up covering a little more ground than I’d originally intended, and of course the vagaries of politics and culture in the twilight years of the American century got their share of attention on this blog. Now that the story’s told and the manuscript is getting its final revisions before heading off to the publisher, I want to talk a bit about exactly what I was trying to do by taking an imaginary person to an imaginary place where things work better than they do here and now.
Part of it, of course, was an attempt to sketch out in detail the practical implications of a point I’ve been exploring on this blog for a good while now. Most people in today’s industrial society believe, or think they believe, in progress: they believe, that is, that human history has a built-in bias that infallibly moves it from worse things to better things over time. These days, that belief in progress most often attaches itself to the increasing complexification of technology, and you get the touching faith in the imminence of a Star Trek future that allows so many people these days to keep slogging through the wretchedly unsatisfactory and steadily worsening conditions of the present.
Faith does not depend on evidence. If that statement needs any further proof, you can get it by watching the way people respond to technological failure. Most of us these days know perfectly well that every software “upgrade” these days has more bugs and fewer useful features than what it replaced, and every round of “new and improved” products hawked by the media and shoveled onto store shelves is more shoddily made, more loaded with unwanted side effects, and less satisfactory than the last round. Somehow, though, a good many of the people who witness this reality, day in and day out, still manage to insist that the future is, or at least ought to be, a paradise propped up by perfectly functioning machines. That the rising tide of technological failure might be something other than an accidental roadbump on the way to utopia—that it might be trying to tell us something that, by and large we don’t want to hear—has not yet entered our society’s darkest dream.
It so happens that in very many cases, older, simpler, sturdier technologies work better, producing more satisfactory outcomes and fewer negative side effects, than their modern high-tech equivalents. After most of two years taking apart the modern mythology of progress in a series of posts that became my book After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age, and most of another year doing the more pragmatic posts that are being turned into a forthcoming book tentatively titled The Retro Future, I decided that the best way to pursue the exploration further was to imagine a society very much like ours that had actually noticed the declining quality of technology, and adjusted public policies accordingly. That was the genesis of Retrotopia: the attempt to show, by means of the toolkit of narrative fiction, that deliberate technological regression as public policy didn’t amount to a return to the caves—quite the contrary, it meant a return to things that actually work.
The form that this exploration took, though, was shaped in important ways by an earlier venture of the same kind, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. I don’t know how many of my readers realize just how dramatic a change in utopian literature was marked by Callenbach’s solidly written tale. From the days of Thomas More’s novel Utopia, which gave the genre its name, utopian literature worked with the contrast between the world as it is and an ideal world as imagined by the author, without any connection between the two outside of the gimmick, however worked, that got a viewpoint character from one to the other. More’s Utopia was a critique of the England of Henry VIII, but there was never any suggestion on More’s part that England might be expected to turn into Utopia one of these days, and nearly all the utopian tales that followed his embraced the same approach.
With William Morris, things began to shift. Morris was a socialist, and thus believed devoutly that the world could in fact turn into something much better than it was; during the years that his commitment to socialism was at its height, he penned a utopian tale, News from Nowhere, which was set in a future England long after Victorian capitalism had gone gurgling down history’s sewer pipe. (Later on, in the pages of his tremendous fantasy novel The Well at the World’s End, he wove a subtle but pervasive critique of the socialist views he’d championed—socialism appears there in the stark and terrible symbolic form of the Dry Tree—but that’s a subject for a different post entirely.)
News From Nowhere was quite the controversial book in its day, not least because the socialist future Morris imagined was green, agrarian, and entirely free of the mechanized regimentation of humanity that played such a huge role in the Marxist imagination then as now. Still, the historical thread that linked Morris’ utopia to the present was very thin. The story was set far off in the future, and Morris skimmed lightly over the process that led from the dark Satanic mills of Victorian England to the green and pleasant land of his imagined socialist England.
That was where Callenbach took hold of the utopian narrative, and hammered it into a completely new shape. Ecotopia was set barely a quarter century in Callenbach’s own future. In his vision, the states of Washington, Oregon, and the northern two-thirds of California had broken away from the United States in 1980, and the usual visitor—journalist William Weston, from what’s left of the United States—came to pay the usual visit in 1999. Over the nineteen years between independence and Weston’s visit, the new nation of Ecotopia had entirely reshaped itself in the image of the Whole Earth Catalog, adopting the technologies, customs, and worldview that San Francisco-area eco-radicals of the 1970s dreamed of establishing, and here and there actually adopted in their own lives.
It really is a tour de force. One measure of its impact is that to this day, when you ask people on the leftward end of things to imagine an ideal future that isn’t just a lightly scrubbed version of the present, dollars will get you organic free range doughnuts that what you’ll hear is some version or other of the Ecotopian future: wind turbines and solar panels, organic farms everywhere, and everyone voluntarily embracing the social customs and attitudes of the San Francisco-area avant-garde circa 1975 in perfect lockstep. While I was writing Retrotopia, until some of my readers got the hang of the fact that I don’t crowdsource my fiction, I fielded any number of comments and emails insisting that I really ought to incorporate this or that or the other aspect of the Ecotopian future into my narrative. I didn’t take offense at that; it was pretty clear to me that for a lot of people nowadays, Ecotopia is literally the only alternative to the status quo that they can imagine.
We’ll get to the broader implications of that last point in a moment. Just now, I want to talk about why I didn’t write a mildly retro version of Ecotopia. I could have; it would have been easy and, frankly, quite entertaining to do that. I’ve imagined more than once writing a tale about somebody from our world who, via some bit of science-fictionish handwaving, is transported to an alternate America in which Ronald Reagan lost the 1980 election, the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant underwent a full-scale Fukushima Daiichi meltdown with tens of thousands of casualties, and the United States had accordingly gone careening ahead toward the sustainable future we almost adopted. I may still write that story someday, but that wasn’t what I chose to do this time around.
Partly, of course, that was because Ernest Callenbach was there already forty years ago. Partly, though, it’s because not all the assumptions that undergirded Ecotopia have worn well in the decades since he wrote. It’s become painfully clear that renewable energy sources, valuable and necessary though they are, can’t simply be dropped into place as a replacement for fossil fuels; huge changes in energy use, embracing issues of energy concentration and accessibility as well as sheer quantity, will have to be made as fossil fuels run out and we have to make do with the enduring power sources of sun, wind, water, and muscle. It’s also become clear, painfully or amusingly as the case may be, that the notions that Sausalito intellectuals thought would save the world back in the 1970s—communal living, casual pansexuality, and the like—had downsides and drawbacks that nobody had gotten around to noticing yet, and weren’t necessarily as liberating and transformative as they seemed at the time.
Ecotopia also fell headlong into both of the standard pitfalls of the contemporary liberal imagination. The first of these is the belief that a perfect society can be attained if we can just abolish diversity of ideas and opinions, and get everyone to believe what the affluent liberal intelligentsia think they ought to believe. That’s why I put ongoing controversies between conservative and restorationist blocs into the story. It’s also, on another level, why I put in repeated references to religious diversity—thus there are people running for public office in the Lakeland Republic who end an oath of office with “So help me Jesus my Lord and Savior,” just as there are military officers there who spend every Sunday at the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Toledo, and politicians who attend the Atheist Assembly.
The second pitfall, which follows from the first, is the belief that since you can’t get “those people” to have the ideas and opinions you think they ought to have, the proper response is to hole up in a self-referential echo chamber from which all unacceptable views are excluded. Ecotopia assumes implicitly that the United States, and by inference the rest of the world’s nations as well, are utterly irredeemable; the nation of Ecotopia thus barricades itself inside its borders and goes its green and merry way, and the climax of the story comes when William Weston decides to stay in Ecotopia and become one of the good people. (He had a significant other back home in the USA, by the way; what she thought of his decision to dump her for a San Francisco hippie chick is nowhere mentioned.)
We’ll be discussing both those pitfalls at length in future posts, not least because they bid fair to exert a massive influence on contemporary politics, especially but not only in the United States. The point I’d like to make here, though, is just how deep the latter habit runs through the liberal end of our collective imagination. I’m thinking here of another powerful and morally problematic work of fiction to come out of the same era, Ursula K. LeGuin’s haunting story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” The core of the story is that there’s a splendid city, Omelas; its splendor depends on the infliction of suffering on one helpless person; now and again, people get upset by this, and leave the city. It’s stunningly well written but evades a crucial question: does walking away do anything to change the situation, or does it just let the ones who walk away from Omelas feel morally superior?
That was one of the reasons why the conclusion of Retrotopia didn’t feature Peter Carr chucking his Atlantic Republic passport and moving in with Melanie Berger. Instead, he caught the train back home, having committed himself to the challenge of trying to move his own country in the direction that the Lakeland Republic has already taken, in the full knowledge that he might not succeed. I had the entire last scene in mind from the beginning of the project, partly as a deliberate challenge to that aspect of Ecotopia, partly because that sort of leap into uncertainty seems much more relevant to our present predicament. We don’t know, any more than Carr did, what lies behind the clouds that hide the future.
Of course the primary difference between Ecotopia and Retrotopia was that my narrative was meant to explore a very different approach from Callenbach’s. He was trying to propose a new, avant-garde, cutting-edge future—it’s often forgotten that the kind of thing Callenbach was talking about really was seen as the next great wave of progress in the 1970s, before the current fad for schizoid withdrawal into a cybernetic Neverland took that title away from it in the 1980s. I’m trying to explore the possibility that going back to what worked is a better idea than plunging forward along a trajectory that leads to no place any sane human being would want to go. He was talking about innovation, while I’m talking about retrovation: the strategy of using the past as a resource for problem-solving in the present.
Retrovation used to be utterly unthinkable in modern industrial societies. At the moment, it’s making the transition from utterly unthinkable to unspeakably heretical—thus another term for it I introduced in a post a while back, the heresy of technological choice—but a lot of people still can’t get their minds around it at all. When I’ve proposed steampunk technology as one model for the future, I’ve inevitably fielded a flurry of comments insisting that you can’t possibly have Victorian technology without child labor and oppressive gender politics—and of course while I was writing Retrotopia, quite a few readers assumed as a matter of course that the tier system in the Lakeland Republic governed every detail of daily life, so that you weren’t allowed to have anything belonging to a post-1830 technological suite if you lived in a tier one county.
Not so. The word I’ve coined for the strategy under discussion, retrovation, is obviously backformed from “retro” + “innovation,” but it’s also “re-trove-ation,” re-finding, rediscovery: an active process of searching through the many options the past provides, not a passive acceptance of some bygone time as a package deal. That’s the strategy the Lakeland Republic puts to use in my narrative, and those of my readers who know their way around the backwaters and odd corners of history may find it entertaining to figure out the sources from which I lifted this or that detail of Retrotopian daily life. The rhetoric of progress, by contrast, rejects that possibility, relies on a very dubious logic that lumps “the past” together as a single thing, and insists that wanting any of it amounts to wanting all of it, with the worst features inevitably highlighted.
I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve been told that rejecting the latest new, shiny, and dysfunctional technology, in favor of an older technology that works, is tantamount to cheerleading for infant mortality, or slavery, or living in caves, or what have you. I’ve sometimes thought that it might be entertaining to turn that around—“if you won’t use a cell phone, you must be in favor of bringing back a balanced global climate!”—or simply taking it in directions a little more absurd than it’s gone already—“if you prefer rail travel to air travel, why, you might as well just restart the Punic Wars!” In either case, the point that might be made is the silliness of the progress-worshippers’ insistence that the past, or the present, or for that matter the future, is an all-or-nothing deal.
That’s also why, to return to my narrative for a moment, I made a point of showing that the sexual mores of people in the Lakeland Republic didn’t correspond to how people behaved at some point in the past—or, more to the point, the mythical notion of how people behaved in the past that’s been circulated by certain pseudoconservatives in recent decades. Thus industrial magnate Janice Mikkelson is a lesbian with a lovely wife, Peter Carr happens to see two young men who’ve just gotten married on their way to their honeymoon, and when Peter and Melanie go out for dinner and an opera, the evening ends in her bedroom. I know that was uncomfortable for the social and religious conservatives among my readers, but it had to be there, for two reasons.
On the one hand, as a moderate Burkean conservative, I see absolutely no justification for imposing legal restraints on what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms, or for that matter in that dimension of the public sphere that pertains to marriage licenses—and, after all, this is my utopia and I’ll permit what I want to. On the other hand, just as I put devoutly religious people into the story to discomfit the sort of doctrinaire liberals who believe that nobody should follow traditional religious teachings, I put married gay and lesbian people into the story to discomfit the sort of doctrinaire conservatives who believe that nobody should follow contemporary sexual mores. In both cases, the point I hoped to make is that the Lakeland Republic, with its policy of retrovation and its relative comfort with a diversity of ideas and lifestyles, hasn’t gone “backward,” or for that matter “forward,” but off in a direction all its own—a direction that can’t be defined in terms of the monomaniacally linear fixations of the worshippers of progress.
And of course that’s the crucial point, the most important thing that I hope my readers got out of the narrative. At the heart of most of the modern world’s insoluble problems is the faith-based claim that human history is a straight line with no branches or meanders, leading onward and upward from the caves to the stars, and that every software upgrade, every new and improved product on the shelves, every lurch “forward”—however that conveniently floppy word happens to be defined from day to day by marketing flacks and politicians—therefore must lead toward that imaginary destination.
That blind and increasingly untenable faith, I’ve come to think, is the central reason why the only future different from the present that most people can imagine these days, if it’s not Ecotopia, is either a rehash of the past in every detail or some kind of nightmare dystopia. These days, as often as not, that even extends to science fiction, once our society’s most effervescent cauldron of novel futures. While writing an essay on the genre for a new magazine of science fiction and fantasy, Mythic, it occurred to me—and not for the first time—how few recent works of science fiction seem to be able to portray a future society that isn’t either a straight-line extrapolation from the present, complete with all its most parochial features, a carbon-copy rehash of some specific society of the past, or a smoking wasteland.
Not all that many decades ago, SF authors routinely spun future societies as radically different from ours as ours is from, say, the ancient Maya, but such visions are rare now. I don’t think that’s accidental. To borrow a metaphor from Retrotopia, when you’ve driven down a blind alley and are sitting there with your bumper pressed against a brick wall, the only way forward starts by backing up—but if you’ve been convinced by your society’s core ideological commitments that “backing up” can only mean returning whole hog to the imaginary, awful past from which the ersatz messiah of progress is supposed to save us, you’re stuck. There you sit, pushing uselessly on the pedal, hearing the engine labor and rattle, and watching the gas gauge move steadily toward that unwelcome letter E; it’s no surprise that after a while, the idea of a street leading somewhere else starts to seem distinctly unreal.
Other futures are possible. Retrotopia isn’t the only option, though I have to say it strikes me as a much more pleasant choice than what we’ve got now, and retrovation isn’t the only tool we need to get us out of that blind alley, though I suspect it’s more useful than a good many of the more popular items in our contemporary toolkit. Still, time will tell—and if my narrative irritates some of my readers enough to get them working on their own, radically different visions of a future that breaks free of the blind alley of linear progress, all the better.

#### 262 comments:

«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 262 of 262

latheChuck said...

  Russell Cook- Regarding ham radio, JMG and I have reached dissensus on the question of retrovating from highly-integrated modern radios back to discrete transistors, or to vacuum tubes. My argument is that vacuum tubes waste a great amount of energy, and are guaranteed to wear out, so they should be avoided. His argument (if I recall correctly) is that it takes a lower level of technology to fabricate new vacuum tubes than new transistors, so a vacuum-tube supply chain is more sustainable in the long run. We agree that there's a vast amount of salvageable electronics (both solid-state and vacuum-tube) to be preserved. In the short run, I can send/receive email via ham radio even if the Internet is down for 100 miles in every direction, using a laptop PC and a 30-year old HF transceiver.
  If you want to start exploring amateur radio, see www.arrl.org, www.greenwizardsradio.org, http://teresamcguffey.com/greenwizards.org/?q=forum, or just drop me a personal note at ab3na@arrl.net.

  9/25/16, 5:50 PM
Patricia Mathews said...

  Again, off topic, but irresistible: Charlie Stross' latest blog post, "Evolver" repeats your "next 10 billion years" classic post to some extent, but, oh, the difference in attitude!
  I quote: "Think in terms of bears building fish traps in rivers and pit traps on land. Wolf-analogues coordinating their hunting drives by stationing individuals at high points to relay signals. Raccoons ... shudder.
  What am I missing?"
  Perhaps what he's missing is my delight - shared by my science fiction-fan-friend Jean from the Oregon drytowns - in speculating on the raccoon people, the corvid people, and her favorite candidate, the rat people. Shudder? Has he ever read that lovely short story "The Bears Discover Fire?" Go, bears!
  Oddly enough, the increasingly desperate Salvation by Progress David Brin would probably agree with Jean and I and you that seeing our successors would be wonderful!
  And on that front, thanks to its use in Steve Stirling's latest, I did some belated homework and read Robert Chambers The King In Yellow. How alien are so many of the assumptions of 120 years go! And how un-scary a fair number of his scenarios once past the first two stories - the horror being all in the narrator's mind and ideas about the world. He even dips a toe into Lovecraft territory in which the horror is that a member of Homo Aquaticus is hanging out in a New England port town's harbor.
  The scariest thing in the entire anthology is not the guy who's read a King in Yellow spinoff, "Imperial Dynasties of America," taken it as gospel and himself as a royal heir, and starts killing off his "rivals for the throne" - but rather, the proto-fascist alternate America he's living in. They've "Solved the Native American" problem precisely as Hitler did, and "the Negro Problem" the way South Africa did .... and I can't even tell whether the author meant that as a dystopia, or (considering the ideas in the air then) desirable! Talk about opening one's mind to the point of blowing it.
  And it all hangs on an overdeveloped Disgust/Fear of Contamination by The Other attitude, every single word. Shudder.

  9/25/16, 6:41 PM
Angus Wallace said...

  Hi Robert Beckett,
  Thanks for your comment and info -- I will definitely look into that (the cost to buy the PCM is significant -- it will be _much_ cheaper to make it).
  Cheers, Angus

  9/25/16, 11:48 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Dorda, sure, and I could probably come up with some way to one-up your worst case with an even worse one. So? The point of the narrative I've written was to try to suggest a better alternative that people can begin working toward, starting with their own lives and families. In earlier posts on this blog -- quite a few of them -- I've sketched out where I think things are headed if left to themselves; at this stage of the project, I want to talk about what can be done about it. (That doesn't mean, please note, stopping the Long Descent; one way or another, industrial civilization is ending. The question is purely whether we can make that process a good deal less traumatic and wasteful than it will otherwise be.
  Shane, don't worry about it. I find trolls amusing, and occasionally informative -- when some new line of horseradish is going to be standard among progress worshippers and the like, I usually hear that line first from a troll. No doubt NS's insistence that we have to continue chasing progress down a blind alley, no matter how disastrous the consequences, so that somebody someday might get around to curing spinal cord injuries will be all over the internet six months from now.
  Jason, thank you. That's really quite funny!
  Clay, the question I like to ask is, in a nation that has millions of people who are permanently unemployed, just why are we pursuing a technology the sole purpose of which is to put taxi drivers and truck drivers out of work?
  Pygmycory, yep. The microbiosphere can learn, in effect, and it's learning how to brush aside our drugs. Stand by for a future of pandemics...
  Sebastien, delighted to hear it!
  WA1KIJ, by all means, though it may be a while before I get to it. (On the other hand, The Well at the World's End is a hefty book -- to the best of my knowledge, the largest single work of imaginative fiction published before The Lord of the Rings -- so it's not something to get through in a day or two!)
  Nachtgurke, that's an excellent question, to which -- as far as I know -- nobody knows, or has the slightest clue about, the answer.
  Jill, glad to hear it -- though of course most of us don't, and can't afford to, live in Berkeley.
  Justin, well, we'll see. I believe nobody's reporting on Syria these days -- all sides have too much to gain from the propaganda war.
  Donald, of course it could be done. What I found curious was the way that Callenbach basically cooked up a technofix for the throwaway culture rather than changing the culture...
  DeVaul, excellent! It occurs to me that I haven't given out a gold star in a while, but you've just earned one. Yes, exactly -- the Renaissance was all about retrovation, and makes an excellent example. As for old computer technology, that might be worth trying -- I habitually use old computers, but that's simply because I'm cheap, and I prefer to keep 'em out of the waste stream rather than having a new one made for me, with all the ecological costs that entails.

  9/25/16, 11:59 PM
Synthase said...

  "in a nation that has millions of people who are permanently unemployed, just why are we pursuing a technology the sole purpose of which is to put taxi drivers and truck drivers out of work?"
  The standard corporate answer to that is that human employees are just way too expensive and unreliable, what with their 'payroll' and their so-called 'needs', and are to be done away with entirely asap.

  9/26/16, 12:49 AM
John Michael Greer said...

  Nuku, it would be interesting to look into alternatives. I know that hearing aids were made with vacuum tubes back in the day -- there were special low-power, small tubes for the purpose -- but I don't happen to know what other old hearing aid technologies might be available for retrovation.
  Dragonfly, you're welcome and thank you. And...
  Gather 'round, ye computer geeks! I have said for years now that I would be perfectly willing to admit that computers might possibly squeak through the approaching dark age as a living technology, or be reinvented in some future renaissance, on condition that someone show me a computer that was handbuilt entirely from components of a type that can be made with hand tools. Dragonfly has now done so -- the Megaprocessor is a handmade computer made from discrete transistors, and transistors of certain kinds can indeed be made in a basement workshop. My condition being met, I withdraw my objection -- but anyone who wants to have computers in a deindustrial future will want to factor in the cost and hassle of taking handmade transistors and wiring them up. (Oh, and you're not going to carry a thirty-foot-long processor with you anywhere.) Hint to writers -- a future society with a handful of these objects might make a good frame for a story submission to Into the Ruins...
  Russell, I'll simply encourage you to follow up on LatheChuck's recommendations.
  Jay, good. Yes, the metaphor does catch some of the quality of our predicament, doesn't it?
  Lordberia3, thanks for this. I don't know that anybody knows what exactly Trump will do if he gets into the White House, but your forecast is as good as any I've seen, and rather better than most. I hope you're right about the reset with Russia!
  Cherokee, hmm! I'm delighted to hear that there are still people in the business who care that much about quality. If I ever end up in Australia and need solar power gear, I'll know who to ask after. Is the word "hillbilly" in common use down under, or is it purely an Americanism?
  David, exactly. I would argue that most of the questions human beings can ask have many valid answers, and "what kind of monetary system should we have?" is a prime example. There is no one right answer, not least because "should" presupposes a value judgment, and those are invariably subjective and dependent on irreducibly personal issues. What do you want your monetary system to do? What do you want it to allow, and what do you want it to prevent? That determines what kind you want.
  Beneath, that's a good solid question. Of course there are no one-size-fits-all answers. In the case of homeschooling, I see that as a matter of rescuing one's children from a harmful situation. In the case of libraries, the goal is to build a parallel library system that will eventually be available to the general public, and if it becomes popular enough, to panic the public libraries into becoming libraries again, instead of delivery systems for the mass media. In both cases, bringing competition to bear against a dysfunctional and "stuck" system is one way to cause change. If the ones who walked away from Omelas went somewhere else to work out the bugs of having an equally splendid city without the injustice, with the goal of challenging Omelas to adopt that better system, I'd be less troubled by LeGuin's story.
  Pygmycory, bingo.
  PatriciaT, that's excellent! Thank you, and may the term be enthusiastically adopted by many.
  Aron, well, yes, back in the day. ;-)

  9/26/16, 12:51 AM
SteelRust said...

  Dear JMG,
  as usual your posts are engaging and thought provoking. At the same time, as always, you persist in your fundamental prejudice, namely that technology is fatally limited and the technological progress in itself doomed, because there is a "malignant germ" inherent to technology itself. And this is, IMO, the error: you attribute the responsibility to the hammer when in fact the culprit is who uses it in a distorted way. When you say "Most of us these days know perfectly well that every software “upgrade” these days has more bugs and fewer useful features than what it replaced, and every round of “new and improved” products hawked by the media and shoveled onto store shelves is more shoddily made, more loaded with unwanted side effects, and less satisfactory than the last round." you seem not to understand the fundamental point, namely that these "upgrades" are not aimed at improving, but only the generate more revenues for the ones that implements them. The problem is the human being, or rather, that part of human beings who have as their only purposes power and profit,
  and that those purposes will exercise in any context they may be: hyper-technological or Retro Utopian. And the human nature is what must be changed: the psychopaths who aim to control others for the pure sake of it, have to be expurged from the system, otherwise no level of civilization, even that technologically stagnant you seem to love so much, is likely to last. Please re-read what Ford wrote to oppose planned obsolescence in the field of industrial production, and the way in which he was defeated by the other more cynical capitalists of his time.
  Of course I realize that in the context of your way to see things what I write will be accused of blind faith in technology & progress, but, if mine is a faith, yours, which seems to not see and do not understand the limitations of the human being, what is?
  Best regards.
  Steel Rust

  9/26/16, 3:31 AM
Maverick said...

  JMG,
  Swedes are ahead of the rest of us as always
  https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/09/23/2236230/from-bicycles-to-washing-machines-sweden-to-give-tax-breaks-for-repairs
  The Swedish government is putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to encouraging the repair of stuff that would otherwise be thrown away, according to both The Guardian and Fast Company. The country's Social Democrat and Green party coalition have submitted proposals to Parliament that would reduce the value-added-tax (VAT) on bicycle, clothing, and shoe repairs from 25% to 12%. Also proposed is an income tax deduction equalling half the labor cost of repairing household appliances. According to The Guardian, "the incentives are part of a shift in government focus from reducing carbon emissions produced domestically to reducing emissions tied to goods produced elsewhere." Per Bolund, Sweden's Minister for Financial Markets and Consumer Affairs, said the policy also tied in with international trends around reduced consumption and crafts, such as the "maker movement" and the sharing economy, both of which have strong followings in Sweden.
  Although this is under the umbrella of carbon emissions with this they will build a nice little internal capacity of repairing stuff which will serve them good during times of distress.

  9/26/16, 6:22 AM
RandomQuestionGuy said...

  @JMG
  Thanks for the response about the nukes, though I'm going to have to disagree on the logic. Keeping 2000 nukes operational is expensive, but keeping a few dozen is something most countries can budget for. It's certainly less expensive than buying weapons for and training millions of militia soldiers every year. And a few dozen is all one needs if one is to be left alone against most adversaries.

  9/26/16, 8:11 AM
August Johnson said...

  JMG, Lathechuck and others - I've had to quit running the greenwizardsradio.org site, just about no participation after the initial burst a couple years ago. I'm spending a lot of time with local hams, working on local communications strategies, building a cohesive community of interested people and making inexpensive used equipment available to those who can't afford to buy new.
  I have been acquiring and refurbishing lots of old commercial two-way equipment and setting it up for use on the 2 meter and 70 cm ham bands. There's a LOT of old Motorola stuff that works much better than brand new Ham equipment, even though it's 30 years old. I've had to get old DOS computers set up to program the radios, but I now have literally hundreds of radios to distribute.
  I'm also refurbishing old Packet Radio TNCs to get to those who can't pay $200 for a new one and computers to go along with them. We're building a quite good network for packet email on both HF and VHF. This is not like the old Packet networks of 20 years ago, but we will be able to get messages through. There have been some improvements even though the modern systems like to depend too much on the Internet. They can be used independent of the Internet if you know what you are doing.
  Since I'm located up on a decent ridge, I have installed a 2 meter and a 70 cm repeater that are again refurbished old commercial equipment and they are all with battery and solar power backup. We are getting quite a decent group of people together here in case of problems.
  We're also running a class in town for those who want to get their license. About 10-12 present at this time. This includes people from the fire dept and a couple police dept volunteers.
  No, people participating aren't aware of things like are discussed here, but this is my way of making a contribution and helping to form a community that will work together as times get tougher.
  August KG7BZ
  you can reach me at my callsign at arrl.net

  9/26/16, 8:56 AM
Ed-M said...

  Hi y'all!
  For your information: the Bakken and Eagle Ford fields' extraction rates are down. A LOT.
  http://ifpeakoilwerenoobject.blogspot.com/2016/09/peak-oil-is-coming-back.html

  9/26/16, 11:06 AM
David, by the lake said...

  John--
  I realize that this is just the senility of the elites manifesting, but looking at various stories recently exemplifying your post (not to mention the reality-denying comments on PolitcalWire re the state of the election/polls), I cannot but shake my head in bewilderment. Are the elite and establishment truly so wrapped in a self=-referential bubble that they can/do not perceive that the commoner's experience is directly at odds with the picture being drawn by their various proclamations? It seems that the only answer they have is to repeat, again, the same assertions and question why their audience is too ignorant, uneducated, or racist to understand. This is nothing you haven't spoken of, in volumes, but watching it is, well, puzzling. I mean, HRC's solution is to re-introduce herself? Again? And her supporters figure that calling people ignorant racists and/or petulant millennials will somehow rally voters to her cause? Not quite understanding the strategy here...
  I suppose this isn't that much different from what you encounter with the apostles of Progress, either. Like a train wreck in slow-motion.
  I like the way you phrased the questions re system design -- what do we want to support? and what to we want to prevent? We need to (collectively) step back and re-evaluate our systems on that basis, b/c perhaps the system shouldn't be at all or else be redesigned some radically different form or scale. We are still stuck in the myopia of "how do we keep the current systems going as they have?" The electrical grid (my industry) is one of those systems that hasn't been tested with those broader questions. Yet.

  9/26/16, 11:47 AM
Robert Mathiesen said...

  SteelRust wrote:
  "the psychopaths who aim to control others for the pure sake of it, have to be expurged from the system, otherwise no level of civilization, even that technologically stagnant you seem to love so much, is likely to last."
  Here's how I see it. Psychopathy (and its relative, sociopathy) are so prevalent in humans, and their near analogues are so prevalent in our closest relatives among the higher primates (that is, in chimpanzees) that they are almost certainly not malfunctions or diseases of the human animal, but a fundamental part of what makes the human animal human -- in short, they are a *feature* of our genetic makeup, not a *bug* or an occasional malfunction.
  That being the case, these behaviors will continue to be as prevalent as they are now throughout the rest of human history. It is not a question of cultivating greater responsibility in ourselves, but of controlling our inherently irresponsibility, that is, of controlling ourselves. And that is a fool's errand. Some few of us may be able to learn how do that, but that level of self-control and self-knowledge is beyond the capacity of our species as a whole, and always will be.
  The only way, short of exterminating them, to keep a band of murderous psychopaths from killing as many people as they can is to severely limit their access to weapons. We are that inherently irresponsible murderous band, and technology is our weapon of choice.

  9/26/16, 12:39 PM
Michelle said...

  In light of the Troll Bingo card, and the Peak Oil Bingo card discussed formerly, I offer you tonight's "Official Bingo cards for the First US Presidential Debate."
  http://www.vox.com/2016/9/26/13048748/presidential-debate-vox-bingo-cards

  9/26/16, 12:40 PM
LewisLucanBooks said...

  "...pursuing a technology the sole purpose of which is to put taxi drivers and truck drivers out of work."
  1.) Because we can't leave well enough alone 2.) It's for your convenience 3.) People have asked for it. (Who? I want names!) Lew

  9/26/16, 1:38 PM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...

  Hi JMG,
  Commenting very late because of so much end-of-summer work outdoors...
  I greatly enjoyed Retrotopia and couldn't help but notice that in my opinion it begs for a sequel: The further adventures of Peter Carr, Special Ambassador to the Lakeland Republic. I, for one, want to know what happens next. I understand no crowdsourcing, though at one point you did encourage reader suggestions or thematic concerns, I believe. But you're on the way to building a really interesting world.
  I keep imagining the results of Carr's trade agreements and the reverberations those will have. How many kinds of retrovation there can be! For example, I imagine that the City State of Chicago, with its large population of Native Americans who have real political power there, will utilize the trade agreement to open trading opportunities with the federated First Nations peoples of northern North America and Canada.
  Their culture would be an interesting, vibrant blend of "western" technology and old tribal ways (differing for different tribes), as is developing now. I can easily imagine that the new trade agreements would enable them to do a booming business in hemp and hemp products (cloth, rope, etc.) that would be so necessary to the Lakeland Republic and in future to the Atlantic Republic. Also wild rice, maple syrup, leather, furs, honey, wood and wood products, and flax/linen--all sustainably managed, all traditional products newly important in a retrotopic world. They also might control the last remaining taconite supplies in Minnesota. And their community-oriented lifestyle and earthcentric spiritual ways would be another tonic contrast to (present day) notions of "progress," somewhat different to that of the Lakeland Republic's.
  Perhaps Carr would visit Chicago and be educated even further.
  A minor point: the leader of Chicago would not, I believe, be the "President," but would still be the Mayor.
  Looking forward to future posts. It will be interesting to read what you have to say about a "post-liberal" future.

  9/26/16, 2:06 PM
Nachtgurke said...

  @Nuku
  "Changes which last across generations are possible in relatively slow changing societies, but I doubt these changes can be permanent. Although societies are made up of individual people, I believe using people‘s psychology as a pattern to investigate society may be a flawed tool."
  Have you read Isasc Asimovs "Foundation"? While I generally don't like his books, he has invented an interesting fictional science called "psychohistory" which allows to predict the future of human society by mapping a societies state onto mathematical equations. While this is of course fictional, it still is an interesting question (very close to the one I asked before), whether this is possible to some extend.
  Certainly human society has a lot of parallels to physics for example... You have something like a colloid formed by individuals, shaped by internal and external forces and influencing its environment as well... a lot of parallels to quantum mechanics as well (coherence, thermodynamic limit, ...) - whatever.
  Anyhow it might be pointless to develop a tool that might tell us how bad it might become and in what timespan this is going to happen, when in principle everything one needs to know and one needs to do is there in plain sight, for those who want to see...

  9/26/16, 2:46 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Lathechuck, good. I would argue that such things have happened throughout human history, and will continue to happen as long as our species continues to exist, because human beings are human beings and not, say, plaster saints -- and one of the things that comes with being human is the phrase "it seemed to make sense at the time."
  Patricia, thanks for the reference. That was entertaining -- and a great example of industrial society's biophobia in action. That other creatures might not just be objects for us to dispose of as we will...the horror! As for The King in Yellow, well, yes. I've been having fun with that in my new fiction series.
  Synthase, which in turn unfolds from our culture's biophobia and fetishistic craving for the kind of absolute control you only have with machines. I'll want to do a post about this as we proceed.
  SteelRust, okay, this is funny. I challenge you to cite a single post or comment of mine in which I say "there is a 'malignant germ' inherent to technology itself." I don't believe that, nor have I said it -- but true believers in the religion of progress love to insist that this is what critics of progress think. Not so. What I am saying is that scientific and technological progress are subject to the law of diminishing returns. (Please read the passage in boldface again, as many times as necessary, until it sinks in.) Like everything else, scientific and technological progress pick the low-hanging fruit first; as time goes on, the costs of continued progress rise while the benefits decline; eventually, those two trend lines cross, and additional progress imposes costs that exceed its benefits. I also propose that we are well past the crossing of those trend lines. The law of diminishing returns governs every other human action, and it requires far more of a leap of faith to insist that progress is somehow exempt from it than to accept that yes, progress is also subject to it.
  As for the current fad for blaming everything on sociopaths -- well, it's always very convenient and comforting to insist that all the world's problems are the result of the machinations of a malevolent minority. I'm sure you can recall several previous times in the last century when this sort of thinking became generally accepted in one or more countries, and the result has usually involved a body count in the millions. Is that really the sort of thinking you want to encourage?
  Maverick, that's really good news. Thanks for the heads up!
  Randomquestionguy, a couple of dozen nukes sounds simple enough until you start adding up the infrastructure, manufacturing facilities, need for testing, etc., etc. Certainly none of the post-US North American republics, struggling to meet basic needs and pay off crushing debt loads, would be able to cover that.
  August, thanks for the update! I'm sorry greenwizardsradio didn't take off -- one thing I've learned is that you never know what will or won't catch fire in this line of work. Still, glad to hear that the packet email project and your other ventures are ongoing.
  Ed-M, yep. At least one of my more speculative new year predictions -- that the fracking bubble would deflate this year -- is very much on schedule.
  David, yep. I think the political class just had their reality check returned for insufficient funds.
  Michelle, funny. Thank you!
  Lewis, (4) because IT'S PROGRESS!!! (Ahem.)
  Adrian, nope. There will be no sequel; the fact that it sets your mind racing to think of what comes next is exactly the desired point, and having succeeded in that goal, I bow and leave the stage. BTW, the head of state of the Free City of Chicago is a President, because in my fictional 2065, Chicago is an independent nation -- think Monaco or Lichtenstein.

  9/26/16, 4:00 PM
Janet D said...

  @mr_geronmino (and anyone else so interested)...
  re: birth control / modern industrial system / modern sexuality....actually, there are a number of herbs that can provide fairly effective birth control, so the loss of modern methods does not necessarily mean a automatic return to 'sex is dangerous' (assuming enough people are knowledgable). I've known several herbalists who rely on herbs for regular birth control due to not wanting to rely on synthetic birth control pills (which end up in our waterways through bodily excretion, but that's another subject for another day). I recently listened to a talk by an indigineous woman who explained her tribe's history of largely planning for birth through the judicious use of certain plants. Of course, nothing is 100%, but certain herbs taken judiciously can be just as effective as some of the more modern methods.
  The U.S. had such a dearth of birth control options for so long not because effective contraceptions weren't known about, but because Comstock laws existed and were enforced, and societal mores were dominated by very Abrahamic concepts about being fruitful and sex-for-procreation-only. Roman women and prostitutes throughout the centuries long used herbal contraceptives, so the info was there, it just tended to be surpressed.
  And there are many herbs - including some very strong ones - that can be very effective antibiotics, although you do need to know what you are doing.
  Not sure if this will provide you with comfort or stomach upset, but thought I would pass the information along!

  9/26/16, 4:12 PM
Tyler August said...

  In the spirit of retrovation, I would like to chime in on the Tube/Transistor radio debate and say : "A pox on both your houses!"
  As in the cold war, both sides are right about the drawbacks of the other system. Fortunately, unlike in the cold war, there is a perfectly viable Third Way in the retro toolkit: the magnetic amplifier.
  See, for example: http://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/the_magnetic_amplifier
  Or, a technical thesis (from 1948) http://calhoun.nps.edu/bitstream/handle/10945/31621/48_Steffen.pdf?sequence=1
  If transistors had not come around, I am quite sure that tubes would have still faded away in the 1960s-- to be replaced by MagAmps!
  Any aspiring Green Wizards who are into amateur radio and want to get their hands dirty in experimental, New Alchemy styleshould check this stuff out. Amazing technology. I am tempted to get a radio license just to build a magamp setup and prove my thesis to all and sundry.

  9/26/16, 4:22 PM
Shane W said...

  Speaking of "recovery", I have noticed that your novels are a bit booze saturated. I find myself having trouble keeping up with your characters, I think they'd drink me under the table, and I'd be saying I'd had enough long before they're done! I can see an sponsor saying to a "sponsee", "I really think you need to avoid novels like that that celebrate drinking culture until you've worked your steps and got a bit more sobriety under your belt.", or, if they're really rigid, "I think you should avoid novels that celebrate drinking culture (Period)" Romancing the drink and all that. LOL

  9/26/16, 5:01 PM
Shane W said...

  We've discussed this moment in time before on here, but I just wanted to relay some anecdotes that reinforce the perception that we are living in a strange time when things are changing and realigning rapidly. I continue to be mystified by how rapidly things are changing among the wage class. A coworker who goes to our local Six Flags Over Jesus Christian theme park/amusement ride with another coworker just came out. The response among my gun loving, government hating, conservative wage class coworkers has been supportive. The other, straight, Six Flags attending coworker is always talking about his sexcapades, and other coworkers' kinky adventures pretty much leave me in the dust, mostly. It's a strangely surreal change compared with the world I came out into 20 years ago. We go out for drinks on Friday. Not that evangelicals weren't always doing these things, but they always maintained a unified pietistic, sanctimonious, puritanical public front before. No matter how much you drank privately, you dutifully voted dry and campaigned against "demon rum" every wet/dry election. No matter how many same-sex partners or mistresses were hiding in your closet, you always railed against the "homosexual lifestyle" and sex outside of marriage. I really think that we will see a major fracturing and emptying out of the Six Flags Christian theme park megachurches in the next few years as crisis hits. They're literally now all over the map with their beliefs, and without the unifying pietistic, sanctimonious puritanism, I really don't see what will hold them together. We're already seeing this locally--the major opposition to our local Fairness Ordinance (LGBT civil rights) is the ministerial association, and the members of a local church that is of the same denomination as Six Flags, but is a more modest size, has fractured over the Fairness Ordinance, even though the pastor opposes the ordinance.

  9/26/16, 5:31 PM
Shane W said...

  More observations regarding the wage class:
  JMG has mentioned this before in relation to the senility of the elite, but I am noticing that the young, wage class people I encounter seem way more intelligent and mature than the salary class youth I have met. JMG had mentioned something about kids realizing that college was a con and a money drain and not falling for the trap. I'm wondering if these wage class kids are more shrewd than their college educated counterparts. They seem more literate, more engaging, and overall more intelligent than their pot smoking, salary class counterparts.
  Another thing I have noticed among the wage class, they seem way more class conscious and much less conscious of traditional divisions than in the past. For example, 20 years ago, they'd be way more obsessed about racial and sexual orientation differences. Today, not so much. I think their biggest concern about some minority groups is that they will continue to support the establishment when the compost hits the wind turbine. When push comes to shove, I think that if gay people, immigrants, and black people show class solidarity and pick up pitchforks and rope along with their white wage class counterparts, they will be accepted as "one of us" by the white wage class. There just seems to be some anxiety about minority groups not showing class solidarity when push comes to shove.
  Regarding staying or leaving when civil war breaks out, on this, I am torn. Reestablishing the Confederacy and ending the Union will cost a lot of lives, and I think I could be a good loudmouthed demagogue, saying the outrageous things no one else is willing to say, whipping crowds into a frenzy for the cause. This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly, though. And I think it would be awesome to be a founding father of the Confederacy, Act II, and I would love to be the first Confederate ambassador to Mexico.

  9/26/16, 5:52 PM
Shane W said...

  I've been talking to younger workers about ending Social Security and Medicare withholding, and I really think the simple idea of ending Social Security and Medicare withholding for anyone under 50, or under 40, take your pick, is an idea that could catch fire with young workers and be the biggest youth movement/protest since the draft/Vietnam. It's really simple: young workers know how much is withheld from each paycheck for Social Security & Medicare, and they could easily envision those items not being taken out of their checks, and being able to use that money to buy food and necessities for their families. And it's totally agnostic about providing those benefits to retired or disabled workers, whether we provide them or not is separate from the question of how they are funded, and they should not be funded on the backs of younger workers who can't afford to have them withheld from their checks. The Coalition to End Social Security and Medicare Withholding...

  9/26/16, 5:59 PM
Kevin Warner said...

  Re: "Is the word "hillbilly" in common use down under, or is it purely an Americanism?".
  Though the word "hillbilly" is a distinctly American one, I would imagine that each country and culture has its own version. Here in Oz the local equivalent would be a "bogan" (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bogan).
  In passing, I offer the following local story without comment-
  http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/ballina-shark-attack-eco-barrier-became-environmental-disaster/7878704

  9/26/16, 7:05 PM
nuku said...

  @Robert Mathiesen,
  Re your comment to SteelRust: Thank you for putting into elegant words my thoughts on the subject.
  I might add that another in-built human *feature* is the well-known compulsion to blame anyone but ourselves (as members of an imperfect species) for all the troubles of the world.

  9/27/16, 12:18 AM
SteelRust said...

  Dear JMG,
  "scientific and technological progress are subject to the law of diminishing returns."
  This is exactly the point: entropy. And IMO science and technology are exactly the kind of instruments that, if well managed, could be able to slow down entropy at the planetary level, shifting its effects outside of Earth. What for sure has instead reached the no-return point is a society in which the management of science and technology happens in the frame of the today dominant neocon economic, consumeristic and socio-political paradigm. If today a lot of the new "developement" in almost every scientific and technical field seems to be worse ot the stuff they substitute for, is because the main interest of whom produce them is for the quaterly bottom line, not for the quality of the product. What has to be reformed is how and for what the mankind use the developements of science and technology. To be clear: I don't say that this is feasible, the cancer of the neocon capitalism is so anvanced and, apparently, so well attuned to some basic human mental structure, that it seems that nobody today is anymore even able to image the possibility of other socio-economical paradigms. But if we will be unable to change this aspect, the snake will rise again in every alternative society we try to build.
  Regards
  SR

  9/27/16, 1:12 AM
Patricia Mathews said...

  Shane: re drinking culture. I piked up Dashiell Hammett's THE THIN MAN from the library, and my first thought was that narrator/hero Nick Charles was obviously an alcoholic! Of course, a 4-martini lunch was more doable before the age of plastic cars and very high highway speeds, and in cities where you can or could take a streetcar more easily than driving.
  Martin Luther had a delightful saying I love to quote: "Human beings are like a drunken peasant trying to ride a horse. First they fall off on one side, and then on the other." And my first thought was, "At least the horse knew the way to his stall! The peasant could take it from there without much more danger than being clobbered by his frau."

  9/27/16, 7:59 AM
RPC said...

  JMG, regarding your exchange with SteelRust...it suddenly occurred to me that there might be an experiential reason why believers in progress think it will go on indefinitely. Due to an accident of history, coal was the first fossil fuel exploited. A good fraction of a century later, we began to exploit petroleum, which is even more convenient and energy dense. If we extrapolate from those two data points, it's "logical" to assume we should find another energy source even more convenient and energy dense. If we further exprapolate to all technology, well, you know what we get!

  9/27/16, 8:28 AM
Twinruler334 said...

  Shane W. You are right. College Education, these days, really is a sham.

  9/27/16, 8:58 AM
Robert Beckett said...

  @Angus Wallace & JMG,
  You're welcome Angus.
  Another resource is at www.teappcm.com which I believe has production facilities in India. The website is full of technical data on their range of products, as well as plainly written explanations of the various uses of PCM's.
  PCM's, as noted on the website, have the potential to reduce HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) energy needs by 50%. Coupled with good passive solar building design I believe the percentage could be much higher in most parts of the world.
  It looks to me like a good option for low technology in the Long Decline.
  Robert Beckett aka Source Dweller

  9/27/16, 9:24 AM
Raymond Duckling said...

  Off topic:
  On the 2nd assignment, the one about reading a book that upsets your core beliefts... I picked something bland about feminism... and never managed to finish it. Not challenging enough, I guess.
  Now, I have found my nemesis: The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. (can be found @ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016JPTOUG/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb).
  I suspect this is going to be high-octanage fuel to a lot of people around here. I have peeked at the preview pages, and I consistently went back and forth from "how can this guy be so stupid to believe..." to "God Almighty help us all if half of this craziness comes to pass!".
  My favorite quote (of the "oh, so stupid" kind) is about Shoes-as-a-Service:
  Product will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, ... A shoe, too, is no longer a finished product, but an endless process of reimagining our extended feet, perhaps with disposable covers, sandals that morph as you walk, treads that shift, or floors that act as shoes. 'Shoeing' becomes a service and not a noun.
  The author, Kevin Kelly, is not your garden variety of ignorant ranter. He is smart and compelling; he even presents his own malignant version of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The style is clear and engaging, but somehow all the values are flipped upside down.

  9/27/16, 10:45 AM
Josh said...

  JMG - check it out:
  Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition
  Edwards MA, Roy S
  Over the last 50 years, we argue that incentives for academic scientists have become increasingly perverse in terms of competition for research funding, development of quantitative metrics to measure performance, and a changing business model for higher education itself. Furthermore, decreased discretionary funding at the federal and state level is creating a hypercompetitive environment between government agencies (e.g., EPA, NIH, CDC), for scientists in these agencies, and for academics seeking funding from all sources—the combination of perverse incentives and decreased funding increases pressures that can lead to unethical behavior. If a critical mass of scientists become untrustworthy, a tipping point is possible in which the scientific enterprise itself becomes inherently corrupt and public trust is lost, risking a new dark age with devastating consequences to humanity. Academia and federal agencies should better support science as a public good, and incentivize altruistic and ethical outcomes, while de-emphasizing output.
  open access: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ees.2016.0223

  9/27/16, 11:12 AM
Patricia Mathews said...

  Raymond: That book was obviously 'written' (Oy! the jargon!) by someone's Marketing Department! I can smell that odor a mile away.

  9/27/16, 12:15 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Tyler, thank you! That's utterly fascinating -- I wasn't aware of magnetic amplifiers before, and if that technology were to become sufficiently well known before the supply chain of semiconductors starts breaking down, it could extend the lifespan of electronics technology substantially -- potentially right through the next set of dark ages. The one question I'd have is the viability of basement manufacture of ferrite cores; will have to look into that.
  Shane, yes, the main characters of Star's Reach and Retrotopia both drink a moderate amount of alcohol; many people do, and it's a common social habit in most cultures. I also have characters in other novels who are much more abstemious! As for social security et al., you may well be right.
  Kevin, fair enough. I was just a bit startled when Cherokee used it.
  SteelRust, you know, if I'd tried to come up with a parody of the illogic that believers in progress use to avoid thinking about things that contradict their faith, I don't think I could have done a better job than you just did now. Let's take a look at this comment of yours. You quote a line of mine, agree that that's exactly the point, and then start babbling about entropy et al., as though that has something to do with what I said. It doesn't. What I said was that scientific and technological progress are subject to the law of diminishing returns. That law isn't caused by profit-seeking elites; it's present in all human activities everywhere, and it means that scientific and technological progress, taken beyond a certain point, produces more negative consequences than positive ones. It would be nice if you could address that point, rather than veering instantly off into irrelevancies.
  RPC, that's part of what helped build the mythology, yes. These days, though, it's simply that the concept of perpetual progress so saturates the media and what passes for an educational system that most people take it as self-evident, and stop thinking (as demonstrated by SteelRust) the moment it's questioned or contradicted.
  Raymond, I have another reader who's insisting that I ought to do a review of that book. I have a copy, but haven't yet managed to get past the cover blurbs. Oh, well...
  Josh, thank you! This is extremely timely; I've recently gotten several other papers on this same theme, mostly focusing on the replicability crisis in science. There's at least one upcoming post here; the short form is that we are probably witnessing the death of science.

  9/27/16, 12:22 PM
lordberia3@gmail.com said...

  John, thanks for the positive feedback, it is greatly appreciated.
  Naturally, know one knows for certain what Trump might do if president but there are some core themes (hostility to global empire commitments/free trade deals) which have been common in the Trump worldview since the 80's.
  I watched the election debate last night. The media and political elites have called it for Clinton but I am not so certain. There is no doubt that technically she was a more polished, sharper and experienced performer compared to Trump. However, I thought that on certain issues, including his message of change against a political elite, his hostility towards "stupid" wars abroad and his strong and forceful defense of the police hit home with ordinary people. His language is very plain, direct and common sense rather than the sophisticated language of the establishment which Clinton so personifies. What was your feedback?
  http://blog.dilbert.com/post/151007796236/i-score-the-first-debate
  Like Scott Adams, I think Trump won the debate.

  9/27/16, 1:02 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...

  nuku, you are quite welcome! And, of course, the compulsion to blame others for one's own mistakes and blunders also has its parallels elsewhere in the animal kingdom. It's one manifestation of what the professionals refer to as "displaced aggression." Even American desert tortoises (gopherus agassizi) exhibit it regularly, so it's not just primates.
  To put much the same point in other terms, the Iron Law of Diminishing Returns seems to apply not just to technological "progress," but to "progress" in suh things as ethics, morals and the quest for social justice.

  9/27/16, 1:12 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...

  @Josh and JMG
  As an academic insider for four decades, I've seen so much of this in any sector of academia that relies on outside funding for most of its support. (There are, of course, individual acadmeics who see the danger and won't go down that road even to save their academic careers. But when the stakes are that high, only a few will try to resist the pressures.) It's not just the sciences that are dying in this way, but all of the academic fields that depend heavily on outside funding.

  9/27/16, 1:15 PM
Shane W said...

  One particularly disturbing feature I've noticed about our local Six Flags Over Jesus--most of the people I've talked to that go there seem to be anonymous or enjoy the anonymity of it all. I have family that goes there, and I always mention them whenever someone says that they go to Six Flags. Now, I know it's a ginormous place w/thousands of members, and I certainly don't expect them to know my uncle, cousin, & nephew, but, in talking to them, I get the feeling that they don't know ANY other people that go there. In fact, one person said exactly that, that they go just for the "worship". I find it very baffling that they don't seem the least bit interested in who's in the pews with them, if they even have pews. I can't fathom not wanting community with your fellow parishioners...

  9/27/16, 1:26 PM
Maryb said...

  I have fairly recently become a regular reader of your blog and the first thing I did was to binge read all the previous episodes of Retrotopia. I fully accept your point that reverting to earlier technology does not mean accepting earlier social and sexual mores. And yet... I can't help wondering what the life of a child in a Tier 1 county would be like if they had a yearning for the life of the mind - especially for a girl.
  It's not so long since it was common to hear "If I catch you with your nose in a book again when there's work to be done, you'll feel the back of my hand" or " what's the point of wasting a university education on a girl - she'll get married and have children and when is she going to have time to use that fancy education?"
  What do you think would prevent a reversion to such attitudes in an environment heavily dependent on sheer physical effort by all concerned?

  9/27/16, 1:30 PM
Justin said...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1YxNYiyALg&feature=youtu.be
  Today Elon Musk announced how we're going to go to Mars. It's quite something. I'm sure that on some level, the basic math about the amounts of fuel required for a given orbital maneuver are perfectly correct - that would be easy to fact check, but I can't believe people are taking this clown seriously.
  He plans to build a reusable booster larger than the entire Saturn V stack, which will land on its own launch clamps after launching the transfer vehicle, then do that five more times to refuel the transfer vehicle, which will then go to Mars, where it will land and refuel using solar panels. We will then have colonized Mars.
  He demonstrated admirable humility when he said, that with refueling depots on one of Jupiter's moons, people could go anywhere in one of his spaceships but couldn't engage in interstellar travel quite yet.
  It's a little bizarre to see people eating this up. The first question the audience asked was "but what will we do with all our poop on Mars". (I jest a little, the guy did understand that you could recycle poop and use it for things).
  2016.

  9/27/16, 2:18 PM
Raymond Duckling said...

  @Patricia.
  Your senses are well tuned. The guy is co-founder of Wired Magazine, and was chief editor there for 7 years. I'd not dismiss him out of hand though; marketing being a bastardized version of black magic after all.
  @JMG
  Strictly speaking, you do not *have* to review the book. I am just pointing out someone else who's in the business of painting compelling visions of the future. I mean as sincere
  compliment to Kelly's prose to say that I'm now pretty sure to know how those poor true believers in God Progress fare when then wander and find their way to this virtual living room. ;)

  9/27/16, 2:38 PM
Tyler August said...

  The first work on magnetic amplifiers was done in the pre-ferrite era, with laminated steel cores, but that did introduce serious frequency limits. I think you'd be stuck in the VLF band, in terms of radio.
  As for the manufacture of ferrites, below are two manufacturer's overviews of their processes.
  http://www.jmc.co.jp/en/products/ferrite/manufacturing.html
  http://www.cmi-ferrite.com/news/Articles/ferpro.pdf
  See also wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrite_(magnet) , which has a few more details.
  Looking it over, the chemical synthesis of the minerals involved don't sound too arduous for an alchemist's lab -- the milling and sintering processes can be compared to historical ceramic work by someone who knows that field better than I. Without trying, it looks doable... but without trying, everything looks doable.
  My biggest worry is that with the number of ferrite cores already built, the know-how to make new ones might not make it though the salvage era.
  That's what keeps me up at night with regards to any salvageable technology worth keeping, come to think about it. That salvage will be too convenient, and we (our descendants) will simply forget how things were done... which will make the transition incredibly painful when the salvage runs out. Is there any reason to suspect this problem won't be the bugbear I'm imagining?

  9/27/16, 2:52 PM
Shane W said...

  @Nastarana,
  I agree, I'm very leery of "progressives" this year, and will be until at least after the election, if not longer...

  9/27/16, 2:56 PM
Shane W said...

  Someone had mentioned reestablishing the old Union, either in this week's post or last's, I can't remember. All I can say is that "Je me souviens", as the Quebec license plate says, applies equally to Dixie as well as Quebec. Having first made the mistake of going into Union with the Yankee traders/industrialists, the South will never make that mistake again. I'd imagine Quebec would feel the same way after regaining independence from English Canada. Same for Mexico regaining the lands lost to Guadalupe-Hidalgo, once returned to Mexico, it'll be a cold day in Hades before they give them up again. Je me souviens, indeed...

  9/27/16, 3:03 PM
Ol' Bab said...

  Robert Mathiesen said...
  "Psychopathy (and ... sociopathy) are so prevalent in humans, ... that they are almost certainly ... a fundamental part of what makes the human animal human ...
  "That being the case, these behaviors will continue to be as prevalent as they are now throughout the rest of human history. It is not a question of cultivating greater responsibility in ourselves, but of controlling our inherently irresponsibility, that is, of controlling ourselves. And that is a fool's errand..."
  In a nutshell, you point out the basic flaw in any Utopia. Our evolution has carried us to an inflection point where, finally just able to "master nature", we are yet unable to have a balancing ability to grok consequences (this as a species, not as individuals). Referring here to thumbs, speech, symbol manipulation, etc. We have likely added ourselves to the list of species doomed because they evolved into becoming toxic to themselves. If we had enough time (a few million years?) protected somehow from ourselves, the necessary balancing abilities (wisdom? more inherit compassion?) might appear. But evolution is fickle...
  When I say doomed, I don't mean to extinction, but to never achieve the wild good hopes of our finest minds through the ages.
  I think you missed a good point. Maybe it's a fool's errand, but civilization, perhaps all civilizations, were/are attempts to control the dark side -the "dangerous other"- internal or external. Some succeeded admirably, at least for a time. We've been there, done that, many times. Technology has made the weapons more murderous, but not changed the basic dilemma.
  Ol' Bab

  9/27/16, 3:42 PM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hi JMG,
  It was a real pleasure meeting people who thought so long term and built resiliency into their products. It was like meeting "your people" and we had a great chat and better still, they gave me some very good ideas.
  Sorry to digress, but I'm in the early stages of reconsidering the wood heating system here as it is a bit of a minor disaster. The steel in the combustion chamber is delaminating and I've already replaced several sections of steel plate in that combustion chamber. Yes, it would be fair to say that that unit is in for a good time and not a long time. Which really annoys me as I find it increasingly difficult to tell what bit of rubbish product being foisted onto us is going to last. And I totally hate the waste of time and resources involved in walking away from minor disasters like this.
  Oh, sorry, I digress again. Well, I first came across the word hillbilly as a young kid who was subjected to US culture and the television show "The Beverley Hillbillies". You may or may not recall that one? I didn't really think about the concept much after that, which is possibly a good thing, although some may argue otherwise. Then one of the local farmers here used to stir me up about living in "hillbilly country" and instead of getting defensive about it, I just sort of owned it. Of course with these good natured ribbings there may always be a grain of truth hidden within.
  And the poem ended up being a song. My wife came across the words a year or so back whilst reading a delightful book on US fashion by the author Cintra Wilson titled: "Fear and Clothing". What a great title too. We had a good chuckle about the lyrics as we can sort of see where the writer was coming from. I'll reproduce the words here (with some minor adjustments to the lyrics from the song Way out here, as the singer Josh Thompson has to understand that this is a website run by a Druid, after all - I hope him and the band don't try and come and get me...). Here goes:
  "Our houses are protected by the Gods and a gun
  And you might meet 'em all if you show up here not welcome son
  Our necks are burnt, our roads are dirt and our trucks ain't clean
  The dogs run loose, we smoke, we chew and fry everything...
  We won't take a dime if we ain't earned it
  When it comes to weight brother we pull our own
  If it's our backwoods way of livin' you're concerned with
  You can leave us alone"
  They kind of lost me with the smoking, chewing and frying bit, but each to their own! Oh my, we've descended into the land of silliness again. The song also went onto to say something, something about John Wayne and Johnny Cash. The only Johnny Cash I've ever enjoyed is when he covered the Nine Inch Nails song. Emotional stuff with that growling voice...
  Cheers
  Chris

  9/27/16, 4:46 PM
latheChuck said...

  Re: magnetic amplifiers... They depend on an alternating-current "power supply", historically provided by a spinning alternator, so it hasn't been shown (as far as I know) that they can be used for "short wave" radio communications. If we want to communicate over hundreds of miles with less than 100W, we need to generate signals of at least 3.5 MHz, which is about 20x higher in frequency than is described in Wikipedia as controlled with magnetic amplifiers. (A transistor or vacuum tube amplifier, by contrast, is supplied with direct current (constant voltage, as from a battery or solar panel).) I'm eager to hear of success at frequencies practical for radio.
  I have a modest little book "Instruments of Amplification", (H. P. Friedrichs, apparently self-published), which describes experiments (of varying success) in making vacuum tubes and transistors with household equipment. (I got my copy through ARRL.org.) It gives me a new appreciation for the electronics technology of the 1970s.

  9/27/16, 6:16 PM
Shane W said...

  @Lordberia,
  one correction I'd make is about fracking. On here, JMG has stated that fracking was a financial bubble that actually added less oil to the US market than commonly believed. I even think he posted a graph showing how little US oil production actually went up as a result of fracking. Maybe JMG can let us know...

  9/27/16, 7:19 PM
Patricia Mathews said...

  @lordiberia3 - I caught the debate on KUNM-FM and thought Hillary sounded great. Not at all the shrill, scolding, Mother-in-law-as-Nixon people have made her out to be. And you, who were watching TV instead of listening to them on the radio, got a totally contrary opinion. Calling Marshall McLuhan - this sounds significant. Very significant indeed. Others?
  Though I am surprised the smoke alarms in the debate venue weren't clanging incessantly from all the pants on fire!

  9/27/16, 7:38 PM
Justin said...

  Re magnetic amplifiers, they existed alongside tubes for a while. Magnetic amplifiers have advantages, and tubes have advantages.
  Lets not forget that the first computers were analog computers, some of which were simple enough to be literally hand-cranked. Look up MONIAC.

  9/27/16, 8:28 PM
Unknown said...

  Further to some comments I made a couple of weeks ago, I see a scientist in NZ has observed that farmers have forgotten how to make clover based pasture work properly and have forgotten what good healthy clover based pastures look like. He blames the fertilizer application regimes which seem to work hand in hand with the seed companies to produce rye grasses which produce incredibly well but need lots more nitrogen than a clover based pasture will produce.
  I have been looking at renovating some of my own pasture and am finding information on traditional pasture mixes based on clover hard to come by locally.
  re Retrobate, love it!
  Cheers
  eagle eye

  9/27/16, 11:34 PM
Unknown said...

  Cherokee,
  Re your wood heater. Go talk to a boiler servicing company about your problem, find out what steel they use and then get the local fabrication guru to make one out of that. We have a home built wood heater that was originally a pile at the Burnie Wharf.
  Rumor has it that it is Bisalloy, it has never looked like delaminating, and it comes up really good with a lick of stove black. Just don't try and drill holes in it with a normally sharpened drill.
  Back in the hills against the tarkine we refer to the area as "banjo country", but terms like bogan and hillbilly are not really used for the rural people. Hippies for some of the now fading 70's counter culture types but even they are as mainstream as they come with a couple of charming exceptions.
  Cheers
  eagle eye

  9/27/16, 11:44 PM
David, by the lake said...

  I don't want to speak for John, but I suspect that he'd point out that education, like healthcare, is not infrastructure. The tier system defines what infrastructure (roads, utilities, etc) is supported by local taxes. Moreover, he's made the observation in the post on technological choice that the use of a technology doesn't imply the suite of historical attitudes associated with it. Why would I not want my educated daughter assisting me on my farm? Or studying at the university? And moreover, how is it that education is viewed as synonymous with respect and basic decency?

  9/28/16, 3:54 AM
Phil Harris said...

  JMG
  Thinking about ‘knowledge’ (scientific and other scholarship - h/t JMG, Robert Mathiesen and Josh), I find myself coming back to Thatcher. (I suppose this could be better than regressing to the default 30s/40s example of disaster: smile).
  I offered this ‘joke’ once before a while ago on this forum, but it seems central to both the Public Good and what we used to call in Britain, ‘Public Service Ethos’. America had a strong moral strand as well, I remember. Things changed. In 1980 Thatcher started to dismantle the Ministry of Agriculture and the ethos of ‘public science’. I made a joke in the pub to the effect - “If it made money, then ‘Government’ should hand it over to ‘Business’. And, if it did not make money then it was not worth doing anyway.” There were some jokes I wished later I had not found so amusing.
  The corollaries seem to have been: “if you can’t find ‘outside’ funding –at going-rates in competitive markets - for the knowledge business, then by definition it is not worth having.” “Teaching is worth what students are willing to pay for it”. “You as a teacher are worth the cash flow, no more, that you bring in to cover ‘our’ overheads as an ‘employer/business’. Remember, you are there to sell it, whatever it is.”
  On the other hand at some critical point ‘knowledge’ is what we are. For any society and for sure ours, minimum knowledge is a public utility needing maintenance, much like our water and food supply and control of waste and ‘security’. ‘Scholarship’ supporting historically informed ‘understanding’ across the range of our critical ‘utilities’ is necessary for sane policies; i.e. keeping in touch with ‘realities’. And ‘attitude’ or ‘ethos’ really matters! Curiously, Thatcher I guess, thought she had the key to investing in ‘knowledge’ and at the same time solving the ‘diminishing return’ problem.
  best
  Phil H

  9/28/16, 3:56 AM
SteelRust said...

  JMG said:
  "What I said was that scientific and technological progress are subject to the law of diminishing returns. That law isn't caused by profit-seeking elites; it's present in all human activities everywhere, and it means that scientific and technological progress, taken beyond a certain point, produces more negative consequences than positive ones. It would be nice if you could address that point, rather than veering instantly off into irrelevancies. "
  Dear JMG,
  how can I address what for you is clearly a point of blind faith, i.e. that the reached diminising returns of science and technology IN THEIR TODAY FORM OF IMPLEMENTATION are not mainly caused/heavily influenced by "ab initio" and "in itinere" bad political/ideological choice, but only/mainly by thermodynamic limits?
  An example? Private vs public transportation. Consumerism vs optimized product design. Profit for the medical corporations vs optimized medical and drugs production. War & competition vs peaceful cooperation. That last is the 800 pounds gorilla, if one only think at how much resources are wasted in wars!
  Where we totally disagree is that, with a better "political" management of the human nature, we could have employed the nature resources to develop science and technolgy much much furter, avoiding a lot of waste in time and energy (not only as a figure of speech). Where we disagree is not on the fact that some absolute limits exist (of system complexity, e.g.), but that we will reach it a lot faster that if we had better managed ourselves, and on this topics nor I nor you could bring "proof", but only hypotetical extrapolations...
  Reagrds
  SR

  9/28/16, 6:17 AM
Raymond Duckling said...

  @SteelRust
  You have reached an impasse with JMG on both of your opinions. JMG says progress is inherently limited, and that you cannot kickstart it again because it has no more juice left. You say progress still have lots of juice left (though it might have some theoretical upper limit, which we have not reached yet) and that the symptoms we see are caused by the mismanagement of progress by political reasons. If you two just keep repeating yourselves, there is no further progress possible (sorry about the cheesy pun).
  Instead of geting yourself banned, why don't you test your hypothesis (with JMG's as the null hypothesis)??? How does the world look like if progress has reached the end of its shelve life? How does the world look like if progress is stuck due to mismanagement?
  After all, that's what a rationalist would do! :>

  9/28/16, 11:33 AM
nuku said...

  @SteelRust,
  In reply to your last comment to JMG:
  “Where we disagree is not on the fact that some absolute limits exist (of system complexity, e.g.), but that we will reach it a lot faster that if we had better managed ourselves...”
  I think with respect to Law Of Dimishing Returns, the question is not how fast a society gets to “absolute limits“ (thermodynamic or otherwise), but rather how to stay on the positive side of that law. In other words, to not “progress” into negative territory where the gains of efficiency, comfort, convenience, etc. are in fact outweighed by the bad consequences such as pollution, creating a large poor under class, trashing the environment, etc. We want to avoid the crossover point into negative returns for our efforts. Certainly better political management, as practiced in the Lakeland Republic in the story, would be one aspect of staying on the positive side of the crossover point.

  9/28/16, 3:57 PM
Maryb said...

  David by the Lake, I am not suggesting that education is infrastructure. My point is that a Tier 1 county tends to be heavily dependent on physical labour, because the individuals who live there tend to prefer it that way. Being gay doesn't preclude that sort of work so I can quite see why there would be no reason to revert to earlier social and sexual mores in that respect. But serious intellectual interests take up time. You may very well want your clever daughter helping you on the farm, you would probably need every pair of hands. But what if she doesn't want it? What safeguards are there in Tier 1 counties for such children who would love to take up one of the scholarships but face parental opposition?

  9/28/16, 4:33 PM
Susan J said...

  Dear JMG,
  I found a paragraph in a book that startled me.
  I am re-reading the book “The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light” by William Irwin Thompson. The subtitle is “Mythology, Sexuality & The Origins of Culture”; it was written in 1981. I first read this book about 15 years ago. I found it slow-going then and now. The words are easy enough, but the sentences are hard. I suspect it is because my college courses were primarily math and physics; no history, no literature.
  I was startled by the following paragraph on page 120, near the beginning of a chapter on agriculturalization:
  “For the few thousand years that Magdalenian culture lasted, the relationships among religion, art, and technology seem to have achieved a condition of harmony and balance. But for humanity all steady-states are temporary, and just when we think we can take nature for granted, whether we live in a hunting or an industrial society, the weather changes, and we are forced to change.”
  The next paragraph begins: “Great ages of transition, with their attendant changes of climate—-as we ourselves seem about to discover—-are difficult times of decreasing culture. Adjusting to a new ecological niche calls for a new adaptation and takes the entire psychic energy of a culture.”
  Your Retropia is largely based on declining petrocarbon-based energy, but this book reminds me we face a greater change—the weather.
  Thank you for Retropia. I liked the contrast in the different state’s approaches to technology, agriculture, etc. I am convinced more than ever that 52 states are too many to govern in one union.

  9/29/16, 10:35 AM
stravinsky7 said...

  Hey JMG, I am curious if you have an opinion on AI/machine learning?
  Check out "the unreasonable effectiveness of recurrent neural networks" on andrej karpathy's blog for an example.
  For another good example, check out deepmind's blog post introducing wavenet, particularly the hallucinated piano samples at the bottom. What do you think?

  10/4/16, 11:41 PM
DoubtingThomas said...

  While I recognise some of what you say here:
  [Faith does not depend on evidence. If that statement needs any further proof, you can get it by watching the way people respond to technological failure. Most of us these days know perfectly well that every software “upgrade” these days has more bugs and fewer useful features than what it replaced, and every round of “new and improved” products hawked by the media and shovelled onto store shelves is more shoddily made, more loaded with unwanted side effects, and less satisfactory than the last round.]
  in so far as the allusion to a pressurised sales cycle. In fact I recently said something about “seasonally cyclical manipulative advertising practices that push incrementally modified, sometimes deliberately shortened shelf-lifed, disposable products that desperately attempt to create a market“” (1) so it appeals to me.
  but, I simply don’t recognise either the “every software upgrade these days has more bugs” generalisation and or the “more shoddily made, more loaded with side effects, and less satisfactory”. You then go on to say that older was better, sturdier etc. I don't accept the attempted generalisations. I also can’t go along with the “most of us these days know that perfectly well”.
  I would want to see the evidential statistics backing those quite sweeping generalisations. I’m sure you wouldn’t be expecting us to take them on Faith *wink*
  I agree things fail, wear out, have errors etc! There are no doubt differences in shelf-life, reliability and the MTBF of old and new products. Yes! Absolutely!
  I would suspect it goes both ways and perhaps even on balance evens out but if you have a study that supports those claims then I would love to read it - seriously. It could be useful for me.
  When I made statement (1) above I actually had no evidence I could point to in support of the “deliberately disposable” part. It was just feeling based. The rest I could justify.
  As for the following:
  [And of course that’s the crucial point, the most important thing that I hope my readers got out of the narrative. At the heart of most of the modern world’s insoluble problems is the faith-based claim that human history is a straight line with no branches or meanders, leading onward and upward from the caves to the stars, and that every software upgrade, every new and improved product on the shelves, every lurch “forward”—however that conveniently floppy word happens to be defined from day to day by marketing flacks and politicians—therefore must lead toward that imaginary destination]
  I get the marketing flacks aspects, re (1), but I simply don’t recognise this “that human history is a straight line with no branches or meanders, leading onward”. Anyone with a passing knowledge of history should be able to point at branches or meanderings .. no ? Who is claiming that human history is such ?
  Perhaps I’m just being slow today but I don’t quite understand why you are conflating all of that or why you are trying to say that it is at the heart of most of the modern worlds problems.
  You have this thing about what you have termed “progress” in some other posts ( whatever that may be .. too subjective for my tastes ) and somehow blaming it for the world’s problems.
  I don’t recognise this idea of progress. For me I see evolution, change and adaptation. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it causes harm etc. Different groups in parallel explore different ways of being. Along the way sometimes some groups of people take advantage and attempt to manipulate others for their selfish purposes but not everyone goes along with it. Some see it and resist it. Some don’t and fall prey to it. Some see it and don’t care etc. Along the way individually and collectively we learn .. at different rates.
  I like the Retrovation term though and the concept. We should be aware of the past so that we can learn from it and where appropriate re-use concept from it but most preferably not some careful curated version of it.

  1/11/17, 7:37 AM

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