This is the twenty-fourth (and next to last) installment of an exploration of some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative fiction. At a final meeting between our narrator and Isaiah Meeker, President of the Lakeland Republic, certain unstated agendas are revealed and the future of one of the post-US North American republics takes an unexpected turn...
***********
A taxi brought back to my hotel from Janice Mikkelson’s mansion—one of her flunkeys called it for me—and I spent most of the ride staring out the window and thinking about what she’d said about the prewar rich. I’d heard plenty of stories along the same lines, of course, everybody has, but for some reason my mind kept circling back to the way that they’d dug their own graves and then jumped into them. Why didn’t it occur to them that voting themselves one billion-dollar bonus after another, while driving their own employees and the rest of the country into poverty, was going to blow up in their faces sooner or later?
I was thinking that, staring out at the darkening sky, when a little pale streak brought me back to reality. The dozens of governments and corporations that kept launching satellites even after 2029, when the Kessler syndrome in low earth orbit should have given them a wake-up call, had gone waltzing just as cluelessly into a preventable disaster of their own. I thought of the mess we’d gotten into back home by going long on nuclear power plants in the 2040s, long after it should have been clear to everyone that nuclear power was—what was Fred Vanich’s phrase?—a subsidy dumpster, one more technological white elephant that never paid for itself and only looked profitable because most of the costs were shoved out of sight one way or another. I thought of the war going on a thousand miles south of me just then, and wondered sourly why a species that was so smart at coming up with clever technologies was so dumb about so much else.
The taxi stopped outside the hotel, and I went in, climbed the stairs to my room, and made a phone call. Yes, the call was to Melanie Berger; yes, we spent the evening together; no, I’m not going to go into any of the details. We didn’t talk about progress or technology or the future of the Lakeland Republic, in case you were wondering.
Another taxi brought me back to the Capitol Hotel about seven-thirty the next morning. I tried without noticeable success to coax my electric shaver into giving me a decent shave, then showered and got everything but the day’s clothing packed. I’d considered more than once putting on ordinary bioplastic businesswear for the trip back, knowing that people back home would look at me as though I had two spare heads if I got off the train in Pittsburgh dressed in my Lakeland clothes, but that resolution lasted just about long enough for me to reach into the closet and grab a business suit. The slick clammy texture of the thing made my skin crawl. So I dressed in hempcloth and wool instead, checked my appearance, put on my trench coat and porkpie hat, and headed out the door to my final appointment with the President of the Lakeland Republic.
The weather had turned cold and damp overnight, and stray raindrops spattered down as I walked the familiar six blocks to the Capitol. Another round of scaffolding had gone up on the unfinished dome, and stonemasons were already clambering around up there, laying another course of marble blocks beneath the shelter of brown tarps I guessed probably weren’t made of plastic. Down at street level, people were already picking up the latest papers at Kaufer’s News. I bought the Blade, glanced at the headlines on the front page: the fighting in the Gulf and in northeastern Texas seemed to be grinding toward a stalemate; the other North American republics had appealed to the Brazilians and Chinese to stay out of the fighting and try to talk their respective client states into accepting a ceasefire; one of the big Indian telecom multinationals had gone bankrupt—the first corporate casualty of the satellite crisis, though I knew it wouldn’t be the last by a long shot—and stock markets everywhere but Toledo were doing another sickening downward lurch in response.
I stuffed the paper into one of the big outside pockets of my trench coat, crossed the street, and went up
the long walk to the main entrance of the Capitol. It was five to nine, still too early for kids on field trips or photo ops in the Rotunda, so the only people I saw were members of the legislative staff hurrying this way and that, getting ready for what would probably be another hectic day, and a couple of white-haired politicians, one light-skinned, one dark-skinned, talking intently as they ambled toward the Senate end of the building. Me, I headed straight across the rotunda to the door in back and went in.
It still startled me that you could just walk into the offices of the President of the Lakeland Republic. No doubt the uniformed guards in the Rotunda weren’t the only guards in the place, but they were the only ones I saw. I went down the corridor into the front office, said hi to Gabriel Menendez, waited while he called back, shed my coat and hat in the cloakroom, and then through another corridor and the round room with the spiral staircase to Meeker’s office.
“Mr. Carr,” said the President, as we shook hands. “It’s good to see you again.” He gestured toward the side of the room. “Please have a seat.”
The same people who’d been present for my first meeting with Meeker were waiting: no surprises there, though I hadn’t expected them to be sitting in precisely the same chairs. I shook hands all around. “Mr. President, Mr. Macallan, Ms. Patel, Mr. Vanich—” With the faintest of smiles, just for her: “Ms. Berger.”
We got settled. “Before we get to business,” the President said, “I have a bit of good news to pass on:
to you, or course, but also through you to Ms. Montrose. Our State Department heard backchannel last night via an embassy I won’t name that the Confederate and Texan governments are both potentially willing to talk about a ceasefire. No word yet about when or where, much less what terms either side’s likely to demand, but at least they haven’t rejected negotiations out of hand.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said.
“We certainly have hopes,” Meeker went on. “That’s all we have so far, though.” A gesture dismissed the issue. “I hope you’ve found your stay here—shall we say, instructive.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” I replied. “I don’t mean any criticism at all when I say that in some ways, it’s been two very long weeks.”
Meeker nodded. “Melanie mentioned that you’ve found yourself reconsidering some of your ideas about technology and the like.”
I considered him. “Again, that’s one way of putting it—and that brings me to one last item I’d like to mention before I leave for home.”
“Of course,” said Meeker, smiling. Fred Vanich and Melanie glanced at each other, and I wondered if they’d made another bet.
“I suspect you’re aware,” I said then, “that I had more reasons for coming here than the ones we discussed earlier.”
Meeker turned to look at Stuart Macallan, who said, “Mr. Carr, I hope you won’t mind if I state the obvious. None of us could think of any reason why Ellen Montrose would have sent one of her key advisers here right after the election, when almost any competent staffer could have handled the preliminary work on the the three agreements we worked out. We’ve had plenty of other unofficial envoys come here since the borders opened, of course, and most of them had some agenda other than the one they told us about. We assumed you had one too.”
“With that in mind,” said Meeker, “I’d be most interested in hearing what your other reasons for comong here might be, to the extent that you can talk about them.”
“Fair enough,” I said, meeting his gaze. “You know that Ellen won the election promising across-the-board changes in our national economic policy. She means it, too—we’ve already got the first round of legislation drafted, and everybody’s going to hit the ground running the day after inauguration. I’m sure you know the basic thrust of it.”
“What’s been made public, yes,” said Meeker. “She hasn’t mentioned defaulting on the foreign debt Barfield and his predecessors ran up, but that’s almost certainly going to have to be part of it. Even before this business down south got going, there was no way she could keep her election promises without renegotiating the debt, and that means at least a technical default.”
I gave him a bland look and said, “I can’t comment on that.” He chuckled, and I went on. “The new administration’s going to have its hands full getting the economy a little less dysfunctional, and now there’s what the satellite crisis is doing to stock markets and the telecom industry, not to mention the Confederate-Texas war, to add to the fun and games. Beyond that, though, there’s another set of plans relating to economic regulations, the tax code, and a range of other policies. Those haven’t been made public yet, but when they are, you’re going to find some of them just a little familiar.”
“Indeed?” Meeker said, his eyebrows rising. “Please go on.”
“The short form is that she wants to redirect government support for business away from the high-tech sectors of the economy and into manufacturing and agriculture, and change the tax code and other public policy incentives so that they reward employment rather than automation.”
Jaya Patel waited a moment to make sure Meeker wasn’t about to speak, then said, “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how sensible that sounds from our standpoint.”
“No. When she suggested it to me, though, I told her to her face that she was stark staring nuts.”
That got slightly glazed looks from the others. “I’d be interested in knowing how she took that,” the President said.
“She expects that sort of thing,” I told him. “You’ve heard about her reputation for blunt talk, right? She hires staff who will talk to her the way she talks to them. Half the problem with Barfield’s administration is that he only hires people who tell him what he wants to hear.”
He nodded, gestured for me to go on.
“I told her that there was no way the Atlantic Republic could go back to a twentieth-century economy, that nobody would put up with it, and even if we could and they did, it just meant that we’d be eaten alive by less backward nations that kept up with the latest technology. She pointed out that the more we invested in the latest technology the further behind we got, and I dismissed that as the product of outside factors. We had a fine donnybrook—the kind where everybody else on the floor gathers outside the door to listen—and I finally insisted that it simply wouldn’t work. She just smiled and said that it was already working.”
“So she knew what we’ve done,” said Melanie.
I nodded. “I don’t happen to know where she got her information. I know Barfield sent someone from his inner circle over here right after the borders opened, but her report went into a locked file as soon as she got back and I don’t know if anyone but Barfield ever saw it. Ellen’s got connections in surprising places, though. But she told me that policies like the ones she had in mind were working on this side of the border. I simply wouldn’t believe it, and so we made a deal.
If she won the election, she’d come up with some plausible reason to send me over here for two weeks right afterwards and see for myself. After that, if I could give her a good reason why her proposals wouldn’t work, she’d reconsider them.”
Meeker paused, watching me, and then asked, “And what will you tell her when you get back?”
The words came more easily than I’d expected. “Something that I couldn’t have imagined myself proposing a week ago. I’m going to advise her to go considerably further than she’d planned, and begin moving the Atlantic Republic in the same directions that you’ve gone here.”
When I was a kid, my grandmother used to talk about deep silence by saying it was quiet enough that you could hear a pin drop. That’s what came to mind just then; I’d have had to drop it onto Meeker’s desk—the floor was carpeted—but if I’d done it, nobody in the room could have missed hearing it. Everyone but Melanie was staring at me; she was smiling.
“Well,” Meeker said, recovering before any of the others. “If I may say so, Mr. Carr, that’s quite a compliment.”
“Thank you,” I replied. “I’m not sure whether it’s a compliment to the Lakeland Republic, though, or a criticism of everyone else. It shouldn’t have been so hard to figure out that if you’ve gone down a blind alley, the only way you can go forward starts by backing up.”
Fred Vanich glanced at his boss, and then at me. “It’s a little more complex than that, Mr. Carr,” he said. “Progress, development, going forward. Those are powerful metaphors, and it’s not always easy to think clearly when they’re being waved around by those who have blind faith in them—especially if rich people stand to get much richer by convincing others that here and now, going forward means buying whatever technology they happen to be selling.”
I gestured, conceding the point. “Have you decided how you’ll propose going about the transition?” Jaya Patel asked.
“No,” I admitted. “I’ve only had a couple of days to think about it, and quite a few other things to do in that time. When we get the first couple of rounds of legislation passed, cope with the end of satellite services, and figure out how we’re going to deal with the blowback from the war down south—ask me then and I can probably tell you.”
“If there’s anything our government can do for yours in the process,” Meeker said, “I trust you’ll let us know.” With a sudden amused smile: “For reasons that are not entirely altruistic, of course.”
“I know Janice Mikkelson would love to sell us some streetcars,” I observed.
That got a general laugh. “Yes,” Meeker said then, “but there’s also the point you made when we first talked, about not wanting a war zone or a failed state on your country’s border. If I may be frank, if the Atlantic Republic had kept going the way the Dem-Reps were leading it, it’s an open question whether you could have avoided serious trouble for long. The changes Montrose has announced will help, but it’s going to take quite a bit more to achieve the kind of economic and political stability we’ve managed here. If we can help you make that happen, that’s an investment we’ll consider.” He smiled again. “‘You’ in this case meaning the Atlantic Republic and Ellen Montrose primarily. I don’t claim to know what role you personally will be playing in all this.”
“That’s another issue,” I said. “My position in the new administration was one of the things hinging on my deal with Ellen. Of course there’s the confirmation vote on our side and the usual formalities on yours, but part of our deal was that if I ended up agreeing with Ellen, I was committing to four years as our ambassador to the Lakeland Republic.” I drew in a breath. “So I expect to be back here early in the new year, if everything goes according to plan.”
Meeker considered that and nodded. “That’s welcome news, Mr. Carr.”
287 comments:
9/7/16, 3:02 PM
Robert Mathiesen said...
9/7/16, 3:26 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
9/7/16, 3:43 PM
sgage said...
BTW, I like the arc of the story, right down to Melanie's smile at the end...
But, re: nuclear power, a fellow named Amory Lovins, who started off as a promising sort of eco-economist in the 70's but then became a raving clueless technocornucopian, had just about the most pithy summation of nuclear power I've ever heard:
"Nuclear power is a future technology whose time has past."
And nearly as pithy: "Splitting atoms to make electricity is like using a chainsaw to cut butter."
Looking forward to one last episode...
9/7/16, 3:59 PM
Justin said...
9/7/16, 4:00 PM
Tidlösa said...
9/7/16, 4:28 PM
Armata said...
With the Missouri Republic moving in the same direction, it looks like the Lakeland Republic's influence is about to get a lot bigger. Perhaps we might be seeing the emergence of a new major power, based on the wisdom of getting out ahead and taking proactive action to deal with the realities of the deindustrial future. I look forward to reading the concluding post and the book, which I expect I will be passing around copies of to friends and family as a source of inspiration and ideas. Outstanding job and congratulations!
9/7/16, 4:28 PM
Sven Eriksen said...
9/7/16, 4:37 PM
Glenn said...
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
9/7/16, 4:41 PM
pygmycory said...
it is a little jarring to have Peter Carr address the audience directly all of a sudden, and I found it a little jarring. Knocked me out of the flow of the story. I'm saying this as someone who couldn't care less what they were up to.
9/7/16, 4:49 PM
John Dunn said...
-2 wheels are making a comeback - practical bicycles and very small motorcycles for quick delivery of mail.
-AM radio is back, local programming in the day, and turn up the power at night when AM can make the skip. Families cluster to listen to far away sounds. DXing is back. HAMs make a comeback. SW Broadcast returns as the source of far away news. Pour a bucket of water on the ground wire.
-Aladdin Lamps, the ones that burn with a mantle (circa 1910). These don't burn much fuel and have the light of a 60W bulb. About 3/4 the heat output of a space heater. With power out and in winter I've heated rooms to 60+ degrees with two.
-Supply lines for food are decentralized and much shorter. Current approaches make money efficiently, but waste energy. Locavore by necessity. Small gardens,chickens as a gateway drug for goats. Home canning.
-Hand crank tools, and old style tools are back. See Sloane's: A Museum of Early American Tools.
-Water and wastewater an issue. Water is pretty easy with knowledge base, but WW treatment eats the energy. WW Lagoons become a best technology choice.
-Older clothing styles, designed for work and warmth are rediscovered.
-Foxfire and Whole Earth Catalog are studied again.
-Absolutely nothing resembles Burning Man steampunk.
Thanks JMG. --JD
9/7/16, 4:53 PM
Matt Van de Ven said...
Could you please include a passing remark on a bit more of the social life of the Lakelanders? Your description of restaurants, bars etc is great, but maybe a bit more on what they do for a good time? You may have and I can't remember, but I would love to hear if there is a Fraternal/Club/Society like structure present. It seems it would be a perfect fit (like a good Fedora). I realise it is only a two week timeline, but a passing comment would do it!
Love your work,
Cheers,
MvdV
9/7/16, 4:56 PM
latheChuck said...
9/7/16, 4:57 PM
Leo Knight said...
9/7/16, 4:58 PM
Angus Wallace said...
This isn't really a comment on the story, which is turning out very nicely. Do you think that the society you've outlined is sustainable, or is it just one stable step in your model of stairstep decline? If the latter, how would you envisage its collapse (or slow decline) unfolding?
Cheers, Angus
9/7/16, 5:05 PM
NomadicBeer said...
I am a long time reader, but I rarely commented as Unknown.
This episode explains a lot about the almost religious conversion of the main character.
I can't wait to reread this in book form!
I have some retro suggestions for the story.
First, there is a big difference in perspective between people that lived 100 years ago and the 2050 Lakeland republic. In the past, the life was improving visibly every generation. How do the parents in Lakeland imagine their kids' future? Are there any new religions of the fall (like original Christianity or Buddhism)? I know the book most deals with childless people.
Related, I would like to understand if people become more stoic in facing death?
I would guess that family life is more important too. I would like to see a social event (wedding, barn raising etc). How do extended families stay connected?
On the technical side, I wonder if we see the reversal of today's trend - older people would prefer old gadgets while the young would be very proud in correctly using "new" retro technology like the slide rule.
Thanks
9/7/16, 5:14 PM
SamuraiArtGuy said...
But of course Indians have litttle voice, and less poliitcal power, and would they please die off and make room for the victors. What's another broken treaty? The sad truth of traties is that nations only keep to treaties up to the point as temptation and/or national interest makes it advantageous to break them.
But the Indians are RIGHT, and are well aware that we ravage the earth at ultimately human peril. But thinking of the next generation, much less seven generations, seems beyond the capability of the corporatocracy, hardwired to seek only profit and shareholder value.
9/7/16, 5:21 PM
Unknown said...
There must be rules about fraternization between embassy staff on any level and foreign nationals, since it's something that comes up in any longterm posting. Is there any precedent for an ambassador being in a romantic relationship with a citizen of the country he's an ambassador to? Surely that would raise questions about the objectivity of his reports, discretion during pillow talk and ultimately about allegiance. I can see someone in such a relationship being made a special envoy, but not ambassador.
9/7/16, 5:28 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
I had thought Ellen Montrose had sent Peter Carr to test the waters and see if Lakeland had anything she could use, but she's miles ahead of me. Now - how is she going to get her reforms through Congress and their lobbyist puppetmasters?
9/7/16, 5:28 PM
MayHawk said...
On another topic: Thanks so much for your Review of Edgar Pangborn's "Davy" in "Into the Ruins" Summer issue. I am enjoying it immensely and plan to pick up more of Pangborn's books as I go along.
9/7/16, 5:33 PM
Gordon Cutler said...
9/7/16, 5:52 PM
John Dunn said...
-The far away becomes the exotic. Carr gets many questions about life far away.
-Young people have wanderlust.
-Carr enjoys the crisp and the smell of line dried sheets and shirts. (Use the sheets as a racey touch...)
-Children play with simple toys.
9/7/16, 5:58 PM
jessi thompson said...
9/7/16, 6:03 PM
Mark said...
I bow to the productivity of your work, and the quality of your methods and standards. It's as inspirational as it is humbling.
9/7/16, 6:09 PM
Pinku-Sensei said...
9/7/16, 6:16 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Sgage, I've found that in talking about nuclear power, the argument none of its promoters can successfully dispute is that no nation anywhere has had a nuclear power industry without massive ongoing government subsidies. That shows right there that it's not an economically viable industry. Lovins' quips are good, but arguments based on cold hard cash are better!
Justin, to some extent that's implicit in the story; I've been trying to make the point that "retro" doesn't mean "back to the caves," it means quarrying the past for things that work better than what we've got now. But I'll consider it.
Tidlösa, nah, it's a utopian narrative, not a Tom Clancy potboiler. ;-)
Armata, thank you. Stay tuned...
Sven, thank you. Freeman was my model for President Meeker, for whatever that's worth -- but I'd be very, very wary of any studio that set out to film Retrotopia, and would want some degree of creative control.
Glenn, or the future could see the Atlantic Republic become just as comfortable as the Lakeland Republic, you know.
Pygmycory, so noted, but I've used the same device before. It's one of the perks of a first person narrative.
John, they're on the list. I can promise you that Burning Man steampunk is a forgotten fad of the pre-Second Civil War past by 2065; real retro Victoriana, of course, is quite another matter!
Matt, I'm revising the whole story, so it's quite possible to put things in earlier. I've already put in a bit where Carr notices a Masonic lodge and a Grange in Hicksville, btw.
LatheChuck, thank you.
Leo, it does sound like a front page story in 2065, doesn't it?
Angus, I'll be hinting about that in the last episode. The short form is that the tier system allows unsustainable infrastructure to be let go of, as county after county votes to go to a lower tier for economic reasons, while tier one counties have already worked out the bugs of something that's sustainable over the long term.
Nomadic, I like the idea of teenagers getting into the latest old thing while their elders cling to more "advanced" technologies! Your points are on the list.
9/7/16, 6:24 PM
Joel Caris said...
I'll agree with pygmycory that the direct address of the audience by Carr felt a little out of place and jarring. I can't recall if there been a direct addressing like that in a previous episode. If so, I don't think it stuck out to me then.
Overall, the story is wrapping up nicely. I wonder if you have one more surprise in store for us?
I thought I'd mention, if you don't mind, a new post I put up at the Into the Ruins blog in which I solicit some letters to the editor for the third issue by asking people to write what critical issue that is currently unmentionable they would like to see featured as the central issue of a presidential run in this country. I've received some great responses, but would love a few more!
Also have a new post up at Litterfall about the compounding consequences feeding us for those who are interested.
Looking forward to next week's finale!
9/7/16, 6:30 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Unknown Deborah, ambassadors are legendary for getting into, shall we say, highly informal relationships with foreign nationals. If there are such regulations, one gathers they're honored mostly in the breach.
Patricia, remember that Montrose's party also won big in the legislative elections, so she's got a comfortable majority in the Atlantic legislature. Still, good to remember that it's early days yet...
MayHawk, delighted to hear it! Pangborn is a treat, and his deindustrial fiction is really worth the read.
Gordon, you're welcome and thank you. I had a hunch that presenting a positive vision of the future -- something that wasn't just more of the same forever, and wasn't a rehash of Ecotopian orthodoxy either -- might be very welcome...
John, into the list they go.
Jessi, I do write fast -- one of the things I've learned from blogging is how to shift my keyboard into overdrive and turn out prose at high speed. (Though I'm not up to the legendary standard of Michael Moorcock, who supposedly wrote his "Runestaff" novels over a series of three day weekends, one weekend per book.) Thank you for your good wishes!
Mark, I'm assuming that the current nukes were decommissioned in a hurry as the Second Civil War heated up, and the high level waste shipped somewhere else, since the last thing the federal government would have wanted was "dirty bombs" in the hands of the rebels! The AR's nuclear power program in the 2040s involved two plants, three reactors each; only one plant was finished, and the cost overruns and equipment breakdowns caused it to be shut down permanently in 2059.
9/7/16, 6:40 PM
Justin said...
Descriptions of nice sheets as a racy touch is a great idea. I've often thought that the combination of slow exposures and sepia or black and white photography has made the past look far more sexless and dour than it really was.
I would love to see Carr field questions about life in the Atlantic Republic from some curious Lakelanders. Preferably ending with a smart Lakelander cutting to the core of the problems with the Atlantic model of things, much to Carr's discontent.
Finally, I'll echo Toomas' sentiment that most organizations, however progressive, have good reason to not want their employees to do any sort of horizontal diplomacy with employees of a foreign organization, and however progressive the Lakeland Republic might be, my suspension of disbelief, and perhaps my enjoyment in reading the final story, might be improved upon by reading that Carr's liason with Melanie is illicit.
I also promise to work on my run-on sentences.
9/7/16, 6:49 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
The problem I've had in talking to my father about nuclear power is his conviction that the whole problem is government regulation making it too expensive. He's absolutely convinced that nuclear power would be super cheap if those crazy environmentalists hadn't made everyone so scared that the government made it super expensive to get permission to build one. I've pointed out that nuclear power never took off without subsidies anywhere but to him that just proves his point and he generally starts talking about how safe nuclear plants are if you're not cheap and incompetent like the Soviet Union.
There's no arguing with a mindset like that.
9/7/16, 6:49 PM
Armata said...
Since the Lakeland Republic's isolation seems to be ending, its influence is about to increase big time and it's well-positioned economically and technologically to thrive in the coming era, I could very easily see the Lakeland Republic ascending to great power status and having even more influence (economic, diplomatic, even ideological) on events over the next century or so.
9/7/16, 6:53 PM
Candace said...
So maybe mentioning youth socials? I think they would be events, not something available just any time.
Of course it could include Cosplay. Maybe Steam punk is long forgotten, but maybe a reprinted novel of Robert Louis Stevenson becomes all the rage and every one wants to wear pirate shirts? I hope they don't get hooked on vampires again! Surely even Lakeland Republic can't evade the onslaught of Lowbrow trash, what is their "Twilight" series?
9/7/16, 7:08 PM
Eric Backos said...
We in Northeast Ohio are following Melbourne’s example by holding well-advertised monthly meetings.
The monthly joint meeting of the Green Wizards’ Benevolent and Protective Association, Tower Number 440, and Ruinmen’s Guild, Local 440 will be held at 11:30 AM on Saturday, September 24, 2016. Our location is Ruko’s Family Restaurant, 9385 Mentor Avenue, Mentor, Ohio 44060, (440) 974-1914. Shining the Green Light! Public Welcome! Tables for Failed Scholars. Look for the table topper with the Green Wizard Hat.
Many thanks to John for the posting space on his blog.
9/7/16, 7:16 PM
William said...
Does the Lakeland Republic use electricity? Is so, how do they generate it? Store it? My impression of the region is that there is not a great opportunity for hydro. Could be wind.
Thanks for a great possible vision of a future. (Climate seems likely to be much worse by 2065, though)
9/7/16, 7:33 PM
Keith Huddleston said...
If this is a realignment election, what were the polls/political scientists in the narrative missing? Because wasn't this also an upset?
9/7/16, 7:34 PM
LewisLucanBooks said...
I was trying to think of things that might not have been touched on in your story so far. It's been such a long trip :-). Did Carr ever visit a grocery store or farmer's market? What were they like? Quality? Selection? Product labeling? I vaguely remember a trip to a drugstore or chemist ... maybe. Now I don't think he visited any thrift stores. Or, opportunity stores, as my Australian friend calls them. What IS the second hand / flea market / salvage scene like in the Lakeland Republic? Lew
9/7/16, 7:37 PM
Dennis D said...
9/7/16, 7:38 PM
Jeff Balvanz said...
Re: AM radio. Right now the practice in the US is for small-town AM stations (and they still exist) to reduce power during the night to avoid interfering with other stations on the same frequency due to skip. Many even leave the air at sundown. There might not be as many stations in the LR, though, so that might not be a problem. But do you suppose there are people who run higher power stations near the borders to broadcast to nearby countries? Does someone in Lakeland run Radio Free America? Are there circuits for crystal sets somewhere out on the metanet? Do teenage boys hide in their basements and listen to Lakeland jazz and radio dramas?
Also re Aladdin lamps. Those are wonderful, but will there be an adequate source of yttrium to make the mantles? They stopped using thorium because of the radioactivity concerns, mostly in manufacturing (although some manufacturers of gas and kerosene lamps on the Aladdin model just shipped production to a developing country where they didn't have to worry about contamination). The original mantles were made with magnesium, which isn't a rare earth, but they weren't as efficient.
@JMG: this has been a thought-provoking excursion. Thank you!
9/7/16, 7:49 PM
Eric Backos said...
The traveler, who may reveal himself at his pleasure, offered insight into top-down approaches. It seems that Tower 440’s origin as a supper club for suburban gardeners is a long-term advantage.
And if the Wizardren don’t mind revisiting a previous conversation, our meeting took place at a local establishment that followed the brick building, glass shopfront, salvaged wood, and industrial lighting motif. The problem was that it was a new-built and completely phony. Being a native Clevelander, I’d encountered the real thing – recommendations available – and found the simulacrum disappointing.
The bit of humor I wrote about filling trucks with workmen for environmental remediation projects from hipster bars is no longer funny. We’ve all run into a person who is both well-heeled and miserable. A whole room full was shocking. There are seven stores in the chain we visited. That style of bar is popular worldwide. Wow.
9/7/16, 7:54 PM
Jack O' Lantern said...
9/7/16, 7:56 PM
Shane W said...
9/7/16, 8:08 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Justin, so noted.
James, exactly. There's a fundamentalism of progress, exactly parallel to other kinds of fundamentalism, and like them, it's wedged itself into a self-reinforcing belief system that prevents disproof. All you can do is walk away.
Armata, a future fiction project I had in mind would trace out the geopolitics of North America in the late deindustrial dark ages, and yes, the Ohio valley would be the linchpin region. Unlike other pivot areas -- the Ukraine and northern Mesopotamia come to mind -- it's geographically defensible, and so I suspect its role will be more like that of northern France (the pivot area of western Europe) -- not a zone to be fought over but the heartland of a dominant polity. But we'll see!
Candace, dances and carnivals, certainly; in rural areas, Grange halls hosted a lot of dances back in the day. Cosplay? That seems to be a very modern habit, as it presupposes lots of disposable income plus opportunities to get together with other cosplayers to show off your new kit. I'll have to think about that.
William, it should be available for sale by the holiday shopping season. As for electricity, that's already been covered.
Keith, it was an upset as well as a realignment election, and what the pundits didn't see is the same thing a lot of pundits have been missing of late: the 80% of the population that isn't affluent and doesn't dominate the media discourse also has a say in things, and used it. You're right that I should make that point a little more forcefully.
Lewis, hmm! Kudos to Shriver for getting that edgy. As for the shops in question, they're on the to-consider list.
Dennis, composting toilets would be used outside of the cities -- in town, fecal waste goes straight to the power plants via basement tanks pumped out by municipal workers. The residue is sold to farmers as fertilizer, as noted in an earlier post.
Jeff, you're welcome!
9/7/16, 8:19 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Jack, thank you!
Shane, okay, that's a good one. Of course he'd have no idea how to use a rotary dial, and would have to read instructions or get help the first time he tried it!
9/7/16, 8:23 PM
gwizard43 said...
I've just started reading Fleming's 'Surviving the Future,' and already I can see some parallels between the Lean Economy and Lean Culture he describes, and your description of the Lakeland Republic.
Fleming does have a thing for the concept of Carnival (even makes it into the subtitle) - perhaps you'd consider some mention of a carnival as revived in the LR?? Could even work nicely as a central theme for a chapter...so many things can happen at a shared ritual like carnival, after all, where our 'second natures' (in Fleming's terminology) are allowed to come out and play!
BTW, I would absolutely LOVE to see you review 'Surviving...', or at least give your view of the views outlined in it - which certainly seem to align well with the philosophy and practices you've espoused and explicated here in the ADR over the years.
9/7/16, 9:03 PM
Ondra said...
regarding some suggestions what to include in your story, I have been thinking about one thing. I would like to know what states are included in Lakeland Rep. (I guess Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois, Wisconsin), and of you could somehow talk also about their internal variability. I mean, it is still a huge territory, and given the decentralized character of its politics, there must be lot of differences between regions.
I am already setting funds aside for purchase of the book.
Regards
Ondra
9/7/16, 9:14 PM
Claire said...
I'm loving the narrative. What I really want is more of it.
I'd like to have a glimpse at the domestic economy. With a mostly agrarian population I'll bet that there is a larger number of goods produced for direct consumption. I'm sure that will expand into cottage industries and craft work done in the home during bad weather. What portion of the available market goods might this provide to urbanites? Are there temporary markets and market days in tier 1 (or other counties) rather than (or in addition to) permanent shops?
I'm also curious about the salvage economy. I know you've said this is RETROtopia but it seems to me you've already included elements of 'future' in the power generating systems and elsewhere. It would be great to see a bit more of that blend of new efficient systems and design, and salvage and re-purposing along side the retro technology. But maybe that's for another story.
Can't wait to have the finished book in my hands.
All the best,
9/7/16, 9:29 PM
patriciaormsby said...
I'm looking forward to the book, with so much input from your readers! One of my purposes in writing collapse fiction was to get my thoughts together, working through the implications of what I had learned, and then hear what others thought about it. I quickly discovered that nearly everyone around me thinks Star Wars is the future and refuses to take anything else seriously. Through your blog you have cultivated a nice community who doesn't just dismiss a healthy step back from the technological pinnacle as pessimism.
I was thinking "Christmas presents" as I read through the first ten or so comments. I'll have to look for signs of intelligent life among the intended recipients, however. Also, I want to order a copy or two in a way that profits you.
Oh, and I still haven't subscribed to the newsletter, because I have not heard back how much I should add for shipping. Or how is the excess used, because I certainly don't mind donating.
9/7/16, 9:34 PM
Keith Huddleston said...
Your work, as well as Jacob Lund Fisker's, has changed my life. The short version is less debate coaching and more vegetable gardening, less driving and much, much more walking.
And next I will try to build more community, trying to make a little bit of a Retrotopia by organizing my street, o starting time bank, or even joining a faith community.
You were a beacon of light in a time of darkness. Thank you.
9/7/16, 9:42 PM
patriciaormsby said...
9/7/16, 10:10 PM
Dennis Mitchell said...
9/7/16, 10:17 PM
Candace said...
9/7/16, 10:30 PM
Glenn said...
"I was thinking specifically of something you pointed out, that the Ohio River valley and adjoining Great Lakes region is the strategic center of gravity in North America. Whoever controls that area is in a position to dominate the rest of the continent."
Those of us living West of the Front Range beg to disagree. To be precise, in a broken up United States, the west will not be part of what you are calling the United States. Whether or not we are dominated by some Asian power, or go our own way, North America will not have any continent spanning countries in the Lakeland scenario.
I am a tad more sanguine about the future than our host. I anticipate a functioning, stable, California Republic; Cascadia and an Alaska with a greatly reduced population, though the Aleutians might repopulate, largely with natives. The intermountain west will be sparsely populated except for Deseret (I think the Mormons are cohesive enough to make something work). But this continent will definitely have distinct and separate eastern and western regions with little interaction. There's going to be a lot more "empty" in the big empty between them.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
9/7/16, 10:34 PM
Urban Harvester said...
9/7/16, 10:43 PM
Peter Attwood said...
9/7/16, 11:48 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Ondra, yes, those are the states. I'm not sure how much I can do with differences in the different parts of the country, because all of it takes place in what's now northwest Ohio, but I'll consider it.
Claire, added to the list. The domestic economy won't be easy, but I might be able to squeeze in a reference here and there.
Patricia, there seems to be a problem with the email connected to the print edition site; I'm working on getting that fixed.
Keith, you're welcome and thank you.
Patricia, the nearest thing to a single post that sums up green wizardry is the one that started the series of posts, Merlin's Time. If you'd like to translate it into Japanese, btw, by all means!
Dennis, I won't be writing that, precisely because I want each reader to imagine that for himself or herself. As for the presidential race, understood; there are some crucial issues of politics still up for discussion, but I'll try to rein in the election chatter.
Candace, that's an excellent point -- I hadn't even been thinking of masquerade balls. Hmm.
Glenn, no question, the Pacific rim is its own geopolitical zone, and especially in a changed climate -- when the dryland west goes to Saharan levels of aridity -- it's going to have about as much in common with the rest of the continent as the north African coast has with sub-Saharan Africa. A lot depends on the level of maritime travel that remains viable; the strategic center of the Pacific basin, if tall ships stay in use, could as well be either Japan or Australia.
Harvester, Callenbach was basically reinventing the utopian genre -- and his success can be measured in the deathgrip the Ecotopian vision still has over so much of the green left -- but yes, he did make some mistakes, and that was one of them. I tried to learn from those.
Peter, there aren't any refugee flows yet, and if the ceasefire happens, there won't be. As for immigrants from elsewhere, we saw one family at the beginning of the story, you know, and there have been many more. Since the Lakeland Republic has effective control of its own borders, the number of immigrants is kept to a level the economy can sustain. (Europe and the US could do exactly the same thing if they wanted to, but letting in mass migration is so convenient a way to force down wages and break the power of the unions, so the governments in question wink and pretend to care...)
9/8/16, 12:44 AM
Mean Mr Mustard said...
"Why didn’t it occur to them that voting themselves one billion-dollar bonus after another, while driving their own employees and the rest of the country into poverty, was going to blow up in their faces sooner or later? "
A billionaire majority owner of a 'Victorian Warehouse' is currently in spot of reputational bother. Draconian discipline and working conditions imposed on a large workforce on zero hour minimum wage was then topped with lengthy security checks - once clocked off - the company's contempt and distrust of its workforce effectively pushing them under poverty wages.
Yesterday, we saw the owner submit himself to the security regime on an 'PR open day' - only to reveal to the surrounding press that he was carrying a huge bundle of £50 notes. Talk about hoist by his own petard.
The answer to Mr Carr's question appears to be hubris. Their money just makes them disdainful, thinking they're much smarter than the rest of us - but obviously that just ain't so.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/sep/07/sports-directs-open-day-at-notorious-warehouse-is-not-quite-glasnost
cheers
Mustard
9/8/16, 12:46 AM
Karim said...
Interesting end to the narrative. May be the end is not the end, a sequel to describe how the atlantic republic goes the way of the lakeland republic in a not too distant future?
Hi Jensen II, along the same line of thinking as your father, I have a friend who was indignant that we still did not have nuclear powered batteries for home use that would last years!
Needless to say we don't spend lots of time exchanging views about the future of human civilisation!!!!
9/8/16, 12:51 AM
MigrantWorker said...
I would like to suggest including some information about the Lakeland Republic's poor into the book. We did not hear anything about them in this series of posts - of course that's understandable given that much of the action takes place in the prestigious parts of a capital city and/or among the rich and powerful, and a blog post can only be so long - but the poor, as they say, will always be with us.
Regards,
MigrantWorker
9/8/16, 12:56 AM
Somewhatstunned said...
When the film comes out, should it be called: Forward to the past?
9/8/16, 1:06 AM
Clarence said...
clarence
9/8/16, 1:41 AM
Jo said...
Clearly Peter Carr has not so much been given the job of Ambassador from the Republic, as Ambassador TO the Republic, sending back dispatches from the front of a new society and new way of thinking.
And I can't help but feel that we as readers can take up that same role - we have been on a journey through Retrotopia, and now it is our responsibility to take on a similar role as Carr in our own dysfunctional Republics. We have seen what is possible, now we have a tangible goal to work towards... Retrotopia in our own backyards.
Thanks JMG.
9/8/16, 1:53 AM
Jo said...
I sent an email to Stone Circle Press about international shipping a while ago, and had an answer that they had fixed it. If you check on the site, they now have international shipping charges, although to be honest, it is still not entirely clear which one to choose. I will go with the most expensive one and that should cover it!
9/8/16, 1:57 AM
ville-nouvelle.net said...
At the end of the process, current subcultures could become something between monastic orders (in rural areas) and medieval guilds (in urban areas), with each subculture specialized in a specific field:
- Nudists => Agriculture and food processing
- Burning Man => woodwork and furniture
- Cosplayers => clothing
9/8/16, 3:29 AM
Morgenfrue said...
9/8/16, 3:32 AM
latefall said...
Hunting, tracking, trapping, nutrition, and ecology school project for adolescents:
Including the production of a slingshot from absolute scratch (grow Russian Dandelion for rubber, labor intensive but low tech - just what you need at that age) http://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/specialty-crops/russian-dandelion/
Perhaps also burial customs could be addressed. I think there is potential to say a lot with very few words.
Library buses (or rather detachable streetcar sections) as used in some parts of France or Scandinavia. Also small book exchanges have become a lot more common in many places, perhaps that could be somehow combined.
Cash-less economy (e.g. three way barter, or simply writing up on tab), general tolerance (if not desire) to leave some accounts unbalanced so as to keep a relationship.
Repair shops - I would imagine the flea market and thrift scene is perhaps somewhat disappointing for a large number of goods. If they don't terminally break, or go out of style there are not that many good I would expect to be available commonly.
Cheap(ish) publicly accessible bio/chem labs. I was thinking in the direction of trying to keep up e.g. food safety, but not do total overkill in food production regulation. So you'd work similar to 100 years ago, but you routinely take samples and quickly (pneumatic post? pidgeon?) turn them in to a lab that tracks them and evaluates them. Since paths are short you could rapidly (radio) intervene if something raises a flag. The product batch in question may not have to be removed from the market even then. Educated consumers may be able to decide if it is an issue by themselves. A food producer could learn what went wrong and could improve the process, with no/little legislation necessary. Perhaps the general theme would be consumer "protection" (really: emancipation).
Re Montrose's jibe:
One more reason for sending someone like Carr may have been the need for an ally in the skeptical camp, who knows their language, sensibilities, etc. Thus not only will the gambit assure a decent due diligence, it changes the ratio regarding for/against - and more importantly, is very likely to guarantee Montrose the initiative for a while. The opposing camp will first have to figure out if there aren't more de facto (or potential) converts in its ranks. Running internal policing at a time of crisis is usually very tough on the ability to hold together a power structure in the long term.
9/8/16, 3:52 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
And my underthings go on a rack, usually indoors. Probably a hangover from having been reared in an age when this was the norm.
9/8/16, 5:23 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
I may have missed this being discussed, but is it just a coincidence that the recently-ousted party in the Atlantic Republic had essentially the same name as the party of Jefferson and the other slaveholders in the early days of the USA?
Tidlosa -- that would be interventionism, which seems very much to be not the Lakeland way.
Sven -- excellent casting choices!
9/8/16, 5:24 AM
Scotlyn said...
I just want to say that, as I recall from my long-ago days studying anthropology, there have been very few places and times indeed when attention to personal adornment, particularly on the part of the young and nubile (of both sexes), was absent.
Dressing up should not require a large disposable income, if the skills to produce interesting finery are present, but to spend inordinate amounts of both time and (if used) money on adornment, festivals, rituals, entertainments and celebrations is human. Those are what we live (and strive and earn) FOR.*
*and this is true EVEN when we lack security in the matter of basic survival needs.
9/8/16, 5:29 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
For example, "What? A movie actor, in national politics? Flash in the pan."
"I don't think the country's ready for a Catholic president."
Or else, the president campaigned on X, and saw that Y had to be done, and did it.
"That Man In the White House is a Traitor To His Class! And his wife is even worse! (And she's as ugly as sin, too.) And what's that rumor about That Man being a cripple?"
"Backwoods lawyer with a vulgar sense of humor and no style at all ... hasn't got a chance. Especially with three experienced, intelligent Compromisers of great stature on the political scene. One of them will be nominated and the hillbilly can go back to his log cabin and puff on his corncob pipe."
Okay - I wasn't there for the last two. Caught the tail end of the administration of the penultimate one, though.
9/8/16, 5:31 AM
Lili said...
Thanks for this series. I've enjoyed it and look forward to reading the finale.
9/8/16, 6:21 AM
Ludovic Viger said...
@W.B. Jorgenson count me in.. feel free to email me lvigero at gmail
9/8/16, 6:30 AM
Eric S. said...
Re: Retrotopia the movie: Freeman I suppose is fair for Meeker, I was picturing Meeker as my Lodge's previous Master and that's who I would choose to play him in a movie ;-). That discussion does kind of make me think about the role of cinema in Retrotopia in general, I can definitely understand the decision to trade in network television for Radio, both from an expense standpoint, from a tier standpoint, and from an ideological standpoint but as someone who really does have a fondness for cinema as a medium (but doesn't care for television), I do hope that there's a place in the Lakeland Republic for old fashioned reel, film, and projector theaters. It is after all, something that existed in some form in every tier offered and in its modern form in 3 out of the five, it's hard to imagine an entire country rejecting motion pictures as a technology out of hand. Not a recommendation, just a musing and a hope that imagining retrotopia as having a place for a few small scale film-makers isn't too out of line with the values or intent of the story.
9/8/16, 6:32 AM
David, by the lake said...
I am, of course, happy-sad to be (almost) at the end of the narrative, but very much looking forward to the novel version. Count on two purchases from me -- one for my shelves and another to be donated to the local library. This story needs to be pushed out to the broader public so that they can begin to see alternatives to what they've been taught. A civilization rests on the foundation of its stories, something you've pointed out in any number of ways, and we need to be telling new ones for a new time.
9/8/16, 6:49 AM
Doug said...
I work with small farmers in a valley outside of Seattle. Half of our funds come from the 'wealthy', who wish to see small organic farms thrive in the face of development. The other half of our funds come from the 'state', which are merely redirected tax receipts. Neither the wealthy nor the taxed should be considered as a sustainable subsidy for local agriculture, yet that is where we find ourselves today. What is progress in this model? So far, we know we need to connect 'wealthy' landowners who do not wish to farm, with young farmers (the New Peasantry) who are okay working the dirt for not much money. They aren't making a living, they're living a life. But they can't do it yet without outside money.
9/8/16, 6:50 AM
Helix said...
9/8/16, 7:05 AM
Duke Williams said...
I thought this link to a mainstream business site about an HBSC report would be interesting to you as a public event.
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-oil-supply-and-demand-2016-9
The report details the very near - 2017 - oil issues you have been talking about for years.
A surprising acknowledgement of the inevitable.
9/8/16, 7:15 AM
Helix said...
In that regard, I remember a conversation once in the early 1970s. This was the heyday of the sexual revolution, and the topic was, of course, sex. In particular, the abandonment of the concept of "premarital" when discussing it. There was an elderly lady in our group. She taught piano and we all loved her. Someone commented to her, "I guess this is all kind of an affront to your generation, isn't it?"
Her reply: "Don't you believe it. Not even for a second!"
I loved that old lady. Down to Earth at a time when that wasn't all that common.
9/8/16, 7:36 AM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Dear JMG,
Thanks! This is a satisfying ending, with a southern cease-fire in the offing, and with the Atlantic Republic itself about to overhaul domestic policy.
I hope, however, that you will not be miffed if I remark on two points that might also attract the attention of your eventual substantive-stylistic editor at the publishing house (assuming the house is sufficiently funded to assign you such an editor, as part of its "book development" process).
(1) Carr's account of Atlantic Republic intel is questionable: I know Barfield sent someone from his inner circle over here right after the borders opened, but her report went into a locked file as soon as she got back and I don’t know if anyone but Barfield ever saw it. Inept though Atlantic might be, they will have been getting, either through ordinary channels or through covert channels, the principal Lakeland newspapers and magazines. Such reading, plus superficial debriefings of even untrained travellers, will have given Barfield's team an overview of Atlantic nuts-and-bolts - the county tier arrangements; the available ranges of consumer goods; the state of the telephone network; the organization of industry, including labour relations; and so on.
Even in the Cold War, the picture of USSR day-to-day life available to casual American readers (let alone to White House teams) was not too skimpy. And Lakeland, unlike the USSR, is an open society.
(2) I have to concur with Deborah ("9/7/16, 5:28 PM") and Justin ("9/7/16, 6:49 PM") in querying the reasonableness of a romantic liaison between a Lakeland national and an ambassador, i.e., a Head of Mission. You reply to Deborah ("9/7/16, 6:40 PM"; I paraphrase) that diplomatic annals abound in romantic liaisons. Oddly, however, I cannot think of any, at the level of Head of Mission. It could be that I am not adequately read. But in what I have read, I do not seem to see Heads of Mission apprehended in ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay. We get other awful stuff: some writer linked to UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office says, notably, that yes, the Diplomatic Pouch really has been used (perhaps in some African case) for moving a live human being from State A to State B. But Head-of-Mission in a liaison? Here what mainly comes to mind is the 1960s spook-novel Smith and Jones, in which security specialist "Drillpig" recalls inspecting the personnel file of diplomat Smith or diplomat Jones, and finding in it that damning sheet regarding future career path, with that damning annotation "Not above Second Secretary."
Also, it is a little depressing, though admittedly true to some actual recent American practice, to find the Atlantic President so casually rendering a mere political adviser, as opposed to a career diplomat, Head of Mission.
It's your book. But were I in your shoes, I would consider in the revision process retaining the romantic link, and retaining the idea of Carr going to Lakeland on a multi-year posting or secondment, and yet dropping the idea of Head of Mission. Car need not suffer the indignity of sitting in some Embassy slot "not above Second Secretary". There must be some more creative way of getting him into the Atlantic Republic, for the longer term, perhaps even under dual citizenship. Maybe other commenters here on ADR will have ideas?
Hastily, respectfully,
Tom
http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com
9/8/16, 7:36 AM
Donald Hargraves said...
One question does pop up to my mind – if Mr. Carr was a die-hard believer in progress and got into a deep argument with Mrs. Montrose on the idea of going backwards, why was he with her team and not with the Dem-Reps who had run the nation over the past forty years? What would cause him to shift – if he had indeed shifted?
9/8/16, 7:37 AM
RPC said...
First, the citizens of the Atlantic Republic elected Montrose and her party by a landslide. How was that possible with the super-advanced voting technology controlled by the Dem-Reps and Microsoft Diebold Corporation?
Second, I'm sure you're familiar with the enthusiasm of recent converts. It would be interesting to see Ms. Montrose trying to rein in Mr. Carr when she's used to having to drag him along like an unwilling burro!
9/8/16, 7:47 AM
Albatross said...
9/8/16, 7:50 AM
Howard Skillington said...
9/8/16, 8:15 AM
Spanish fly said...
9/8/16, 8:41 AM
Spanish fly said...
9/8/16, 8:44 AM
James M. Jensen II said...
The new iPhone doesn't have a headphone jack. You need either a cumbersome adapter to get audio through the charging port or a wireless set of headphones.
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/07/apple-explains-headphone-jack-removal/
"The audio connector is more than 100 years old," Joswiak says. "It had its last big innovation about 50 years ago. You know what that was? They made it smaller. It hasn't been touched since then. It's a dinosaur. It's time to move on."
That quote strikes me as the essence of Carr's original position. Let's get rid of technology that works simply because it's old and replace it with technology that has issues (connectivity, battery life) that those "dinosaurs" inherently don't have.
No thanks. If I upgrade my phone at all, it won't be to one of these... y'know, we really need a word that's the opposite of "dinosaur." A word for something new for newness sake and the worse for it. "Mutant," in the bad sci-fi sense, fits the bill but has too many other connotations from the same bad sci-fi.
9/8/16, 8:47 AM
HalFiore said...
9/8/16, 8:50 AM
David, by the lake said...
9/8/16, 8:56 AM
dltrammel said...
As for the objections to the talk to the audience concerning Carr and Melanie's evening, I too found it slightly out of the flow but understood the way you used it (as a fellow writer). If you have room for a middle long addition, I think I have a idea that could address several people's suggestions.
Have Carr phone Melanie, and offer to get together but have Melanie say she needs to stop by someplace first. Have her be a bit vague and mysterious as to where. Then have her pick him up and take him to a visiting carnival. Say her brother is working as a roustabout at the carnival. Melanie is dropping off letters from their mother.
One thing I haven't seen is whether common people can just walk up to their politicians and speak their mind. I imagine in the Atlantic Republic where Carr is, that body guards would swiftly intervene. You might have a few people recognize Melanie and come up and ask her questions. She could put them off with "I don't know much more than the newspapers have right now" and "wink, wink, I'm out with a NEW friend please".
You could show some of the social life of teenagers interacting. Have a band and a dance floor, watched by chaperons of course, where they can meet and pair up. Kind of like a school dance. Carr invites Melanie to a dance. And then when the song is done she can suggest they leave.
That might provide a sort of interlude before the seriousness of the final chapters. That even though there is a war in the South, that in Lakeland, life goes on.
9/8/16, 8:59 AM
llamawalker said...
Regarding Nuclear Power: I had two separate conversations recently on the topic and was presented with two near identical responses that left me, I guess, astonished. When talking about the future of energy (and the nuclear industry specifically)with two twenty-something, college educated individuals, they both gave a shocking perspective on the legacy of nuclear power/waste. It boiled down to "who cares". One said they'd rather decimate a relatively small geographical area as opposed to allowing fossil fuel emissions to destroy the entire planet, and the other responded by hoisting up post Chernobyl Ukraine as a wildlife refuge otherwise impossible without the 1986 disaster. I was expecting the regulation argument, the fuel reprocessing argument, anything but the apparent apathy I encountered. Still mulling it over! Wow.
-llamawalker
9/8/16, 9:01 AM
Unknown said...
David.
9/8/16, 9:08 AM
David James Peterson said...
The gist of the video is that if Trump “makes America great again”, bringing back the care free days where “Men were men” and “Girls were girls”, and just generally having ‘freedom’, then we’ll have to:
Lose Rights for gays
Make raping a date okay
Remove warning labels on Cigarettes
Make smoking in restaurants is okay
Make work place sexual harassment okay
Put the wife back in the kitchen
Make domestic abuse of women okay
Make racial discrimination okay
Bring back Jim Crow laws
Bring back school racial segregation
Bring back child labor
Bring back Polio
Give Native American's Small Pox blankets
Bring back Lynching
https://youtu.be/n2b3mkipd3U
9/8/16, 9:25 AM
Myriad said...
1. Glass, the importance of. I've visited the sites of 18th and 19th century glassworks; even back then they had rather large energy footprints. Affordable window panes would have to come from a glass industry comparable in scale to Mikkelson's streetcar company (which would also be a customer, of course). Achieving this would have been a major milestone during rebuilding, when long-boarded-up windows and store fronts would have begun literally coming back to light.
Example: glass beverage bottles that get collected not for recycling but for re-use. If from a large brewer, the brewer's logo might be embossed in the glass, instead of a paper label. (Easy to note in passing in any bar or restaurant scene.)
Shutters on the windows of the elegant houses, that (Carr notes) are actually functional, because (perhaps Carr can deduce) storms happen and replacing large glass panes is a significant expense (or at least, back-order wait) even for the wealthy.
Glaziery as another of the revitalized craft trades.
2. Ruins and salvage. I figure you don't want "ruinmen again" in this novel, but it stands to reason that if there were once a lot of higher-rise buildings and big-box stores and giant "elder care" complexes and the like around the cities, and there aren't now, there's more scrap steel around than could easily be used, or even easily be removed to somewhere else. Not to mention vehicles, construction machinery, war materiel from the CWII; and a lot of concrete still in situ and so forth. Wartime damage and requisition (or post-war pre-embargo business deals) might have reduced the mass, but can't be expected to have cleared out (even if it burned down), for instance, every ugly ex-chain hotel at every freeway exit.
Along railways (and also canals) would be a logical place for heavy salvage yards; perhaps a glimpse in passing? Unlike in typical apocalypse tale window dressing, such a yard would likely be busy with human activity.
3. Phone systems have been discussed extensively in an earlier Retrotopia comment thread. The problem with dial phones is that the dials (as they originally worked) were peripheral devices for "exchanges" which were originally building-sized electromechanical machines. It's unlikely that Lakeland would re-create those monsters, just for highest-tier and inevitably temporary usage, when in the near term a refrigerator-sized digital unit could do the same task (as anathema as importing and using one would be to LLR economic philosophy), and in the longer term, live operators using patch panels would replace the dials and exchanges (so why not rebuild it that way from the start?). Either way, telephony would be expensive, and used for business and important communications instead of social recreation.
4. To include in popular forms of recreation, consider board games, which seem to have periodic bursts of popularity and creative design every few decades, despite (or perhaps because of) technological progress.
As a more speculative prediction for group social events, instead of (or in addition to) masquerades and the like, low-tech LARP (live action role playing) might have a place. Even though it's only retro to the early 1980s, theater-style LARP is (I believe) in the category of things that could have been done decades earlier if someone had invented it and worked to popularize it. This list of games planned for an upcoming LARP convention might give you some idea of the range of subject matter and play styles that are possible.
9/8/16, 9:26 AM
daelach said...
Maybe Mr. Carr will receive a nice hand-crafted Lakeland chess set as a gift when he starts his new position? I bet they do make these in Lakeland, and they will be more pleasing than the holographic projections they have in the Atlantic Republic.
9/8/16, 9:55 AM
peacegarden said...
Well done! I can’t wait to have the book in my hands and in several holiday gift bags (recycled, of course!) as holiday gifts to a select group. I’m thinking of the local library systems, as well as individuals.
Wizard’s hats off to you, sir!
Peace
Gail
9/8/16, 10:23 AM
pygmycory said...
9/8/16, 10:34 AM
donalfagan said...
9/8/16, 10:47 AM
pygmycory said...
I know this is a bit off topic, but I am wondering how close the feeling one gets from the elves, and Gondor, in Lord of the Rings is to a real declining civilization. And if the popularity of Tolkien's work has anything to do with the fact we're living in a real declining civilization.
9/8/16, 10:51 AM
Roy Smith said...
The economic non-viability of nuclear electricity generation is usually heavily overstated, particularly as it seems to ignore the level of subsidies that its main competitor, coal-fired electricity generation, receives. Most analyses that dismiss nuclear power based on economic grounds seem to be more examples of motivated reasoning than clear-headed analysis. I could go on at length and in detail on this particular subject, but I will spare your readership, as it is only tangential to my real point, which follows.
The risk of catastrophe does exist, as we all know. With proper management and a proper institutional culture, this risk can be adequately mitigated, and for an economically reasonable cost. The U.S. Navy has managed to do this for over 60 years. However, the "proper institutional culture" I mentioned is extremely demanding (when it comes to nuclear power) and is potentially a very fragile thing; no other organization that I am aware of has managed to establish this kind of culture for any significant length of time, and I have my doubts as to whether even the Navy (which has a significant advantage in that as a military organization, it can impose cultural norms on its people in a way most other organizations simply can't) will be able to keep this up for an indefinite amount of time into the future. In particular, for-profit corporations as we have them in the modern industrial world and the institutional culture I see as necessary to support nuclear power can't really co-exist.
The bottom line is that while I don't see economics as a major obstacle, and individual humans can certainly be trained and individual systems can be designed in ways that make the odds of catastrophic failure virtually non-existent, it seems unlikely to me that any human society has the capacity to organize a whole industry with the level of engineering competence and consistency of performance to safely use nuclear power as a significant method of electrical generation for the long haul.
9/8/16, 11:13 AM
PatriciaT said...
From the blog of a present day ruinman in Chicago, a bittersweet tale (mostly bitter, I'm afraid):
http://www.urbanremainschicago.com/news-and-events/2016/09/07/demolition-on-a-group-of-neighboring-19th-century-houses-on-evergreen-street-has-finally-begun/
"...he boasted about smashing a 19th century residence for his giant soulless edifice..."
The author of the blog (which is part of a larger website) sells and writes about items that he salvages from buildings before they are demolished in the name of progress. While the Urban Remains website sells stuff, there is a good bit of explanation and history about various (late 19th - early/mid 20th century) artifacts and how they were used.
@JMG - Again, thank you for this series - great read. I am looking forward to buying the book.
9/8/16, 11:56 AM
Joel Caris said...
I'm aiming to write some upcoming blog posts based on a comment I made here a couple weeks ago about reorienting our trade policy toward a more protectionist mode in an effort to help create new wage-earning and physical labor based jobs, as well as dampen down the rampant tertiary economy.
I like Carr's quote in this week's installment:
"The short form is that she wants to redirect government support for business away from the high-tech sectors of the economy and into manufacturing and agriculture, and change the tax code and other public policy incentives so that they reward employment rather than automation."
I'm really interested--for those posts and otherwise--if you have any good sources you could recommend that would get into what kind of economic and trade policies and government support might help to do the above. I think I'm going to pull your own The Wealth of Nature off the shelf for a review, but any other good sources you might recommend off the top of your head? I have to admit to too much ignorance on this subject. That seems like one of the results of political and economic policy debates that don't actually debate the pros and cons, winners and losers of specific policy.
Thanks for any help you might have! Also happy to hear from other commenters with good suggestions.
9/8/16, 12:02 PM
weedananda said...
9/8/16, 12:41 PM
Myriad said...
5. A rational tort system that doesn't stifle practical solutions by overpricing risk. I assume that in Lakeland, if a homicidal lunatic puts poison in medicine bottles, the consequences are on the lunatic rather than the medicine manufacturer for failing to make the bottles lunatic-proof.
That's needed to make many of the other retro systems possible, so it almost goes without saying, but perhaps things are still like the present day (or even worse) back in the Atlantic Republic. If so, Carr might be shocked at (for instance) the tort risk the organizers of the drone shoot seem to be taking, should a stray shot hit someone a mile away off-site. Or at the streetcar operators, for allowing passengers to jump on and off quickly without waiting for a complete stop and raising multiple redundant safety gates first. Or even just the cabbies' horses; they could kick someone, after all, or an animal rights activist group could file a class-action suit on their behalf…
Or did the crises of the second civil war already put an end to that, even back east?
9/8/16, 1:10 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
9/8/16, 1:26 PM
Bob said...
Thanks for the engrossing yarn.
9/8/16, 1:31 PM
RPC said...
9/8/16, 1:50 PM
Kyle Schuant said...
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-08-28
9/8/16, 2:13 PM
Violet Cabra said...
9/8/16, 3:23 PM
deborah harvey said...
really enjoyed this fiction.
9/8/16, 3:48 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Karim, as already noted, there'll be no sequel. I may do a retrospective post on the story and explain why in more detail.
Migrantworker, I've added that to the to-consider list.
Stunned, funny! I actually considered that title before settling on Retrotopia.
Clarence, hmm! Possible.
Jo, thank you for getting it. You get today's gold star for perspicacity above and beyond the ordinary internet standard.
Ville-Nouvelle, I'd be interested in seeing some evidence that these things are more than a form of conspicuous consumption before accepting that claim.
Morgenfrue, hmm! That's definitely going into the list.
Latefall, all added to the list.
Bill, excellent! You got half the joke embedded in the name "Dem-Reps." The other half is that in early 18th century England -- say, the Regency era -- a "demi-rep" was a high-class harlot.
Scotlyn, of course, but in the vast majority of cultures the act of dressing up and making oneself look attractive was done, among the poor-to-middling classes, in a variety of fairly inexpensive ways. I'm not at all sure, based on the cosplayers I know, that cosplay counts. (There's also something decidedly interesting about the passion with which so many people in modern industrial society try to be something other than people in modern industrial society; I'll have a post about that down the road a bit.)
Lili, an important lesson of history! Well put.
9/8/16, 3:59 PM
onething said...
On the contrary, this sentence:
I would love to see Carr field questions about life in the Atlantic Republic from some curious Lakelanders. Preferably ending with a smart Lakelander cutting to the core of the problems with the Atlantic model of things, much to Carr's discontent.
should have been longer, with a comma instead of a period after Lakelanders.
9/8/16, 4:01 PM
onething said...
" if you're not cheap and incompetent like the Soviet Union."
Were the Japanese also cheap and incompetent? Anyway, soviet stuff was often very rugged. I remember one guy who came here in the early 90's walking with me through some partially constructed houses. He thought they looked awfully shoddy and he slightly jumped up and down on the floors and everything shook. He said, you build your houses out of Popsicle sticks.
9/8/16, 4:05 PM
Berserker said...
Instead of "dinosaur" or "mutant" how about "coelacanth"-the living fossil that has survived almost unchanged for something like 200 million years!
9/8/16, 4:08 PM
Armata said...
9/8/16, 4:37 PM
Shane W said...
9/8/16, 4:45 PM
Shane W said...
9/8/16, 4:45 PM
Kevin Warner said...
I thought perhaps that what this ballot could be about would be a referendum on a County deciding whether to move up/down a Tier to illustrate the point that the tiered-county system is not set in cement but has flexibility built into it for robustness sake. It would still serve to illustrate to Carr what happens when there is a Republic-wide election. Just a thought.
Speaking of robustness, I saw something that could very well have come out of the Lakeland's workshops at http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/ox-flat-pack-truck/ which is a flat-pack light truck that can be assembled in half a day by three people and is rugged enough for African roads. Yeah, I know, it is still a chemically-powered truck but it would not be a bad thing to have available as a stop-gap solution as asphalt roads are converted back to dirt roads since there are not the resources available to maintain them any longer.
9/8/16, 5:36 PM
Armata said...
We have been discussing Entryism on The Other Blog as a tactic used by extremist groups, particularly on the radical Left, to subvert and take over other groups and movements.
Well, wouldn't you know it? Permaculture News has an excellent article out about Entryism, including what it is, how to recognize it and how to counter it. The article notes that Entryism has been used by far right groups and corporate shills, but it has been primarily used by radical Leftists seeking to take over not just the neo-Pagan scene but movements like Permaculture and the Transition movement and use them to promote their own agendas.
The article even has a very detailed discussion of the SJW ("Social Justice Warrior") phenomenon that is absolutely invaluable and spot-on, especially for liberal and community groups that find themselves being infiltrated by SJW's. It's a must read for everyone, liberal and conservative, irregardless of whether you are interested in Permaculture or not.
9/8/16, 5:37 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Eric, don't assume that the policies that Carr objected to were the be-all and end-all of Montrose's platform! As for cinema, I'm considering it. I'll have to work through the details of having cinema production in the Lakeland Republic when for thirty years it was basically shut off from the rest of the world, and so the market for movie sales was very small; live theater would arguably have been more viable, though it's not impossible that a movie industry might get under way after the borders opened.
David, thank you!
Doug, you've missed the point of Carr's reflections. It's not wealthy people that he's criticizing, it's wealthy people who are stupid about their dependence on the rest of us, and so think they can push the rest of the world to the wall and not pay a brutal price. It used to be the case that most rich people realized that their wealth obligated them to give back to society -- look up the Carnegie libraries sometimes for a great example. These days, the attitude of a great many rich people is "I got mine, Jack, too bad you're starving"...and that attitude is a good way to guarantee that they're going to end up dangling from lampposts in due time.
Helix, thank you!
Duke, not a problem. Many thanks for the link!
Toomas, first, you've apparently forgotten the briefings that Carr received before he went. The report that got roundfiled certainly wasn't the only intelligence the Atlantic Republic had about its western neighbor; Carr's ignorance is primarily that of someone who had a lot of other things to be concerned with until a few weeks previously, and knew about as much about conditions in the Lakeland Republic as I know right now, say, about conditions in Estonia. (And without looking it up, I couldn't even tell you the name of the Estonian head of state or which party he or she leads, for example.) Second, we've already settled that the post-US republics of North America share the USA's entertaining habit of appointing politically well-connected amateurs to ambassadorships, the same habit that made Shirley Temple the US ambassador to Czechoslovakia and John Kenneth Galbraith the US ambassador to India. (In all such cases, the subordinates are State Department professionals who do much of the actual work.) Will there be difficulties about a relationship with a foreign national? Of course -- but we'll get to that...
Donald, because Montrose's New Alliance isn't explicitly against progress -- it's simply opposed to the continuation of a failed business as usual, and Carr is on board with that. (For example, he supports Montrose's plan to renegotiate the AR's foreign debt.) Think of him as one of the relatively conservative Democrats who supported and advised FDR, because they figured his plans, radical as they were, were better than the failed orthodoxy he was trying to overturn.
RPC, electronic voting didn't outlast the old Union -- it turned out to be so easy to hack that in the 2020 election, Bozo the Clown won the presidency. That was covered up really fast, and the parties quietly settled things on the basis of their internal, honest, and highly secret polls, but by 2022 every state had gone back to paper ballots.
Albatross, I checked it, and somehow a close quote slipped in there. Try this one instead.
9/8/16, 5:55 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Spanish Fly, not to mention the bankruptcies!
James, that's a good point. May I make a suggestion for the term you want? Neosaur. Something brand new that's a dinosaur on delivery.
Hal, okay, let me try again. When's the last time you saw an environmental demonstration that was for something?
David, excellent! You and Carr can share a cup sometime. ;-)
Dltrammel, so noted and I'll consider it.
Llamawalker, at least they're being up front about it. Still, you're right -- it's a bit stunning to have people going, "Oh, who cares who gets poisoned over the next quarter million years, just as long as I can keep my iTrash charged..."
Unknown David, because Carr's an outspoken type and has been using that kind of language all along.
David James, too funny. I'm surprised they didn't insist while they were at it that we have to bring back the Crimean War, the Mongol invasions, bubonic plague, and stone tools.
Myriad, all added to the to-consider list.
Daelach, I'm glad the plot twist surprised you! That was the plan. Not sure about the chess set, though I'm sure they make very nice ones in the Lakeland Republic, and chess is played with verve and enthusiasm in certain bars and public parks. Dominoes, too.
Peacegarden, you're welcome and thank you!
Pygmycory, so noted.
Donalfagan, many thanks for the link. We're getting fairly close to crunch time -- I'm glad to see someone is noticing this.
Pygmycory, that's an excellent point. The elves gave up the initiative, and after that it was all downhill. I'll have to brood over how much that feeds into the popularity of Tolkien in our time, but it's certainly possible.
9/8/16, 6:10 PM
Armata said...
9/8/16, 6:14 PM
Bob said...
I had the exact same thought when I read Apple's press release. Honestly, my thought was "Newer doesn't mean better; Apple designers are idiots. This is a perfect example for Mr. Greer."
In the immortal words of Nelson Muntz (reference "The Simpsons")...Ha Ha.
The clueless, Apple haz it.
9/8/16, 6:20 PM
John Michael Greer said...
With regard to maritime uses of nuclear power, are you at all familiar with the history of the SS Savannah, the world's first and only nuclear freighter? It was just as technically successful as the US Navy's nuclear program, and a total financial dud. The only reason that the Navy can afford to operate nukes is that war doesn't have to make a profit.
PatriciaT, I wish they'd demolished the developer instead. I'm sure he had a few parts worth salvaging.
Joel, I'd be delighted to know of any other discussion of the way that the perverse incentives of the current US tax code penalize employment and reward laying off workers. I'm not familiar with any, and would be delighted not to be a lone voice in the wilderness on this topic!
Weedananda, those have gone into the to-consider list. Thank you!
Myriad, my guess is that the current tort regime went out the window in the wake of the Second Civil War, when everybody wrote new constitutions and renegotiated the terms of the social compact. Still, I'll look into it.
Patricia, I'm glad to hear it.
Bob, that's an excellent point, though by November baseball season is iirc over, so Carr isn't likely to watch a game in progress through the window of a train. Yes, both are played in the Lakeland Republic; I may find some way to weave baseball into things, since it's so much a retro-Americana thing.
Kyle, and progress doesn't always make things better.
Violet, nope. They mostly live in urban tenements with nowhere they can plant seeds at all, unlike their opposite numbers in the Lakeland Republic, who can get spaces at community gardens and are encouraged to grow window boxes. I'll see if I can fit that in somewhere.
Deborah, that's been covered in an earlier episode. General practitioners are extremely common, being trained by apprenticeship, and they're paid for on what used to be called a "lodge trade" basis -- a group of people contract with a physician, they pay him a flat sum per month, and he takes care of all their ordinary health care plus referrals when necessary. It worked really well before the AMA destroyed it, since it kept a lid on doctor's profits...
9/8/16, 6:27 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Shane, I'm 54 and I remember both of mine -- we moved when I was in second grade, from the CHerry exchange to the VErnon exchange.
Kevin, hmm! Possible, though the only county he visits outside of Toledo is already tier one. I'll put it on the to-consider list.
Armata, that's the best thing I've heard about permaculture in a couple of years. Thank you -- and I'm delighted to hear that they've caught onto the problem with letting professional activists hijack your organization and divert it from its agenda to theirs. As for Mall*Wart, literally nothing they could possibly do would surprise me, unless it involved showing some class and treating people decently.
9/8/16, 6:37 PM
Bob said...
As a diehard Chicago Cubs fan, baseball is near and dear to my heart. Hopefully by 2050 they will have won a World Series. Hope springs eternal.
9/8/16, 6:53 PM
sgage said...
"I bet those of us over 60 or 70 still remember their childhood exchange name..."
Trinity. I absolutely remember my childhood exchange. My phone number was TR4-76xx. I remember when we were suddenly supposed to say '874', instead of 'TR4'. And I also remember not getting touch-tone until very late - we were rotary dial right through my high school years. I also remember when zipcodes came along, and the standard 2 letter state abbreviations. The 60's were full of 'progress'.
9/8/16, 6:55 PM
Bob said...
9/8/16, 7:01 PM
Auriel Ragmon said...
CItrus 2813, later 12813 Glendale CA
Jim of Olym
9/8/16, 7:05 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
I think having such encounters would perhaps make the story appeal to a broader audience by showing that different subcultures are alive within Lakeland that don't agree with the dominant culture on everything, but still for the most part respect the positive things the Lakeland system has done. I know for myself I can see a lot of good ideas in the Lakeland system, but the whole story also gives me the sense that I'd feel out of place there. I also recognize that the story takes place in one small time and place in a large country, and the experience of other places and subcultures within Lakeland may be quite different than one would get among government people and those catering to them in the capitol, and one brief visit to a nearby rural area. But, I'd be interested in hearing from a few Lakelanders who have grievences, it would loosen up the sense of conformity that I get from the narrative as it is.
9/8/16, 7:13 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
9/8/16, 7:34 PM
sgage said...
Yes, one of my brothers bought the ol' family home when my parents moved on to other adventures in the 70's, and he still lives there, and that phone is still there, still working, at the same number. 60+ years later. Good ol' Western Electric equipment - pretty much unbreakable.
9/8/16, 7:36 PM
Philip Bridges said...
Talk about art imitating life. National Public Radio's Science program last week reported on the development of clothes made of polyethylene that will supposedly make the wearer feel cooler in hot weather. Polyethylene is our most common plastic, used in the production of plastic bags, food wrappers, and many other products. Two layers of polyethylene with a thin cotton fabric between the layers are assembled and then punched with very small holes to create a garment that supposedly makes one feel cooler in a hot environment. Progress like that makes one consider nudity as the preferable alternative.
9/8/16, 7:54 PM
HalFiore said...
Back when I was heavily involved with environmental issues, we tried whenever possible to provide a positive goal. We found, e.g., that it was more effective to fight for Wild and Scenic Status for a popular or beautiful remote stream than to always be fighting rearguard actions. After losing our first big battle over the Stanislaus, it became much more effective to fight for positive protection for the Tuolomne and American. Unfortunately, some overly busy person or govt agency almost always has their designs on any unmarred space, so opposition work will be with us, I'm afraid.
All to say I see the issue as a bit more complex.
AS for cinema, many early movie houses began life as vaudeville theaters, and continued to serve both functions for long times. I occasionally worked the Paramount in Oakland back in the 80s, and I'm sure it's still hosting live theater, music, and cinema. It was (is, I hope) a beautiful art deco style structure with a full ornate proscenium and a serviceable, if shallow, stage. It contained a full fly-house with counterweight system, though I'm pretty sure Lakeland would have chosen mostly to revert to hemp rigging and sandbags. Probably an orchestra pit, though my memory fades.
Showing films would be a matter of flying a screen and building in a projection booth somewhere in the house. Well, and a sound system. Maybe live music with silent films?
9/8/16, 7:55 PM
LewisLucanBooks said...
Dear Mr. Greer, et all; The recent posts on progress, reading my copy of "Dark Age America." The concept of normative space. The Apple ear phone dust up. Over the past couple of days I've decided that the epitaph for our age will be "They Couldn't Leave Well Enough Alone." Second and third choices would be: "It's what our customers asked for" or "It's for your convenience." Lew
9/8/16, 8:15 PM
Clarence said...
clarence
9/8/16, 8:27 PM
Ian R Orchard said...
9/8/16, 8:55 PM
Glenn said...
Regarding the Standing Rock Sioux pipeline debacle and environmentalists always being "against" things. Read Jim Wright's Stonekettle Station essay for September 7th. http://www.stonekettle.com/ As usual, he articulates it better than I can.
JMG, question about Lakeland's Taxes. You've established that they don't tax income, or anything else they wish to encourage. So, what is taxed, how are the rates determined, and are they progressive or regressive (I left out flat, because the effect is always regressive)?
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea'
Cascadia
9/8/16, 9:07 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Ozark, that's uncommon in the utopian genre, but it's on the to-consider list. So is naming something or other after Aldo Leopold -- though I want to avoid the Ecotopian model here also.
Philip, or nice comfortable hempcloth, cotton, and wool...
HalFiore, of course the issue is a lot more complex, but the tribes are still fighting to preserve something, not fighting to take new ground or push the other side onto the defensive. Again, that's my point -- as long as the other side is deciding where the battle's going to be fought and what the stakes are, you don't have any hope of winning, because you've surrendered the initiative.
Clarence, okay, now I'm going to have to look up the Mudhens!
Ian, yeah, too much backstory is a burden. I don't intend to write a prequel any more than a sequel, though.
Glenn, not quite. They don't tax earned income, defined as wages, salaries, royalties, and dividends below a certain dollar amount per annum. They do tax income from interest, speculation, and any other form of income where you get money for having money, and those are taxed progressively. They also tax every use of natural resources, whether as raw materials or as a dumping ground for waste, at a flat rate that covers the total cost of remediation or replacement, plus all knock-on costs to the rest of society. Since the government is a great deal smaller and less intrusive, the income from those sources is ample.
9/8/16, 10:36 PM
Clarence said...
clarence
9/8/16, 11:08 PM
Scotlyn said...
There is a related apocryphal story anthropologists tell each other when they gather. (I've heard two or three versions). It seems Mr/Ms Ethno Grapher spent time with the Elsewhere Natives who were nomadic hunter gatherers with little by way of material culture. Ms Grapher recorded songs and dances and returned to the Academy in the West where she wrote up a deep & significant analysis of Elsewhere Native traditional dances & songs. A year or two later Mr Grapher returns to Elsewhere with a film crew and plays some of the recordings to the Natives and asks could they do some of the dances again for a better quality broadcast. To great guffaws from the Elsewhere Natives who say: "but that was last years song, and no one arranges their dancing beads like THAT anymore. Do you want to see the new ones?"
9/9/16, 12:34 AM
Coco said...
And, since asked, I second the request for an incidental character/s who is less agreeable/plucky/kind/content/earnest than the rest we´ve met. Is no one irritatingly negative in Lakeland? No one insufferably judgemental, hypocritical, unethical or simply greedy? They don´t need to be mustache-twirling evil, just unpleasant.
I also wonder if Carr wouldn´t be more surprised by the quality of the food. Even if he´s accustomed to eating well back home, I assume industrial agriculture is the norm. Wouldn´t fresh, organic, free range food, expertly prepared, be something of a shock to his palate?
I just found out that we live in one of the lowest income counties of the country. Less distance to fall!
Again, a highly enjoyable series. Thank you.
9/9/16, 1:11 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
That was a very sweet ending and I do hope that the character Peter ends up with Melanie, but then I am a romantic deep down. I can’t believe you blithely skipped over the developing relationship of Peter and Melanie! Did you perhaps believe that we would not notice? Hehehe!!!! For some strange reason, with all of your recent hints about the direction of the story, I believed that the story would have had a much darker ending... For some reason I had a mental image that the returning train with Peter Carr on board would be taken out by an IED. Dunno why.
If you may indulge me with recounting a little short story from the sayings of Wu Tzu...
"The Lord Wen once assembled a number of his subjects to discuss affairs of state: and none could equal him in wisdom, and when he left the council chamber his face was pleased.
Then Wu advanced and said:
In ancient times, Lord Chuang of Chu once consulted with his lieges, and none were like unto him in wisdom; and when the Lord left the council chamber his countenance was troubled. Then the Duke Shen asked and said: 'Why is my Lord troubled?' And he answered: 'I have heard that the world is never without sages, and that in every country there are wise men; that good advisers are the foundation of an empire; and friends of dominion. Now, if I, lacking wisdom, have no equal among the multitude of my officers, dangerous indeed is the state of Chu. It grieves me that whereas Prince Chuang of Chu was troubled in a like case my Lord should be pleased.'
And hearing this Lord Wen was inwardly troubled."
Just sayin... My, my, but that Wu Tzu dude had a sharp tongue with some great insights! :-)! And, I tell you what, but I have been there too and been the only dissenting voice - which got drowned out.
Thanks for continuing the Retrotopia story and I look forward to the next instalment. Incidentally, I believe zinc which is quite an important and useful metal is now in short supply and no further large deposits are being exploited because they haven’t been discovered (that is code word for not existing if ever I saw it used that way).
Incidentally, I have almost finished reading your book Innsmouth. The joy and delight that you had in writing that book shines through to me in the words. I reckon you must have had fun writing it? So when is part two and three being released?
Cheers
Chris
9/9/16, 2:51 AM
Unknown said...
James M Jensen, re a word for regressive progress. Many years ago two friends of mine invented "posterous" as a joke. They used to roll it into conversation just to see if anyone spotted it and asked what it meant. In over a year I was the only tone to spot it. It is a word seeking a meaning, and as mechanical fitters, both could be relied upon to understand the idea that progress is not always better, and sometimes its just posterous.
Roy Smith, re nuclear power. Safety is moot when your reactor is situated on a big ship that amounts to nothing more than a slow moving target for any one of the many enemies your nation is going hell for leather to generate. You seem to have entirely missed the existence of that very major point.
All the best form a very wet Tasmania.
eagle eye
9/9/16, 2:52 AM
Eric S. said...
9/9/16, 4:58 AM
Sylvia Rissell said...
9/9/16, 5:44 AM
trippticket said...
1) I have no idea what this is in reference to, but it reminds me of this South Dakota oil pipeline protest, with people driving their cars from all over the country to gather in solidarity. Um...driving your cars? Aren't you just reinforcing what the "bad guys" are doing? I think I'll just stay home and work in the garden instead.
2) On a related note, I saw another of those Fight Breast Cancer license plates on a slick 4-series twin turbo BMW the other day while running errands with my jet-setting friend. Got a lot of dead air from him when I popped off "you want to fight breast cancer, grow your own food and stop driving your fancy sports car!"
3) We have been correcting some lighting and ceiling fan problems around the farm lately, and when I picked up a "dark sky" light fixture for over the barn door, my friend (the same friend just mentioned) really laid it on thick about how important that was, to battle light pollution. Then I came back with "I don't worry too much about light pollution, since the entire planet will be slowly getting darker every year from here on out, probably for the rest of Earth's history." More consternation.
There is rarely a greener alternative without employing the LESS principle, but it sure is a lot easier to feel pious about your green pet peeves when you aren't willing to make actual changes to your way of life.
I guess one of the main hurdles left now is to stop participating with this internet thingy...
9/9/16, 6:26 AM
David, by the lake said...
Since the post touches on economics, this might be considered on-topic.
https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-09-09/this-bubble-s-got-legs
So we've reached the point where we acknowledge that we are pumping a massive asset bubble, but assert that it has infinite capacity and is "unpoppable" because we are inflating cash and cash is completely under the control (sic) of the central banks?
9/9/16, 6:26 AM
Eric S. said...
9/9/16, 6:33 AM
Scotlyn said...
In ref to the discussion between yourself and Halfiore, I agree with both of you, and can do that (I think) because it does not seem to me that your points are mutually contradictory.
To win, it IS absolutely true (per JMG) that you must stop reacting and choose the stakes and the battleground. I am certainly looking forward to your posts making proposals in this regard.
But likewise, in order to not lose (per Halfiore) once someone has determined that the battleground shall be your land, and the stakes shall be the springs of your livelihood and well-being, you MUST mount a defense - ie you must react.
Defense of one's home in the face of attack is not a seizure of initiative, nevertheless if you fail to defend it, you've lost already, and will have no opportunity to change the stakes or battleground.
It seems to me that defending what matters to the heart and to those one cares about will always be powerfully motivating. (and is very much evident in the case in point).
And a movement with a vision changing the stakes and the battleground, so as to win, will be much energised if it were to connect its vision with that kind of motivation.
9/9/16, 7:51 AM
Justin Patrick Moore said...
I've been loving this story. It will be great to hopefully get a print copy some time. That-being-said, it was nice to get my first print version of The Archdruid Report 'zine. Now I can stay caught up with your essays while on the bus -or streetcar that starts officially today here in Cincinnati (southwest Lakeland Republic). I can only hope the streetcar is as successful as Mikkleson's company.
All the best!
9/9/16, 8:04 AM
Morgenfrue said...
But do we really think that such unpragmatic pursuits will make it through the gap, so to speak? I find it much more likely that people will develop sewing skills by sewing garments, bedding, quilts, mending, refurbishing and so on- and likely from childhood.
9/9/16, 8:22 AM
SamuraiArtGuy said...
Hal, okay, let me try again. When's the last time you saw an environmental demonstration that was for something?
Spot on, the Native Folk are between a (Standing) Rock and a hard place, with little political power vs the Corporatocracy, and can safely be ignored by both our political leadership and (most of) the Media. Who let Lawence O'Donnel's leash slip? . But they don't consider themselves environmental activists, they're fighting for their lives, and the cause resonates.
But JMG is correct in the state of Environmental Activism. For the most part they are presting a choise between two negative scenarios. Eventual doom through environmentla degradation and respurce depletion. Or... Wait for it...IMMEDIATE degradation of their lifestyles by getting by with a lot LESS... of just about EVERYTHING. 75 PERCENT less, by some estimates, less food, less electricity, less leisure time, less clothes, smlaller houses and cars, or no cars, less toys. Real appealing, and not offering an appealing third alternative. Most people, Amaericans in particular, will readily choose present comfort and hypothetical future crisis versus shitcanning their current lifestyles in the here and now, absent any appealing alternative. Futhermore, most of the movement seems to have the expectation that the lions share of the sacrifices will be borne on the backs of the already embattled and misrerable wage class, so they're gojing to sign up for more misery?
"I like my TV, SUV and smartphone. So $&@#% that noise. I'm sure our grandchildren will figure something out with some unknown future miracle tech."
The reservation Native protestors do have this going for them, they are HARDLY salary class - they are America's poorest of the poor, Prisoners of War in all but name. In many cases at the absolute bottom of our Welfare Class.
That gives them a certain moral ligitimacy versus the unmasked greed of the Energy Corps. Whether that will be enough, remains to be seen. Largely depends on who owns the relevant judges.
9/9/16, 8:51 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
And --- Peter Carr would probably suffer miserably without it. It would be extremely interesting to see, not only how Lakeland handles this (I know of several ways, but most of the building for the climate workarounds I know are desert-oriented, which is not the same, and I was too young to be interested in how it was done when I was last in the Midwest.)
As for Carr ... oh, yes. He'd think of it as one of the basic necessities of life. May as well ask him to go without food, water, and heat! And I'd buy tickets to see that!
9/9/16, 9:07 AM
Olivier said...
Your narrative fiction and day to day practical storyline is indeed extremely powerful in regards to make people imagine a positive possible future.
Few comments from me:
- would it be possible to have more details on the governance and decision model used in Lakeland republic? IMHO, the election system (choosing masters to write the law, instead of choosing the best laws), the presence of professional politicians, made me wonder how the lakeland republic managed to keep greed, lobbies, media influence and human power lust under control to have near 30 years of real progress for all.
It would be excellent if you could shed more lights on working alternatives of real democratic governance e.g. Sortition, direct voting on decision/laws instead of representative leaders, non-professional politics with single mandate, ...
- would the corn-belt still be the corn belt in 2065, considering a very likely different climate all together? Have you considered giving some clue or ideas of climate change and disruptions that happened between 2016 and 2065 ?
Looking forward to the final book, I need to do my part and find a way to make a French translation happen.
Your long descent book and this draft retrotopia made me change my plans and future. Thanks - Olivier.
9/9/16, 9:22 AM
Ed-M said...
Jeez, 137 comments, so far! At least it's not over 200 but it will be tomorrow! (A nervous LOL)
In Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles, in the second part of the book, there's this retrotopia (not completely retro -- it has wireless telecommunications) that the USA has marked as a jurisdictione non grata called The United States of Nevada. Of course, what was implausible to me is that in the book, the USA has gone so far up the blind Progress Alley that most everyone is compelled to wear a chip (the Mark of the Beast!) implanted on their person and the IRS is this quasi-god who sees all and knows all, because of, you know, money.
@ John Dunn 9/7/16, 4:53 PM -
"WW treatment eats the energy. WW lagoons become a best technology choice."
So do biological wastewater treatment greenhouses. The sewerage delivers the noxious waste as natural resources for the plants therein who recycle it as nutrients for aquatic creatures which then can be harvested along with the plants. And them's good eatin'. Better yet, no lagoons that emit an intolerable *smell*.
@ Doug 9/8/16, 6:50 AM -
"So far, we know we need to connect 'wealthy' landowners who do not wish to farm, with young farmers (the New Peasantry) who are okay working the dirt for not much money. They aren't making a living, they're living a life. But they can't do it yet without outside money."
You are right to call them the New Peasantry. This sort of business model is actually planting the seeds of a new feudalism. But with the internet and at least with coordinating committees, a.k.a., non-profits, we're better off than the lumpen-proletarians in the ancient and vast Roman Empire were. They had to link up with the wealthy landowners all by themselves.
And some landowners today are setting aside their lands as privately-owned wildlife refuges, hoping to link up with others and with government lands to form wildlife corridors. I bet some were back then, too.
@ Spanish Fly 9/8/16, 8:44 AM -
"30 years more of 'peaceful' nukes...in economic contraction scenarios: a good recipe for a half dozen of Cheno-Fukushimas."
Worst case scenario is 400-something of them. That's how many nuclear power stations we have world-wide.
9/9/16, 10:54 AM
Helix said...
Nevertheless, in a future of phosphate and potassium depletion in particular, it will become a mandatory step in maintaining soil fertility. And as energy sources become tighter, a lot of this work may well become manual. This is not a prospect that most people embrace with much enthusiasm.
Any thoughts on how this might be handled in the Lakeland Republic?
9/9/16, 12:01 PM
pygmycory said...
9/9/16, 12:09 PM
Emmanuel Goldstein said...
I have very much enjoyed Retrotopia--Is it possible to pre-order it from the publisher?
Plot suggestions; 1) Carr returns to Atlantic, troubled because he knows that if he accepts appointment as Ambassador, he must give up his Amour; But if he declines it, he must give up his career. When he meets the President on returning, she already knows about his Amour thru her spy network. She makes someone else the Ambassador, demotes him to "Charge d'Affairs" or other lesser position that does allow for dalliance, and sends him there with the delegation anyway.
2) There are already cultural differences between the MidWest and Atlantic states in the US. Consider the in-your-face interaction style of many New Yorkers, vs the more-communitarian but also more private interaction style of MidWesterners. Was the adoption of a Retrotopian style of government aided by MidWestern culture, and did it reinforce that culture once adopted? How hard will it be for Montrose and her team to overcome isolation, selfishness and rudeness that characterize much of the urban East? Or did people learn how to get along with their neighbors and help each other during the 2nd Civil War?
I recently moved from the urban East-Coast Baltimore to rural Western British Columbia, and have often been struck by the much stronger community ties that exist out here in BC. I'm not saying it is all better, but much is different here.
9/9/16, 12:18 PM
pygmycory said...
Incidentally, I think one big factor in the decline of Noldor was their failure to marry and have kids at a decent rate in Middle-earth. Part of the fault of this is probably basic elvish psychology as Tolkien wrote it, but a lot of it is the fault of the Laws of the Eldar, which don't allow remarriage after the death (or leaving behind in Valinor) of a spouse. This leads to a lot of lonely people, and also to people leaving for Valinor to go see if their partner is out of Mandos yet. It also leads to people not marrying unless everything is absolutely peaceful, which it rarely is in Middle-earth. Seriously, among the descendants of Finwe in the second age you have no marriages and one child, while there are two deaths and the extinction of the direct male line, and the High Kingship. Those laws are not suited to Middle-earth conditions at all.
Then you've got large numbers of people up and leaving for Valinor every single time there's a war in the second or third age, and people knowing that they can just up and leave if things get bad. I tend to think this reduces their attentiveness to what is going on around them.
And the desire for things to stay the same, as embodied by the three elven rings. And when the Rings failed at the end of the third age, and change arrived in Lothlorien and Rivendell, what happened? Lothlorien disbands completely, and Rivendell loses much of its population as the elves leave for Valinor. Adaptation to a changed world: epic fail.
Meanwhile, the elves of Mirkwood successfully pass their Kingship down, move the nation as needed, and are the only elvish realm of decent size surviving into the Fourth age.
9/9/16, 12:26 PM
pygmycory said...
9/9/16, 12:32 PM
pygmycory said...
9/9/16, 12:36 PM
Helix said...
And that's really the crux of the issue, isn't it? I live not too far (upwind) from a nuclear power station in central Virginia. As it turns out, the plant was built on a fault line! Not a fault line. ON a fault line. The plant is designed to withstand a 5.9 earthquake, but we had a 5.7 a few years back and it took some quick, deft manual intervention to prevent a catastrophe. I'm not confident that the plant would survive a 5.9 earthquake.
Of course Fukushima is the poster-child example. The nuclear plant there is in a known tsunami zone. There are even monuments dotting Japan's northeast coastline warning of the tsunami peril, including one warning residents not to seek higher ground on the hill on which it stood because it was swept clean in a previous tsunami. Yet the backup generators were installed at ground level! Obviously, it's cheaper to install them there than in an elevated location, and so that's where they were placed, with results we're painfully familiar with. Investigations following the disaster revealed that company officials had known about the risks, and had furthermore falsified safety records for at least 30 years.
Given today's environment of hypercompetitive markets and lax regulation, I'm pretty sure that cost-cutting shortcuts will just about always be taken in the name of profits.
And don't even get me started on storage of radioactive wastes.
9/9/16, 1:33 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
I'd be interested in a more in depth discussion of mechanization's effects on the economy. A major point of the book seems to be that mechanization takes away jobs and stifles the economy. I imagine anyone who's thought much about it realizes that mechanization reduces the need for human labor, but then that's part of the grand vision of progress, isn't it? Machines replacing human labor was going to mean that humanity would be prosperous with far less human effort, everyone could work few hours and have lots of leisure time. It didn't actually work out that way, but I see that vision still holding enough sway that many people reflexively support any mechanization thinking it will make everyone's life better. Although now, the grand vision of progress has faded a lot, replaced by a belief that mechanization and other means of "progress" are simply inevitable and can't be any other way. I see your story addressing the latter view quite well, offering an alternative way forward. Still, I'd be interested in hearing a more in depth discussion of why, even during the zenith of the era of cheap energy, mechanization never delivered the benefits that so many writers up until the mid-20th century (and many even now) assumed would come with it. I read Ecotopia recently for the first time, and I saw the same ideas there too in green clothing, as green technology gave them all a 20 hour workweek.
I mention this because I personally haven't come across anything that addresses directly the failings of why mechanization fails to lead to the lives of leisure that so many assumed would happen. Sure, there's plenty out there that has pointed out the unsustainability of industrial society, but there must be more to the mechanization issue than just resource limits, as it wasn't delivering as promised even when energy was at its cheapest.
9/9/16, 3:18 PM
latefall said...
Skip to 26:50 of David Graeber and David Wengrow: Palaeolithic Politics and Why It Still Matters: https://vimeo.com/145285143
I can recommend watching/listening to the whole lecture as I found it pretty good at dissolving thought stoppers.
Re soil quality and cycling nutrients @Helix
Trains running at night, barges, or perhaps temporary canals (let them silt up eventually) could do something. I don't think ropeways could handle the mass, not convinced the other methods would work sufficiently. Perhaps you could just move the stuff upwind/upstream and wait for it to disperse over a century or so?
Re Nuclear power and expertise
Perhaps you will find this data point interesting to follow then:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metsamor_Nuclear_Power_Plant
It does not need a containment, because the crew is highly professional and has long experience with the thing (in contrast to the typical Western outsourcing apparently). That is at least the rationale of the safety commission. Being upwind of a capital city in a geopolitically moderately stable region (electricity price hikes led to unrest) does not bode well.
Re Sortition @Olivier
You mean looking in the direction of Etienne Chouard, right? The is lots of interesting thought there. I recently learned of a slightly more gradual approach (apparently being discussed in Greece to some degree):
If people do not vote, it is counted as a vote for representation by sortition. I think that could work very well in many European legislations. From my perspective the first-past-the-post system used in the USA introduces so many unhealthy dynamics that this is probably where I would start tinkering. Coalitions, consensus, and compromise are very unsexy but generally helpful ingredients I'd say.
9/9/16, 3:30 PM
Ahavah said...
While we do have outdoor laundry lines, they have hardly been used this year due to the ridiculous amount of rain followed by high humidity we have had. Instead, we placed two cedar boards on opposite sides of a partition in our basement, and put the eye half of some heavy duty hook and eye sets about 6" apart on each of the boards. We have a total of 7 eyes on each board. We then used hooks as endpieces of laundry line and strung them between the boards in the basement, with an oscillating fan blowing toward them to help with stiffness. (You'll need an extra package of hooks, as the eyes only come with one.) Make sure you find studs or use anchors to put up the boards and they can absolutely hold blankets, quilts, comforters, mattress pads, heavy towels, and other weighty things. We have never had one fall down.
This knocked our electric budget down by about 30% alone - we only use the dryer now to fluff things on the fluff cycle or to dry batches of little things like socks or dish rags. At our old town house, we had the same system in the dining room - with the boards painted the same color as the walls. When we had guests over, we strung lights and streamers instead of laundry lines, and everybody thought it was awesome. They never realized it was camouflage for laundry drying. :) You can also use hangers to dry many things on your shower curtain rod overnight, with the exhaust fan on to send the humidity outside. They are certainly sturdy enough for heavy towels and comforters. Just make sure you clean the tops of the rods before you toss things over them - they do get dirty up there, believe it or not.
Hope this helps.
9/9/16, 3:58 PM
Justin said...
9/9/16, 4:05 PM
olivier64 said...
This is significant because he is (or was) the chairman of Agora Publications, a tentacular publishing concern that is probably the largest publisher of financial newsletters in the US. Agora and its affiliates boast a database (although not necessarily a readership) with millions of names in it, which I find credible. They are not quite mainstream, indeed they are proud contrarians, but almost by definition neither are they a voice in the wilderness: they are much too big for that.
9/9/16, 4:31 PM
Cortes said...
"MACALLAN HISTORY
One of the original farm distilleries of Speyside, Macallan became legal in 1824 when Alexander Reid obtained (or was persuaded to obtain) one of the new licences issued after the passing of the 1823 Excise Act. In 1868, James Stuart took the lease and rebuilt the plant. His ownership ended in 1892, when he sold Macallan to one of the giants of Victorian distilling, Roderick Kemp, who had previously owned Talisker (although he never owned both distilleries at the same time). Kemp’s ancestors – in particular the Shiach family – retained ownership until the 1996 takeover by Highland Distillers (now Edrington)." Presumably ancestors is an error for descendants, but otherwise...
9/9/16, 4:49 PM
Unknown said...
@JMG and Ozark Chinquapin--Aldo Leopold Normal School. Thoreau Elementary.
9/9/16, 4:49 PM
Armata said...
The Army Corps of Engineers has suspended the project by withdrawing the necessary permits and has said it will revisit its standards for ensuring that First Nations voices are heard in cases involving Native lands.
9/9/16, 4:51 PM
olivier64 said...
9/9/16, 4:53 PM
Jo said...
Continuing our previous conversation re suburbs - you are right, I do live in an inner suburb of a very walkable, older regional city built by the first settlers in Tasmania. I was kind of using it as an example of what can be done.
Everything I have ever heard of the Great American Suburb is indeed abysmal - I looked up some images on-line, and you are right, they are truly dire from the standpoint of being liveable in a car-free society. Did you notice the plot point in last weeks ADR post where Mikkelson is salvaging a gated community? I see you have read The Mandibles? A bit familiar, isn't it?
However, major catastrophes and civil wars aside, the future I see for suburbs is this - inner cities will become more an more gentrified and expensive, as the wealthy always get first dibs on the best bits, and the best bits will be a walkable neighbourhood. Suburbs will be left to the poor, and will become less and less regulated. Lack of transport will mean that those trapped in the suburbs will have to organise their own communities, which will operate largely on the salvage economy for some time. Those big box stores have lots of steel in them, after all! Many abandoned houses will indeed moulder away, and after a couple of decades there will be a bunch of green space, returning to wilderness, which can then be farmed - much like what is happening in Detroit right now. I think what we may see is the re-emergence of 'villages' - small, walkable communities, little centres of commerce and community retained among the rubble and returning fields of the old suburbs. Of course, there will no doubt be much violence, poverty and degradation to get through first, as is also very much in evidence in Detroit..
But think how much better it would be if there were political will to help that process along in a safer and more orderly fashion, in the manner of the Atlantic Republic's new government..
9/9/16, 5:10 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
I do not have air conditioning in my house and there are plenty of passive ways to get around that problem. It can get to 114'F in the shade here too. And right now outside it is 99% humidity. Of course it can be done, but it is worth considering that our housing stock reflects our desire to mechanically heat and cool the insides. We as a society don't generally live, where we live, if you get my meaning. We are perhaps the great pretenders!
Cheers
Chris
9/9/16, 5:31 PM
donalfagan said...
9/9/16, 5:35 PM
KL Cooke said...
http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/
9/9/16, 5:40 PM
ganv said...
9/9/16, 6:25 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Scotlyn, too funny. There were similar problems with folklorists in early 20th century Britain trying to find the authentic ancient handed-down-from-forever customs of the folk, while the folk themselves were doing what they normally did and changing things every single year. This is one of the reasons why I never bought the claim that Wicca had been passed down unchanged from the Neolithic...
Coco, the food's a good point. As for the other, remember that this is a utopian narrative, and having lots of helpful people to explain this, that and the other goes with that genre. If I was writing ordinary science fiction, I'd have done a much rougher, more problematic society -- those make for more interesting plots -- but the point of a utopian narrative is to point up a better way of doing things, and talkative, friendly tour guides are kind of indispensible.
Cherokee, many thanks for the Wu Tzu story! I wonder if we can pick up a shipping container or two of ancient Chinese sages and turn 'em loose -- the intellectual carnage would be worth the price. Thanks for the tip on zinc -- I'll look into it, and add a zinc shortage to the list of headlines. As for The Weird of Hali, I'm not sure what the current schedule is; I think the publisher's waiting to sell off the first volume in hardback before he brings out the second. (The third is in final edits right now, and the fourth is 3/4 done; you may be interested to know that Dr. Miriam Akeley, as a result of a long and intricate series of events, is crossing the Cerenerian Sea on a galleon to find Randolph Carter...)
Unknown Eagle Eye, I didn't say that I'm not willing to see Retrotopia in movie form. I said that I'd be extremely wary and demand some degree of creative control. The one time I've had somebody approach me about a movie version of one of my books, the guy wanted to take Star's Reach -- a story about how we're not going to the stars -- and turn it into a story about how we're going to the stars. I could just as easily see some studio decide to film Retrotopia, and then turn it into a morality play in which adopting past technology by definition means you also have to adopt Victorian social mores, massive infant mortality, and ultimately go back to the caves. That's the conventional wisdom, after all, and you don't make a box office hit by contradicting the conventional wisdom.
Sylvia, that would be hilarious! I don't know if I can fit it in, but we'll see.
Tripp, understood, but I'll miss your comments.
David, sure, in the words of Irving Fisher, the economy has reached a permanently high plateau. (As I quietly strap on a crash helmet...)
Eric, maybe that is what it's all about. ;-)
9/9/16, 6:39 PM
RPC said...
9/9/16, 6:45 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Justin, delighted to hear that you've got a streetcar! Now to get the rest of the system in place, moving people cheaply and conveniently all over Cincinnati...
Patricia, there's a reason I set this in November, you know. He'll have some months to get used to the weather. (I'm still working on it -- Cumberland, MD is plenty hot and humid at the moment...)
Olivier, thank you! Since this is, ahem, a Retrotopia, I'm taking the old-fashioned system we have in America, returning it somewhat to its roots, and bringing in a couple of other well-tested features, such as proportional representation, that have also proved themselves in practice. It might be interesting to do a story with some kind of very different system, but again, the point of this narrative is that there's much of value to be quarried from the past. With regard to the corn belt, yes -- corn is grown from the plains states of North America south all the way to the equator, so it'll be viable over the long term as long as there's enough water.
Ed-M, interesting. I haven't read The Mandibles yet, though I'll doubtless make time to do so one of these days.
Helix, already covered. Manure, human as well as animal, is purchased by tier four and five municipalities, shipped via canal, and fermented to produce methane for electrical generation; the residue, which contains all the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, is sold back to farm country as fertilizer. Combined with green manures and other soil-building agricultural practices, that yields steady crop yields for the indefinite future.
Emmanuel, it'll be available for preorder in the not too distant future -- the contract's already been signed, and it's just a matter of final edits at this point. I'll post something when the sales link goes live. As for your other two points, I've pretty much settled the plot, and as for the behavior of East Coast types, I come from laid-back Seattle, and I don't find East Coast people especially abrasive -- I wonder if that stereotype is a bit overblown.
Pygmycory, you really ought to write this up in detail and put it on a Tolkien website somewhere. Take an Elvish pen name, and present it as an analysis -- written, no doubt, in Mirkwood in the early Fourth Age -- of the rise, decline, and collapse of the Noldorin colony in Middle-Earth during the Second and Third Age. I think a lot of Tolkien fans would delight in it; certainly I would!
With regard to squatters in the Atlantic Republic, that's a good point, but they're a somewhat different population from the working poor. The squatters have dropped out of the system completely and scrape by on what they can grow, salvage, and barter. Hmm...
Ozark, that's a major question, and something that probably deserves at least one post all to itself. You're right that there was a massive disjunct between what everyone expected and what actually happened -- several disjuncts, actually. I'll want to brood on that, do some research, and see what comes of it.
9/9/16, 7:00 PM
James M. Jensen II said...
9/9/16, 7:05 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Olivier, is Bonner talking about progress as the enemy of prosperity, or criticizing the idea of progress as an ersatz religion? If so, I'll be greatly impressed; if not, well, I'm quite comfortable out here in the wilderness, you know.
Cortes, thank you! Yes, I did have that in mind -- it's a favorite Scotch of mine -- when I named the character.
Unknown Deborah, I always wanted to attend an Abnormal School...
Armata, thus saving the Clinton campaign from being caught in a vise between its petroleum industry donors and its progressive voters. I hope the ban stays in place after November.
KL Cooke, the topic of this week's post is of course Retrotopia. As for the Claremont article, I'd love to have the author sit down with one of those people on the left who like to talk about the conservative juggernaut steamrollering its way over everybody -- I wonder what the two of them would do when they realized they're both using the same cherrypicking methods and the same language of fighting the War Against Change in the teeth of an unstoppable enemy...
Ganv, I hope so. Your comment, btw, helped inspire a new word; retrovation. This is the process of bringing in something old that works to replace something new that doesn't. It's the wave of the retro future... ;-)
RPC, poor Bozo would be deeply hurt to hear you discussing him in those terms!
9/9/16, 7:09 PM
John Michael Greer said...
9/9/16, 7:11 PM
Jo said...
For those who are interested, probably mostly the Australian readers, I have just finished reading 'The Secret River' by Kate Grenville, concerning the disastrous clash of cultures when Australia's first white settlers met its original inhabitants. I highly recommend this very thoughtful novel. It is not only pertinent to that time and this place, though. At its heart it examines the immense difficulties faced by Europeans who could only see this continent in terms of their own culture, history, climate and social mores, unable to see how the Aboriginal population had settled so successfully in place.
I think we face the same difficulties now going into the future - we can't wrench our heads out of the rut of 'business as usual'. What we need to do is face the realities of our situation and come up with a completely different paradigm for our future successful societies to rest on - a paradigm that isn't 'progress at any cost'.
In Grenville's novel, there is a very, very tiny chink that opens to reveal what might have been possible had the Europeans had the humility to look at another culture and learn from them instead of exterminating them.
Retrotopia is another lens in which to see another possible future, but to take hold of that, as a global society, does require a lot of humility. Relinquishing our hold on the dream of endless progress and being more powerful than Nature itself is going to be very psychically disturbing on a very large scale.
9/9/16, 7:31 PM
pygmycory said...
9/9/16, 8:13 PM
jessi thompson said...
9/9/16, 9:35 PM
Hammer said...
It's a weekly ritual: every wednesday night I go to the Archdruid report, and if the post is non-Retrotopia, I read it and worry about how the future is going to be so bad. Throughout the next day I feel empty and sad.
Then on Thursday I read one or two older posts from a few years ago, and become intrigued and interested, and my fear disappears. And the process repeats next week.
With Retrotopia I gained some relief every other week, but now it's gone. Actually I wonder whether this is a good thing. I'll get over my initial fears more quickly, and then I can start planning and acquiring the knowledge I need.
------------------------------------
When I first joined, you said there are 5 stages of adjusting to the prospect of the real future, and the first one could be compared to the death of a family member.
Yet I only experience that feeling every Thursday for a few hours, and it's only as strong as the death of a pet fish, if I had one.
I have been in a bubble of privilege for my entire life and have never experienced any hardships. The most difficult thing that ever happened to me is adjusting to a college lifestyle, and that was solved in a few days.
Perhaps I am not feeling any grief because I have no hardship to compare the upcoming economic collapse to? Or am I just feeling it slowly, week by week? What have other readers said in the past, JMG?
9/9/16, 9:37 PM
jessi thompson said...
9/9/16, 9:51 PM
jessi thompson said...
9/9/16, 9:57 PM
jessi thompson said...
9/9/16, 9:59 PM
jessi thompson said...
9/9/16, 10:32 PM
jessi thompson said...
9/9/16, 10:42 PM
jessi thompson said...
Secondly, nuclear energy is not carbon neutral. For example, all the uranium (a trace mineral) is mined using trucks that burn fossil fuels. Helen Caldicot has a lot more information on the dangers of nuclear energy. Gail Tverberg has some great analyses on "green" technologies and the ways they're currently manufactured. For example, solar panels manufactured in China are made by burning coal. Should we really burn that coal to mke solar panels? Or should we burn the coal to make something more low tech and durable? Or should we focus on drastically cutting the amount of energy we consume to begin with?
9/9/16, 10:56 PM
KL Cooke said...
"As for the Claremont article, I'd love to have the author sit down with one of those people on the left who like to talk about the conservative juggernaut steamrollering its way over everybody..."
What I found noteworthy about the essay, within the context of the conservative source in which it appeared, is the degree to which it illustrates the schism in the Republican Party. The anonymous author taking to task his fellows for preferring the illusory comforts business-as-usual. A similar fissure among the Democrats seems to be papered over by the capitulation of Sanders and a media generated Greek chorus of “Never Trump.” (I’m no fan of Trump. I think he’s the most dangerous kind of con man—he believes his own con.) If Trump should prevail, I think he will be rendered ineffective by the same obstructionism faced by the current President, only much more so. It may be the Republican Party will go the way of the Whigs, or continue as a rump party, like the Communist Party in Russia that continues to exist in a desiccated form. Regardless, it seems business-as-usual will prevail to the inevitable cataclysm, whether that is arrived at suddenly or gradually, and Retrotopia (in whatever “real world” form it might come about) can only happen in the aftermath.
Attractive as is the Retrotopia you have painted, hesitancy to embrace your vision comes from pessimism that there will be enough like minded participants to bring it about.
9/10/16, 12:02 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
That would be very amusing to watch. No doubt that they'd have something very clever to say about the state of the world and the delivery would be worth observing too.
As to zinc, I tracked down a Reuters article from last year which as to be expected is very bullish and basically makes the claim that it all doesn't matter: Zinc's infinitely stretchable deficit deadline: Andy Home.
The interesting thing is that: "some of the world's biggest mines come to the end of their natural lives without obvious like-for-like replacements." The Century zinc mine has since closed.
The article then goes on to claim that existing operators are extending extraction on existing mines. Also older mines are also being re-opened and re-worked. But essentially the message is that new large zinc mines have not been found - anywhere. I'd like to be wrong on this matter.
Incidentally, zinc is one really important metal. Certainly the effects will be felt by the Retrotopia timeline. Ouch!
I'll check out the Permaculturenews link too. I used to write for those people.
Cheers
Chris
9/10/16, 3:56 AM
Martin B said...
The derivation is Wile E. Coyote who runs over a cliff and hovers in the air for a moment with his legs spinning before crashing to the ground.
@ JMG: In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there was a lot of destroyed property, and presumably many owners of property who died intestate or whose heirs died with them or were scattered to the winds.
What legal arrangements were made to regularize the situation? There were large profits to be made from salvage, but to whom did they accrue? Who got control of abandoned or ownerless properties? Were entire neighborhoods razed as in present-day Detroit to cut the costs of maintenance and provide further salvage opportunities?
9/10/16, 4:03 AM
trippticket said...
I imagine my departure from the internet will coincide roughly with yours! Whatever I add to or subtract from the conversation, I do so enjoy the company around here...
I expect to witness rural de-electrification (in effect if not in deed) within my lifetime though, so I will be subscribing to more than just Into the Ruins for my future snail mail reading! The second issue of which was at least as good as the first, btw, folks, and both very high quality.
9/10/16, 6:16 AM
onething said...
" I personally haven't come across anything that addresses directly the failings of why mechanization fails to lead to the lives of leisure that so many assumed would happen."
I suppose it is because the owners of the means of production weren't willing to take less than the maximum they could extract from their businesses. Getting a living on a 20-hour work week would mean being paid a higher wage, basically. The idea that we would have a short work week somehow implied that there weren't people siphoning off the top everything they could; it implied that we had some sort of true communism, in which the workers owned the factory.
9/10/16, 8:43 AM
Unknown said...
The professional season goes into the fall, but at almost every other level, from semi-pro on down, it's a spring and especially summertime sport.
Both my grandfathers, one from a small city and the other from a very small town, played in summer "twilight leagues" all through their twenties. As I understand it, in the city there were teams organized by large employers, churches, or lodges. The small towns all had a town team made up of the young men who'd been the stars in high school. In the summer, the guys who farmed presumably had somewhat more time than during the spring or fall,the ones who'd gone college were home, and the sun stayed out late. So there were evening games against nearby towns several times a week, and they were social events.
(My grandfather who played on the town team was a catcher, the only position that puts you very close to each of the other team's players, one at a time as they come up to bat; he had proud stories of the trash talk between him and George Bush of the Kennebunkport team.)
All that to say, Mr. Carr's visiting in the wrong season to see a game in progress, but he could certainly see a well-kept town field tucked in for the winter, with a banner on the fence bragging about being the home of the 2065 _____ County champions.
Jonathan.
9/10/16, 9:17 AM
latefall said...
Also, they list examples where you have hunter gatherers with many of the features of sedentary people. If I understood correctly they want to advance the hypothesis that sedentary => hierarchy, and hunter & gatherer => egalitarian is a false binary, and some hunter & gatherers may have consciously shifted from one to the other seasonally. They would use some of the seasonal overabundance to test out political systems in a temporary/playful style, in order to know what they'd be getting into if they went down that road. So one could argue a form of LARP has been around for a very long time.
There is a bunch of other interesting (for me who knows very little about these things) bits they touched upon, but unfortunately it is without proper references. But if you'd prefer more detail in text I am sure his page can help: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/staff/wengrow
9/10/16, 10:02 AM
olivier64 said...
9/10/16, 10:58 AM
SamuraiArtGuy said...
"Good news about Standing Rock.
"The Army Corps of Engineers has suspended the project by withdrawing the necessary permits and has said it will revisit its standards for ensuring that First Nations voices are heard in cases involving Native lands."
An unexpected reprieve and a blessing. Wopila tanka. Pilamaye tunkashilayapi.
But we ain't out the oil slick JUST yet. The powers that be would like nothing better than to shove this out of the news cycle, so they can "get on with it" without so much public scrutiny and sympathy for the Standing Rock Sioux. Note the critical word "paused". Fight on. Stand up. DON'T LOOK AWAY. Many leftist sites wrongly proclaimed the pipeline "killed", which is hardly the case. #MniWiconi
As for going on the eco-offensive, for Traditional Native Americans to take it to the Corporatocracy woukd be a signifigant push, given the lean resources avaialable to that community. Of course taking up with well heeled allies is one of the traps for any movement, discussed in previous posts. But I recall the activites of AIM in my youth, they appeared essentially out of nowhere to assert Red Rights, taking over Federal Facilites, Alcatraz Island, etc., at a time when many Americans thought that Native Americans had been exterminated or completely assimillated. But AIM sure as f**k took some inititiative.
9/10/16, 11:01 AM
Dustin Hamman said...
Re: Additional Themes. You may have already included something similar… Carr could exhibit surprise at the ability to purchase something in the Lakeland Republic that happens to not be hermetically sealed in plastic and styrofoam packaging.
Cheers!
9/10/16, 11:03 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
Really look forward to the book, and loving the end where the fragments of the United states drift toward retro or collapse. I think I will add my own ending past yours, where some 40 to 50 years later people start thinking about reconstitution of the Old Republic. For me at least that would be the perfect ending to a utopian story.
Regards,
Varun
9/10/16, 1:13 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
9/10/16, 1:27 PM
Nancy Sutton said...
9/10/16, 1:39 PM
latheChuck said...
1. Find a way to shrink the distances between where you eat, sleep, work, shop, socialize, and worship. (When we use less transportation, we demand less oil.) Now that all of your "eggs are in one basket", geographically speaking, invest in improving the basket! Make it beautiful; or at least, pick up the litter.
2. Improve the infrastructure. Friends in my neighborhood has been agitating for improved bicycle routes for about ten years, but we still press on. It takes time to acquire the land from hostage-holding landowners, and local-government funding.
3. Walk, bike, or carpool whenever you can, and savor the experience. (Unfortunately, with the hot weather we've had lately in Maryland (mid-90's F, mid 30s C), one can hardly travel by bike without being soaked in sweat. To be presentable at church tomorrow morning, I'll have to allow an extra 15 minutes just to travel by bike, then an extra 30 minutes to cool off!) Sometimes I chafe at the rigid schedule of my carpool, but I relish the conversations.
... and so on. The point is, every decision has its pros and cons. When the "con" of Business As Usual includes environmental and economic disaster, look especially hard for the "pro" of alternative arrangements. Celebrate the pro's!
9/10/16, 2:57 PM
temporaryreality said...
@ zach bender
I wanted to thank you for taking the time to respond to my question about how to proceed. Unfortunately, I'm very late in the process (no excuse, family life takes a lot of my attention, but this DOES point out that the time to get involved in anything is *early* on!). And by late, I mean that I'm still formulating my own opinion, and in no position to state it 'for the record' anywhere. I MAY get a comment to the planning commission/city council before the deadline next week, but that's not a guarantee.
I'm wading my way through the city's archived documents related to the General Plan (GP) process, plus trying to parse what's being said in the draft GP. It might not be as horrible as I'd originally perceived - though at this point, the suggestion that anywhere *ought to be growing* is, by itself, horrible if the underlying assumptions aren't addressed (ie. why grow? legitimate influx of new residents because ___good reason here__? Are we making good and appropriate use of what we already have? Where are we failing in our town's current reality and is "growth" just a way to mask/avoid dealing with that? Are we assuming today's access to resources is unending? etc).
I'm unfamiliar with the way this all works - I note that there is talk in the minutes of various city meetings about "articulating a future vision" and that "a great deal of time has been spent in assessment and organization of appropriate goals and policies," but I'll be darned if I can find when and where that assessment and organization has taken place. Maybe I missed all that given my tendency to focus on mostly-home. Maybe it all happened in city offices.
But like I mentioned upon opening this comment, the ideal moment is the nascent one. Now, I know, every moment holds some sort of nascency and maybe Chris can give us a good Sun Tzu passage that talks about opportune moments and opening acts and the power of early action. But I realized that even though I'm late to the table as it stands in regard to this Updated General Plan and its proceedings, I'm not late for everything. There'll be a next step and a next one. I'll try to be more informed about local happenings so I take the steps I'm capable of taking.
Thanks, everyone for the conversation that touched on defending turf vs. setting out a vision and working for something. That has been helpful.
9/10/16, 2:58 PM
latheChuck said...
So, how do we overcome this bias toward smaller work-forces? An expensive mandatory insurance plan for "full-time workers only" seems like one way to increase the number of part-time positions!
9/10/16, 3:11 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
9/10/16, 3:30 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
I second your opinions. The future also means re-engaging with one's children. It used to be that when I was a kid, parents apparently used to sacrifice so that their children could enjoy a future. I see a bit of that still even today, but progress is used as a mental "tool" so as to avoid that particular story.
Because if progress is that which provides, we apparently don't have to, and that is its reward for the true believers. It looks like a dodgy gamble to me though.
Cheers
Chris
Hi JMG,
Sorry, I meant the word affect, not effect...
Cheers
Chris
9/10/16, 4:15 PM
Jeff Balvanz said...
I'm afraid only an indie filmmaker would touch Retrotopia for a movie, and just thinking about the cost of the sets and props I'd be surprised at that. I mean, how many drones did you shoot down in that scene, and how many horses and streetcars is it going to take? It might be cheaper to just build the Lakeland Republic and get people to move in.
But...it might make a great radio drama. Then all those sets and props get replaced by a good sound effect team. According to the Wikipedia, KDVS in Davis, California still runs radio theater programs, and one of them does social and political themes. Maybe it would play there. And of course you could just podcast it.
I mean, what would be more Retrotopian than a radio drama?
9/10/16, 6:38 PM
Shane W said...
Regarding phones, I'm not sure about energy usage, but I do know that rotary dial, loop disconnect, pulse dialing is a very basic, resilient technology that dates to at least Tier 2 or 3 (early 1900s). The only reason it was not deployed by the Bell System was political, not economic. Automatic Electric, the manufacturer of equally indestructible phones for the General System and other Independent telcos, invented the dial and held its patent (hence the "automatic" in its name). The Bell System and Western Electric did not want to pay Automatic for the use of its patent, so they kept using operators. There was one instance in California where Bell bought an exchange and attempted to revert back to operators, but the customers, in true California fashion, protested, and kept their dial service (anyone who has worked California customer service knows how demanding they can be--California is truly "exceptional" in that it really is the "land of exceptions") One nice convenience that Lakeland might reinstate is 5-digit dialing for same-exchange calls. There is a small town in my county, Midway, that still had their old step switch when I was in high school (90's), and they could still call each other by dialing the last five digits. Advertising in Lexington before the 70s would only list the last five ("phone 5-5555 for Bill's Shoe Repair")--I guess all of Lexington at that time was on the same exchange? Supposedly, Lexington's exchange was "AShland" (27X-), but it was never used in advertisements of business phone numbers, only the last five. I most definitely think the old pre-divestiture model of telephone service is Lakeland's model: highly regulated utility, long distance subsidizes local--hence, local service is affordable and unlimited, and long distance costs a fortune, and is only used by businesses and sparingly by individuals. Most homes will be on party lines, and part of the strong regulation is that the phone company is responsible for providing adequate pay phone coverage in poorer urban and high cost rural areas for those who can't afford even a party line.
As to touch tone, we didn't get our first pushbutton phone until the late 80s, and my parents would never pay extra for touch tone service, so our pushbutton phones were set to dial pulse until they converted/stop charging up in the 90s. I remember, one by one, going around and replacing the "connecting blocks" (grandparents) and four-prong jacks (parents) with modular jacks as we gradually replaced our phones. Am I the only one who grew up with the "General System" and Automatic Electric phones? My grandparents had a teal green Automatic Electric wall phone with the side chrome switchook in one of those built-in-the-wall phone nooks w/the phone book shelf underneath. Is everyone else a Bell System/Western Electric veteran?
9/10/16, 6:46 PM
Shane W said...
9/10/16, 6:56 PM
Steve Morgan said...
On the yard sign/bumper sticker thread, no signs seen for either presidential candidate in Boulder county, CO. Maybe half a dozen Hillary bumper stickers, compared to 10 times as many Bernie leftovers, and perhaps 40 times as many Obama/Biden leftovers from '08 and '12.
At the Scottish Highland festival in Estes Park today a food stand had three tip jars:
Trump (with his picture on it) - half full
Hillary (with her picture on it) - slightly less full
FREEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOM! (with picture of Mel Gibson as William Wallace) - overflowing at twice the diameter
Also seen, a t-shirt with a picture of two Corvette sports cars with the phrase "At least America is still building rocket ships!"
9/10/16, 6:57 PM
Shane W said...
I wanted to second your experience with Canada. Although I'm from KY, and spent time in Ontario, the difference between community cohesion is palpable. There is way more social trust in Canada, and communities are tighter knit, and spontaneously get together and do things for each other in a way they don't here, even in the South.
9/10/16, 7:00 PM
Shane W said...
9/10/16, 8:50 PM
patriciaormsby said...
Years later, the next time I worked up the courage to use a telephone, I got the non-English speaking Greek mother of a classmate on the line, who sounded furious with me.
The next time I tried phoning someone was high school, stuttering in sheer terror at a friend.
@JMG, I think you have already reflected my input (or maybe not) several months back with the mentioning of noblesse oblige. That is such a nice and important element in this story! It may be too much to ask (and I'll understand) to mention tech addiction. A couple of kids pointing at an oldster with his handheld something-or-other, and one of them says, "Our grandpa's tech addiction bankrupted the family!" "What, a hacking?" "No! He just had to keep up with everything, and you know it was all just an illusion anyway."
The only reason I bring up this personal refrain of mine is what I know about collapses or other major social transformations is that one family member with an addiction can really wreak havoc. The system changes and while people are getting used to how the new one works, the quick and creative scammers get to work mopping up loose assets. One handy means is servicing addictions for a reward.
Katie Singer's most recent "Electronic Silent Spring" newsletter reported: "Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, former clinical professor at Stony Brook Medicine and author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids--and How to Break the Trance (St. Martin's), has found treating heroin and crystal meth addicts easier than 'lost-in-the-matrix video gamers or Facebook-dependent social media addicts.'" Wondering how they'll cope...
Thank you for that link back to the original Green Wizardry post, too! That gets me thinking (like you usually do) that the handiest choice of translation of "wizard" is "mahotsukai," but the image of that here is mostly via Disney and Time Warner. They have a much better, familiar choice from China: "sen'in," and I knew a person with that honorary title, who lived year-round at the top of a mountain. The strongest image there, though, is being able to subsist on mists supplemented with lichens, and it really seems closer to "hermit." But Japan had the kind of people you described, and still has them, in fact, carrying forward old knowledge on local herbs and agricultural techniques, for example, and providing Taoist mystical guidance and purifying/divining ceremonies involving fire or steam. In folk Shinto, it is mostly women doing this, and it is quite empowering to them. The men do something similar in Shugendo (syncretic Buddhism/Shinto), but it seems more regimented. The words for such practitioners would be "miko" and "yamabushi," respectively. I've never encountered an "onmyoji" but that would be a male Shinto wizard.
Quin Arbeitman suggested keeping "Green" as it is, because the Japanese are all familiar with it. The problem I see, though, is they are all familiar with it through "Greenpeace," who made a bad first impression. Their own word, "midori" lacks that baggage, but otherwise has a similar meaning, so I will go with that.
It will be much much easier translating relevant parts of that post of yours than that two-word title!
9/10/16, 9:43 PM
patriciaormsby said...
9/10/16, 10:13 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Pygmycory, that would be too funny. Please do write it!
Jessi, I wonder if you could include some reference to what you're commenting on -- I have no idea what you're talking about here.
Hammer, it's not necessarily a fast process, and when you haven't yet had to face the loss of something that's important to you, it can feel very abstract. That will likely change in a hurry as the future tightens around our necks!
KL, the thing I find most interesting about the article in retrospect is that the conservatives the author lambastes are doing exactly what so many liberals are doing -- talking about how unbearable the situation is and then doing exactly nothing to change things. I may just reference it in an upcoming post with that point in mind.
Cherokee, many thanks -- a zinc shortage it is!
Martin, I don't happen to know, and since it's not something with a significant bearing on the book, I don't expect to work it out.
Trippticket, by all means stock up on reading material! Into the Ruins is shaping up to be a very good magazine -- I keep on feeling, when reading it, as though I've gotten a subscription to Weird Tales or the like from the very first issue -- and the forthcoming magazine from Founders House, Mythic, looks very promising as well. (Full disclosure: I have a regular column in the first and have placed a story in the second.) There are doubless plenty of other interesting things out there too.
Unknown Jonathan, okay, that definitely works -- and it stresses the local, small-scale, nonprofessional nature of Lakeland sports, which is important.
Latefall, thank you. The First Nations out where I grew up, on the Pacific coast, were a constant annoyance to anthropologists because the only crop they grew was tobacco -- other than that it was hunting, fishing, and gathering -- and yet they had aristocracies, intricate social hierarchies, monumental architecture, a system of visual communication that would probably have evolved into writing if they'd been left alone for another thousand years, and a lot of other things that you're not supposed to have unless you've got agriculture.
Olivier, that's good to hear. It suggests a degree of attention to reality far from common these days!
Samurai, AIM is *exactly* the sort of thing I have in mind. Notice the way the Native peoples did the good cop-bad cop routine on the government, with the very serious peaceful respectable activists on the one side and AIM making as much trouble as possible on the other. That kind of one-two punch is another basic activist skill that's been forgotten in recent decades -- and it accomplished a lot for Native peoples and, in other contexts, a lot of others as well.
9/10/16, 11:14 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Varun, I'm less than sure that that's a best-case scenario. The United States was a good size when it had thirteen states; by the time it crossed the Mississippi, I think it had already exceeded the optimum size for a nation.
Bill, because it's my story, of course, and I have something else to put into it before it ends. ;-)
Nancy, I'll quietly back away, and leave that project to someone who wants to invest the time and effort.
LatheChuck, those are good examples on a personal scale. There are other things that can be done on larger scales -- based on some of the things you've said, for example, your church is doing some very constructive things. As for leisure from automation, most definitions of "leisure" don't include starving in the streets -- the question is why we got people starving in the streets rather than having leisure time.
Jeff, fun! That really does sound like a good Retrotopian touch -- and in fact I've already put a radio drama into the revised story (Carr listens to the radio while he's sick in bed, and that's one of the programs).
Shane, I've never really known what to say when people talk about this or that writing technique. I don't use writing techniques. I just try to tell an interesting story, and one of the main things that keeps a story interesting is that very often, the plot takes the reader by surprise. I'd had this turn of events in mind from the beginning, as a deliberate contrast to the way that Ernest Callenbach ended Ecotopia.
Steve, fascinating. I'd have tipped Wallace myself.
Patricia, what about gyoja? That's the one other word I know for a more-or-less wizard, though I'm not too sure of its exact connotations. On the other hand, if you want to make it "Green Miko," I'd have no trouble with the gender switch.
9/10/16, 11:25 PM
Martin B said...
One day I caused consternation by attempting to walk several miles home from primary school when my lift was late. For a couple of hours I was off the map until friendly strangers took me in and informed my parents of my whereabouts. "Why didn't you phone us from school?" my mother asked. Simple. I'd been told over and over that the telephone is "not for little children to play with". It never crossed my mind to use it to phone home.
As late as the 1970s I was using public phones with a crank handle you had to turn to get the attention of the lady at the exchange. If you had no change on you for the money box but talked nicely to them they would let you phone for free provided you promised to pay later. This was in a small community where everyone knew everyone, so they'd know if you didn't pay.
The crank-driven telephone generators were also used by the security police to extract confessions. A guy brought one to school one day and we tried it out. Ouch! They give you a nasty kick.
One modern innovation that must stay is the coiled-coil plastic coated cord connecting the handset to the phone. Those old phones had fabric-covered plain cords that always got twisted, no matter how hard you tried to untwist them. You couldn't just pick the handset up and talk. You had to dangle and untwist the cord first.
Another retro thing we can do without is the fuse box with the porcelain fuses. Trip switches are so much better than those scary old fuses you had to pull out and rewire, often with a hairpin or fencing wire or whatever came to hand because you couldn't find the card with the correct grades of fuse wire.
9/11/16, 12:13 AM
Unknown said...
The scrap metal operation I worked for a few years ago was hooked up with an operation in Detroit (iirc) that was working on technology that stripped and recovered the zinc from galvanised steel. It was described as an urban Zinc mine by management and was seen to be a company maker, at least until the greed and corruption killed the company. Don't know what happened to the research.
Loss of zinc will have far reaching ramifications for livestock agriculture. Even the best galvanised fence eventually needs work, and staples in treated posts do not last. Electric fences have drastically reduced the amount of wire used, but require plastic to provide the insulators, which often break down from the UV light over a decade or two. Perhaps shepherding will make a comeback...... And galvanized steel is mandatory in any yarding and structural frameworks if you want them to last.
9/11/16, 2:15 AM
onething said...
Where I live is rural and it's only about 20 years since they got rid of the party line system, but several years ago we went from dialing a 7-digit number locally to having to dial the area code any time we dial. If it's in the same county, we do not dial a 1. Do you know why they would do that?
9/11/16, 6:09 AM
Urban Harvester said...
9/11/16, 6:34 AM
trippticket said...
who said "The point is, every decision has its pros and cons"
This has been a big topic in our homeschooling lately: systems thinking. My wife is a horse lover and was reading an article yesterday morning about the BLM rounding up something like 44,000 wild horses, not for slaughter and market, which would be bad enough, but just to exterminate to make more room for cattle grazing. Our 8 y.o. daughter was mortified, and wondered out loud how to help them.
Well, like I mentioned in my earlier comment, it's up to us as consumers to make the decisions that put ugly practices out of business. We can't just say 'this is wrong, stop doing it,' and then continue engaging in acts that require the ugly behavior. You want to help the wild horses you have to stop eating conventional beef produced in this way. You want to fight breast cancer you have to stop polluting the environment and your body. You want to stop topsoil degradation you have to stop buying produce (and all its derivatives) that was grown in exploitative ways.
Of course YOU know all this, but I doubt seriously that systems perspectives are being taught in public school these days. Bill Mollison said that if you have a headache you don't take an aspirin, you stop hitting yourself in the head with a hammer! Man, if I could just get this way of thinking embedded in my children's heads...
9/11/16, 6:35 AM
Shane W said...
9/11/16, 6:38 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
That's probably true, but a guy can dream. Even with everything that's happening I still have love for the USA. In a perfect world things would workout.
9/11/16, 11:19 AM
Ed-M said...
Hi, Jo!
"Everything I have ever heard of the Great American Suburb is indeed abysmal - I looked up some images on-line, and you are right, they are truly dire from the standpoint of being liveable in a car-free society."
Indeed. It's very impossible to live out there without a car. Because a lot of jobs in the US are out in the suburbs, city-dwellers sometimes have to have cars, too. And some cities are notyhing BUT suburbs! (Liooking at you, Atlanta)
"Did you notice the plot point in last weeks ADR post where Mikkelson is salvaging a gated community? I see you have read The Mandibles? A bit familiar, isn't it?"
Yes, I did.
"However, major catastrophes and civil wars aside, the future I see for suburbs is this - inner cities will become more an more gentrified and expensive, as the wealthy always get first dibs on the best bits, and the best bits will be a walkable neighbourhood. Suburbs will be left to the poor, and will become less and less regulated."
Which means these places will bevome extremely dysfunctional.
"I think what we may see is the re-emergence of 'villages' - small, walkable communities, little centres of commerce and community retained among the rubble and returning fields of the old suburbs. Of course, there will no doubt be much violence, poverty and degradation to get through first, as is also very much in evidence in Detroit."
Oh, don't you know it. I view some YouTube videos from people driving round-a-bout Detroit and some sections now have the ambiance of a run-down US Southern redneck town that became all poor and all black.
"But think how much better it would be if there were political will to help that process along in a safer and more orderly fashion, in the manner of the Atlantic Republic's new government.."
And it usually takes saecular crises to scratch the political will together. And one is coming! Après Obama ou au plus tard, le prochaine Président des États-Unis, le déluge.
9/11/16, 12:33 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...
I think the rich taking more and more of a share is a significant part of the picture, but not the whole reason for the failure of automation to live up to expectations. It doesn't explain why during the height of the era of cheap energy in the USA, the average Amish farm was more likely to make it than the average conventional farm. That wasn't a part of most future scenarios predicted in the early/mid 20th century, although I'm not sure what the Amish themselves were thinking at that time.
9/11/16, 1:21 PM
David, by the lake said...
I have served on my (smallish) city's Planning Commission for the past 6 years. I don't know how the corresponding body operates where you live, but here, it is a 7-member body with 4 public citizen members, plus 3 ex-officio members (city manager as chair, city engineer, and a city council member). Service is voluntary, but rewarding. We advise the city council on issues re land-use, conditional use permits, zoning, and the like. If you have an opportunity to get involved in your community's planning body, I would encourage you to do so. It provides ample opportunity to influence policy and nudge the community in a better direction. One thing that I tend to champion is home-occupation businesses, which I see s a vehicle for establishing a more localized economy.
@JMG
More on-topic re Retrotpoia generally, but a few notes on recent experiences. I've been working on developing my gardening skills, with my 6 beds in our community garden, and I have come to acknowledge (as I've noted on the other blog) a certain pull towards earth-centric activities in general. So, I have started to pay attention to opportunities to learn about hobby-farming and larger-scale gardening in particular, as I see this as something of a calling. Recently, I was very much looking forward to viewing a show on our local public television channel re farming (Wisconsin Homegorwn Farmer), which followed three farming families/individuals and their endeavors. I was rather disappointed to see that the show was half an advertisement for the University of Wisconsin, which was touted in each of the stories as a vehicle toward better and more efficient farming. I was wanting to learn something else,I suppose. More homestead oriented.
On the other hand, I have a pumpkin brown ale fermenting in my basement, a pumpkin-honey mead keeping said ale company, and a corn-potato-cabbage chowder (all sourced from my garden) simmering on the stove. One step at a time, n'est-ce pas?
9/11/16, 2:07 PM
pygmycory said...
Other First Nations have been issuing notices to salmon farms.
They have a limited amount of power to actually force the issue, but it is seizing the initiative and putting companies operating on first nations land on the defensive. I'd say that there has been a significant shift in the power structure in their favor in BC in the last 20 years.
9/11/16, 3:49 PM
pygmycory said...
9/11/16, 4:04 PM
Shane W said...
@onething,
your area underwent an overlay: basically, when an area code exhausts its number pool, the state Public Service/Utility Commission can do one of two things: split the area code into two, usually giving the more urban of the areas the old area code while giving the more rural area the new code; or overlay the same geographic area with a new area code, which means that theoretically, people next door to each other could have different area codes. Overlays necessitate 10 (or in the case of California, 11) digit dialing b/c the system has no way of "knowing" which area code you mean to dial w/out dialing it, since two or more area codes are in operation in the same geographic area. California, as usual, is "weird" b/c "1" signals you are dialing a 10 digit number, not making a long distance call--people in large geographic area codes in California can make long distance calls using just the 7 digit phone number.
9/11/16, 4:34 PM
Shane W said...
9/11/16, 4:37 PM
David, by the lake said...
Potentially OT, but perhaps pertaining to the blog generally, I had a sudden thought. Why is it do you think that we Americans have such an fetish with respect to Britain? From James Bond to public television, we have a definite Anglophilia. Is it because we, like the Romans, emulate our cultural our predecessors?
9/11/16, 4:53 PM
John Roth said...
The way telephone numbers work is a bit complicated. Back in the day, if the second digit was 0 or 1, it had a special meaning. That’s why, if you look at the key pad on a telephone, neither 0 nor 1 have letters assigned to them. So if you dialed RY6-6666 (pronounced R’rleh six) the exchange knew that it was a local number, while if you dial 411 or 911 it switches you to a shared, public service number. It’s that 1 in the second digit that made the crossbars do something different.
When we got national dialing with area codes, the second digit of all area codes was either 0 or 1, which told the switching equipment that you’d just dialed an area code instead of an exchange. That was enough to give 128 area codes, which was plenty. Right? Um, no. That’s why you have to dial all ten digits - with the number of numbers we need, those very convenient 0 and 1 clues went away.
All-number calling happened when they figured out how to use those 0 and 1 codes for local exchanges. Since they didn’t have letters, they moved away from those easy-to-remember mnemonics. My “local exchange,” for example, is 803. Look at the phone pad, and there is no way you can make a mnemonic out of that.
There are mnemonic techniques that you can use to memorize these things. Using the Major System, 803 is 8 -> f or v, 0 -> s, z or a soft c, and 3 -> m. Season with vowels to taste. So 803 could be fizzam. Good way of confusing someone who isn’t in on the system.
When an area code runs out of numbers, there are two possible ways of dealing with it. One is to split the area code, which is what happened here in New Mexico a few years ago, and what’s happened in the Chicago area where I’m from, a bit farther back. The other is to simply overlay another area code on the whole area, which is what happened in the Atlanta area.
Both of them cause quite a bit of pain while they’re happening, and both of them mean you’re going to have to dial 10 or 11 digits at least part of the time. That extra 1 on the front is more of a billing convenience than anything else today: it tells the equipment that you’re dialing long distance.
@Shane
Back when I was a wee lad, we dialed 4 digits for local calls, and put a fifth digit on the front for a couple of different exchanges. This was in the 50s, out in the country where we still had a party line. Phones weren’t all that common until well into the second half of the 20th century. My grandmother had a pay phone in her home, for example - she got tired of moochers using her phone on her phone bill, and badgered the phone company into installing it.
9/11/16, 4:56 PM
Shane W said...
wow, I'd heard that telephone systems outside the US in the past were way behind the US, but I had no idea how much so. Regarding trip switches, which we call circuit breakers, I agree, but I think that copper will be in too short a supply in Lakeland to continue three-wired grounded (earthed) service, and will revert to two-wire ungrounded (unearthed) service. To this day, many advanced countries do not ground their outlets, and personally, if I had an older home with two-wire service, I wouldn't spend the money to retrofit it w/three-wire grounded unless it was knob & tube. If it was two-wire "snakeskin" Romex, it would be safe enough for me, and I'd keep it and the historic two-pronged outlets. While I'm sure it has happened, I've never been shocked by an appliance w/the ground pin removed, and I don't know of anyone who has. If I had a house w/two-wire Romex, I'd only put in a few grounded outlets for electronics which require grounding for the surge protector to work properly.
9/11/16, 5:13 PM
Shane W said...
https://www.oldphoneworks.com/automatic-electric/
http://www.oldphoneshop.com/pages/about-us.html
9/11/16, 5:17 PM
John Roth said...
Anything that researches the past tends to fall into a few traps. One is the assumption of progress, where the the farther back you go, the more primitive it has to be. Another is that, if the researcher can't see it, it doesn't exist. A lot of what's going on in current anthropology is trying to get rid of this; some of the side effects aren't very pretty.
There's a temple complex in what is now Turkey that's at least 10,000 years old, long before agriculture. It makes one wonder how a foraging culture could have focused the resources to build and maintain the thing.
9/11/16, 5:39 PM
Nastarana said...
9/11/16, 5:48 PM
onething said...
"I think the rich taking more and more of a share is a significant part of the picture, but not the whole reason for the failure of automation to live up to expectations. It doesn't explain why during the height of the era of cheap energy in the USA, the average Amish farm was more likely to make it than the average conventional farm."
This seems to me to be a very different question. I would venture to guess that the Amish made it because they don't go into debt, and probably other factors like having integrated farms that are all together with the household economy.
9/11/16, 6:02 PM
Mon Seul Desir said...
onething.
Ten number dialing resulted from the introduction of cellphone service which caused very rapid increase of assigned numbers which lead to area code overlays, ie multiple area codes for the same region. Even a local call could need an area code.
A good resouses for the history of dialing plans: http://www.lincmad.com/index.html
9/11/16, 6:07 PM
Hammer said...
Thanks. I'll keep taking the fear in little bits every week, in case it will lessen the impact later on. At least the experience of collapse will make any future death of a family member less traumatic!
Shane W.:
Lakeland could just use higher voltages and thinner wires. Or use slightly thicker aluminum wires. Maybe North America and Japan originally used 120v because copper was cheaper to them.
9/11/16, 9:17 PM
Unknown said...
JMG, latefall, John Roth--I think there is a straightforward explanation for that amazing pre-agricultural temple complex in Turkey, and Pacific Northwest hunter-gatherers like the Kwakiutl having permanent buildings, monuments and a complex society, and also for why those appear to be rare and exceptional.
In order for a society to develop a complex material culture which includes building long-lasting large structures, it needs to have a reliable economic surplus and it needs to be able to acquire that surplus without nomadism or transhumance. All I mean by this is that the local population is able to acquire a varied diet and plenty of it without spending most of their waking hours gathering, trapping or growing food, and without moving around all the time.
In order to have a reliable food surplus for a city sized population, you need agriculture. However, you can have a complex of sedentary villages within easy traveling distance of each other without agriculture, relying entirely on hunting, fishing, gathering, and low-tech methods of managing the hunting and gathering grounds for maximum productivity (e.g. lighting small fires in the forest to clear out old brush and make space for plants that provide nutritious browse for the deer.) It isn't possible to do this everywhere on the planet, only in areas that are especially rich with plants and animals humans can eat.
The Garden of Eden story has been explained as a memory of a prehistoric time when the Tigris-Euphrates delta was a place like that. What happened during the Neolithic Revolution was that the farmers and herders outbred the hunter-gatherers, went looking for additional lands to farm and graze, and they drove the pre-agricultural people off the richest lands into the wastelands that the farmers didn't want. If you don't have access to the salmon run, the fertile river bottom land, the most species-rich forest, etc. , it takes a lot more time to gather and catch enough food, and big settled hunter-gatherer villages are no longer possible.
Most of the places on earth where those villages once were have been built over by later cultures or erased by changes in topography or vegetation. The ones that survived long enough to be recorded, or that left substantial artifacts, are flukes.
Between the ice ages there may have been a lot of them, and during the last ice age there may have been others on coasts that are now under the wave.
9/11/16, 9:37 PM
Unknown said...
I grinned from ear to ear when I heard that, and thought immediately of you. I will meet him sooner or later (Tasmania is a small place and I regularly attend field days where he works) and I will enjoy referring him to this blog.
Cheers
eagle eye
9/12/16, 12:05 AM
Unknown said...
Gobekli Tepe for those who are interested.
There is a guy in the US who has a theory that the statuary in the Egyptian monuments is constructed using a ststem very similar to what we know as CNC machining. I found his arguments quite reasonable.
Chris Dunn, google Gizapower and his name for his website.
Cheers
eagle eye
9/12/16, 12:21 AM
latefall said...
Yeah I think you mean Göbekli Tepe - they mention it as well. I hadn't heard of it before but it really is quite interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ok29INpVxL8
9/12/16, 12:28 AM
Shane W said...
9/12/16, 3:33 AM
trippticket said...
Re: Anglophilia
I like to think that part of the reason I fit this description is because the Brits are farther along the arc of imperial decline than America is, and their social/economic/political commentary fits my mindset better than garden-variety American thinking does. Americans are still trying to figure out how every Earthling can have a car and air conditioning like they do. The Brits were popularizing P.G. Wodehouse's "Jeeves and Wooster" a quarter century ago...
And then Brexit today. I'm still pretty pleased with that. It all shows a more realistic grasp of the future than you get anywhere in America.
9/12/16, 4:56 AM
trippticket said...
who said "Electric fences have drastically reduced the amount of wire used, but require plastic to provide the insulators, which often break down from the UV light over a decade or two."
May be running down a rabbit hole here, but I often wonder why people worry so much about plastics taking forever to degrade. Ever found a 5-gallon bucket in the woods that's been sitting there for a decade or more? Move it even a little and you'll have shards. Then your example. Styrofoam disintegrates even faster.
And we don't even have a plastic-eating microbe on the scene yet.
Going back to ceramic insulators doesn't strike me as much of a logistics issue. Might cost the end user more, but...
9/12/16, 5:09 AM
Ashtead said...
On the increase of the so-called «leisure» from automation, what might be said to have happen, is that the automation has indeed caused less time needed to be spent on working, just like regular leisure. However, the other part of this that would have made it real leisure is missing, since no-one gets paid for their time off. Whether that ever was a reasonable demand is questionable, but that part of the story seems to have fallen out of sight somewhere along the line.
9/12/16, 6:08 AM
Phil Harris said...
"John
Potentially OT, but perhaps pertaining to the blog generally, I had a sudden thought. Why is it do you think that we Americans have such an fetish with respect to Britain?... "
Forgive me jumping ahead of JMG answer. Could be interesting - but seems unaccountable to me this side of the pond. People from Japan seem to enjoy actually coming here - my daughter who has Japanese friends suggests it is because they like being tourists. Perhaps this has some resonance your side, though you prefer a more couch-based interest? Or is it a bit like paying to get a DNA test? 'Yes, 3% Neanderthal, wow!'
best
Phil H
9/12/16, 7:10 AM
Glenn said...
"The First Nations out where I grew up, on the Pacific coast, were a constant annoyance to anthropologists {Snip!} and a lot of other things that you're not supposed to have unless you've got agriculture."
We must know different anthropologists. The ones I know point out that the critical element for a complex culture is a food surplus. Before European contact, the Pacific Coast north of Baja California was one of most food rich natural environments in the world.
On a tangential topic, that of technology not necessarily dictating culture, something you've emphasized in this series; I attended a very interesting talk at the Wooden Boat festival in Port Townsend this weekend. "Seawomen of Iceland". From settlement around the first millennium C.E. to the mid 19th century, when influence from Europe began to have a greater effect, an average of a third of the Icelandic population going to sea in fishing boats and local coasters were women.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
9/12/16, 8:19 AM
Steve in Colorado said...
I don't disagree with the assessment of the quality of modern electronic products. But the problem is NOT that they are electronic or digital; it's in the design and manufacturing.
I have worked most of my life in the "digital" arena, making and designing products (gadgets mostly), and they are made this way by intention. And it is not really all that different than anything else made today: shoes, shirts, cars, toasters, you name it. The modern mentality is "use it up, throw it away, buy a new one". Few people fix old things and manufactures are happy to oblige this trend (and no doubt played some part in creating it), it reduces their manufacturing costs and ups their sales.
Why are most shoes made today so that they cannot be re-soled? When was the last time you saw someone wearing jeans with patches on the knees? Or someone who brought a TV into a repair shop instead of just junking it and getting a new, bigger model. Why is it the quality old shirts I get at the second hand store feel and look better than most new shirts after a couple of cycles thru the washer?
As a society, we have forgotten about quality and thrift, and we are reaping the results. In almost every product we use, from socks to the food we eat.
Electronic stuff is no different. They could be made so that they were repairable built to last for years and years. That the touch screen on your cell phone was easily replaceable when it broke, or the battery could be simply replace, etc, etc, but they are not. Face it there just isn't the demand for it. Not that many people demand that level of quality otherwise it would be there. It used to be for electronic consumer products.
So yeah, we may be closer to the edge than most realize, but is not digital that is leading us there. It is our acceptance of crap quality at almost every level. Until that changes, the problem does not go away
9/12/16, 9:29 AM
whomever said...
9/12/16, 9:30 AM
RandomQuestionGuy said...
On the other hand, I think that the story ignores a major point. All innovation isn't trivial. A good example of non-trivial, large-scale effort innovation that literally changed the world would be the development of nuclear weapons (something I note is absent from this story). How do you address this? The Lakeland republic is nice and all, but they're basically prey to whatever nearby power decides to build a nuke, and the Confederacy should be able to do it (they got the labs and production facilities for nuclear materials in Nashville). It doesn't matter how sustainable or well-developed your society is if several such weapons can wipe you out, even if they are a long-shot innovation-wise. How does the Lakeland republic respond to that? With its own arsenal? If the slightest edge in delivery technology could mean the difference of a whole city being destroyed or not, do they let themselves fail in the race for better delivery and counter-battery systems?
9/12/16, 10:11 AM
Cortes said...
9/12/16, 1:19 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
I'd have to suggest that your idea of nukes is perhaps suggestive of a phallic talisman of ability to project power. Just sayin... They are best used as a threat.
Mate, those nukes are way complex machines and I often wonder at how well maintained those machines are. If you've ever looked into a failing airline business, one of the first things they ditch in order to stay financially afloat is maintenance. Again, just sayin...
Cheers
Chris
9/12/16, 2:35 PM
Shane W said...
your timeline is a little off, all number, 7-digit calling dates to the 70s, but all the area codes w/"0" and "1" were not exhausted till the mid 90s, when they finally had to repatriate the two codes that had been used to call Tijuana & Mexico City. Before the mid 90s, you could call long distance within your area code by dialing 1+just the number, after, you had to include the area code even if it was the same, b/c the system could no long differentiate based on the middle digit. This is how California won its exception, California customers complained, and the state PUC mandated that customers be able to call w/in their area code by just dialing the number, regardless of local or long distance--dialing "1" just signaled you were calling outside your area code. 10 digit dialing is not required unless you live in an overlay--my area code, 859, is not overlaid, and we make local calls by dialing just the phone number.
Regarding voltage, I read online that 220-240 is the preferred voltage, but that by the time it was made the standard in the mid-20th century, Americans already had way more electrical appliances than people in the rest of the world, so it would be very difficult to switch, and people would have to scrap all their appliances, so we kept 110-120V, despite its deficiencies (thicker wires, less voltage pressure, more line loss). However, we have the better frequency, 60 Hz vs. the 50 Hz the rest of the world uses--supposedly, 60 Hz is better for electrical motors, etc., but that other countries use 50 Hz. b/c it is more compatible w/the metric system.
JMG, if Lakeland is retro, and was under a longstanding trade embargo, I'm assuming that it scrapped the dual metric/customary measurements currently used in the US for strictly customary units for simplicity's sake. Please let us know if any metric survives in Lakeland--I was told that even the medical system had old customary units for pharmaceuticals/etc.
Extremely off topic, but my first call center job was a 411 operator. I got "ma'am'd" all the time. At first, if they asked, I'd tell them I was a Sir, then there'd be that awkward pause. After a while, I was just, "Frack it", and started doing phone drag. I'd even have my work drag name, "Jayne". Phone drag is much easier--you don't have to put on a face, wear stilettos or sequins. The real interesting part was the guys flirting with you. "I'm sure you're a real pretty lady." Me: (giggle)"oh, honey, you wouldn't think so if you saw me." "No, I know you must be a real pretty lady." (Sigh) Any good Southern girl knows how to tactfully rebuff a man's unwanted advances...
9/12/16, 2:39 PM
Shane W said...
9/12/16, 4:48 PM
Justin said...
It's perhaps reasonable to assign phallic qualities which most likely exist to things like ICBMS, fighter aircraft, guns, etc to explore the underlying motivations behind the proliferation of such devices. On the other hand, you have to admit, without phalli, we'd really be in a pickle as a species, no?
9/12/16, 6:46 PM
trippticket said...
In other words, automation doesn't really change our activity level, it just fetishizes automation.
9/13/16, 5:34 AM
trippticket said...
Boil rice for 5 minutes, turn it off, stick it in the insulator for half an hour, and BAM! Perfect rice every time. No stirring, no unnecessary heating of the house, just great rice. Among other things...
9/13/16, 5:48 AM
Scotlyn said...
9/13/16, 6:03 AM
RandomQuestionGuy said...
The first nukes were decidedly non-phallic, and to be even more honest, weren't all that sophisticated. Most of the sophistication in them comes from ensuring that they are as efficient as possible in achieving fission and fusion, and the rocket delivery system. But the nukes themselves will work just fine with a less sophisticated explosion system and a larger amount of fissible material, and they can be flown and dropped instead of rocketed. They are undeniably powerful weapons that can wipe out cities and almost guarantee complete safety from invasion to the country that has them. I find it odd that the greatest societally disruptive advance of the last two thousand years gets dismissed out of hand as a phallic symbol. Only two of them were ever used in war, and killed over two hundred thousand people. One could argue that if Texas and the Confederacy in the Retrotopia story had nukes, the hot war over oil would not have happened because of the threat it might escalate. It is a non-trivial topic, and I find it odd that it is completely skirted in the story, which I otherwise really like. One could argue that the invention of nuclear weapons is the reason why our society is developing towards this techno neo-feudalism, as it is.
9/13/16, 6:29 AM
PatriciaT said...
Looking forward to reading the last chapter tomorrow. Thank you.
9/13/16, 11:02 AM
Martin B said...
"This originates from the first purchases of generators from AEG for Tokyo in 1895 and from General Electric for Osaka in 1896." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan
9/13/16, 11:41 AM
John Roth said...
On phone numbers. I don't believe I specified a time line. There are a lot of places where you don't have to dial ten digits, not just California. All it requires is not being able to assign a 0 or 1 as the first digit of an exchange.
To explicate a bit more: with those nice alphabetic prefixes, they couldn't assign a 0 or 1 for either the first or second digit. That's 640 possible exchanges in an area code. Allowing 0 or 1 in the second digit expanded it to 800 and in both digits to 1,000, which is over a 50% increase in the available number of digits.
What you lose in the first bump is the ability to automatically distinguish an area code from an exchange. What you lose in the second is the ability to just dial 1 + 7 digits for out-of-area-code numbers.
It wasn't cell phones that caused the expansion in numbers. Part of it was Direct Inward Dialing. A company used to have one phone number for a lot of lines; their operator or PBX took the next few numbers to get to the right phone. Now they'll assign you a block of numbers so every employee has cis own number.
Then one of the phone companies started giving out unique phone numbers for "friends and family" dialing. And there are blocks taken up by alarm companies, where they give each of their clients a unique phone number to call rather than making their devices more complicated by having them dial a code number.
We are using a lot more phone numbers than strictly necessary.
9/13/16, 12:13 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
That is very amusing! Yes it is a pickle! Hehe!
Hi RandomQuestionGuy,
Well the fire bombing of Dresden during WWII was pretty brutal too and caused a similar affect and that didn't require nukes at all.
Nukes are used all of the time to project power, but if the other guy has them, they are a zero sum game - they are at best a threat.
I also understand that nukes were mentioned in the story earlier, or maybe that was in the comments.
You dismissed my observation about the maintenance of those particular machines by saying that we could replace those delivery machines with another bit of delivery technology without taking into account that the story represents a society in decline. That seems like a spurious argument to me.
Cheers
Chris
9/13/16, 2:51 PM
John D. Wheeler said...
What really gets me thinking along these lines is the story of the "stone age" Tasaday. Of course the general public considers anyone not living an industrial lifestyle to be primitive. But when anthropologists started studying them in depth, they found they were truly different from other uncontacted peoples; their culture did not show the same depth and maturity the others did. Linguistic and genetic analyses showed that they had diverged from the main population only a few centuries ago, around the time Europeans started showing up and taking slaves. Thus the anthropologists think the Tasaday are actually refugees. But in this context, it is the idea that there is a cultural clock showing how mature a society is that I find fascinating, and I suspect modern industrial society is quite young on that scale.
9/13/16, 3:10 PM
Shane W said...
as a phone company veteran (GTE, SBC, and AT&T, both landline and mobile) your explanation is totally off. No prefix or area code begins w/a "0" or "1" and never has--all area codes and prefixes begin with digits 2-9. No prefix ever had a "1" or a "0" in the middle prior to the mid 90s, and no area code ever had anything but a "0" or a "1" in the middle before the mid 90s. 10-digit dialing is conditioned on whether the area code is overlaid or not, not the presence of a "0" or a "1". My area code, 859, has lots of prefixes with "0s" and "1s", but we are able to make all local calls by dialing the 7 digit number. I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but it is off...
9/13/16, 4:17 PM
Unknown said...
@trippticket--I've been looking for a fireless cooker, either new or antique in working condition, for years. The Tayama thermal cookers look good. Where did you buy yours? The website only sells wholesale and has no information about retail outlets.
I emailed an inquiry to them just in case. Haven't done a web search yet.
I'm partial to soups and stews when I cook in quantity and I think I would get a lot of use out of one of those.
9/13/16, 9:15 PM
RandomQuestionGuy said...
We thankfully have the budgets for both the nuclear stockpile maintenance and the air force maintenance publicly available right now to check that statement. The yearly maintenance budget for the thousands of nuclear weapons the U.S. has is around 25 billion. The Air Force is about 170 billion. Just from that, the nukes are more efficient as a deterrent weapon, and even more efficient if you simply don't build thousands of them, since no one really needs that many. In the Retrotopia world, probably having a couple of dozen reliable nukes+delivery systems would be enough for a deterrent for a regional power, since most states do not have that many cities to target. You don't need enough nukes to wipe the whole continent, merely to threaten a single belligerent.
That being said, I'd rally like to hear from the author on this.
The bombing of Dresden (and of Tokyo) were done with conventional bombers, sure. Dresden required over 1200 heavy bombers. Nagasaki and Hiroshima required just 1. Dresden killed 25000 people. Each bomb dropped on Japan killed at least 40,000. By any metric, the nuke is, unfortunately, a much more cost-effective and efficient weapon. It needs less maintenance than 3,900 tons of bombs and 1200 aircraft, and even in the modern age it requires less maintenance than the equivalent destructive power in the form of airplanes or tanks. We could go through the manufacturing costs and such, but, again, the cost of production of a single nuke and a single plane/rocket to carry it is cheaper and faster than the cost of 3900 tons of conventional bombs and 1200 heavy bombers. The argument of simplifying costs and keeping things as efficient as possible, often used in the story, pushes any rational actor to adopt nukes. You can have a citizen's millitia for minor border disuptes, and nukes to ensure no real invasion ever starts, and it would work.
9/13/16, 10:36 PM
Scotlyn said...
The point you are making is very clear to me. For this to really work the battle has to be taken elsewhere, TOO. But not, I hope, INSTEAD.
I believe there is a binary developing here that I'm trying to find a third way out of. Because if "environment" means anything it means "home" on every single scale you can think of. And if someone fighting to defend this home or that home is wrong to do so and should be doing something else instead, then I don't know what the heart of this environmental movement can be.
9/13/16, 11:38 PM
Scotlyn said...
The "environment" needing saved is not "out there" - it is our living world, and we in it and of it.
9/13/16, 11:44 PM
pygmycory said...
Even if you ignore the ethical issues, it would completely not be worth it.
Nukes are much more useful as a threat than as a weapon that is actually used, especially when you live within a thousand km of the target!
9/14/16, 9:04 AM
Randy Darrah said...
Haven't gone through all of the comments yet, so... if I repeat some, I do apologize.
I can definitely see repair/fixit shops in LLR. Look at how well Cuba has kept all of those classic cars running in the face of isolation. And what cannot be fixed can usually be recycled. Salvage opportunities aplenty?
I think the ceramics and pottery industry would be more prominent than today. From plates and cookware to heat-shielding materials. Glass refractories and firebrick refractories as well.
Seasonal outside entertainment. Yes, festivals and even the concert from the gazebo in the town square of smaller towns.
I would think windmills and waterwheels for a power source would be prevalent. Grist and sawmills for example.
The agricultural side of things should see renewed interest in things such as proper crop rotation, including letting some fields lie fallow for a season. There are other legumes than clover, by the way. Lespedeza is one for pastures, and works very well with native grasses. minimal bloating.
A resurgence of steam powered tractors, harvesters, et cetera. This would probably also involve the travelling harvesting crews. Here in the Midwest, there are many "Old Thresher" events.
Sail power has been making a comeback, especially for cargo vessels. Think windjammers.
I can see diets being much more seasonal. Canning, Salting, Pickling, and Smoking for food preservation. A much more common occurrence not that long ago.
Many of the areas in Retrotopia remind me of The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau.
On a side note to last weeks' post about campaign signs, I have seen a few Trump bumper stickers, as well as some Bernie stickers. The only yard sign I saw was one that modified a Trump one by coloring in the T and the P. "RUM---Make America Great Again." That one at least makes more sense to me.
Looking forward to the book.
9/14/16, 9:59 AM
RPC said...
9/14/16, 10:31 AM
I Janas said...
I´m a reader of both of your blogs - could I get both in a print-version?
Thank you very much for your work!
9/14/16, 1:16 PM
heather said...
One of the handy things about the electronet fencing these days is how portable it is- easy to use to carefully manage the health of a small pasture with a few animals. Also flexible in terms of changing flock size and even species from season to season; a batch of broiler chickens in the spring, a couple of piglets in the late summer/fall, in different areas and configurations, is no problem with lightweight posts and portable solar chargers. I need to learn more about how very small scale farmers managed similar tasks in the past. Lots more human herders, no doubt, and well-trained dogs… another instance where plug-and-play is on its way out.
--Heather in CA
9/14/16, 1:34 PM
heather said...
Very late, not sure you will see this, but I thought I'd mention that I use my SunOven solar oven as a fireless cooker too. Start the rice or stew on the stovetop, and then transfer it to the solar oven box. Even if there's not much sun, the box itself is well insulated except for the glass top, which I just cover with old towels or a blanket. Another way to get some use out of the gadget.
--Heather in CA
9/14/16, 2:52 PM
Auriel Ragmon said...
Jim of Olym
PS Sometimes I wish I still had it. It would make time march slower which would be good!
9/14/16, 5:02 PM
PunditusMaximus said...
9/14/16, 5:15 PM
Glenn said...
Re. electric fences being replaced by hedgerows:
"One of the handy things about the electronet fencing these days is how portable it is- easy to use to carefully manage the health of a small pasture with a few animals. Also flexible in terms of changing flock size and even species from season to season; a batch of broiler chickens in the spring, a couple of piglets in the late summer/fall, in different areas and configurations, is no problem with lightweight posts and portable solar chargers. I need to learn more about how very small scale farmers managed similar tasks in the past. Lots more human herders, no doubt, and well-trained dogs… another instance where plug-and-play is on its way out."
They are called hurdles. Essentially, short sections of fence, 6 - 8 feet long and as tall as needed for the stock in question. The bottoms of the posts were sharpened to act as stakes, and the sections were lashed together as required. Most commonly used for sheep, as they are frequently shifted.
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
9/14/16, 7:53 PM
Neo Tuxedo said...
While looking for something completely different on my Tumblr blog, I found an answer to that question, in the form of a chain of reblogs whose previous links have all been severed. It comes off a discussion of the 2013 giant-robots-vs.-giant-monsters movie Pacific Rim, and of world leaders' decision to abandon the "Jaeger program" (the giant robots) and build a "Wall of Life" around the coastlines. This is what the previous poster in the blog chain, self-published fantasy author Alexandra Erin (who, I think, is over in Hagerstown, not far from Chambersburg or Cumberland) had to say about that:
I keep wondering what the actual endgame of the world leaders was… if they didn’t think the Kaiju would ever strike farther inland if left to run rampant, or if they thought the walls and the target-rich environment on the other side of them would always slow them down enough to be brought down with conventional weaponry, but at the end of the day I think it’s perfectly realistic to believe they had no endgame.
What’s the endgame on denying climate change? What’s the endgame on vulture capitalism destroying the consumer class that makes capitalism possible? What’s the endgame on propping up this quarter’s profits by stripmining the future? Strategies that literally have no future in them still win out.
There have been studies that show that neurologically speaking, we regard our own future selves as different people, that when we contemplate consequences of our actions down the road, the parts of the brain that activate are the same ones that happen when we regard things happening to other people. I think there’s a profound implication in this for how people who lack empathy also seem to lack any sense of long-term self-preservation even they clearly embrace it in the short-term.
The architects of the wall don’t have a plan for the future, because the future is something that happens to other people. In the here and now, they’re a thousand miles form the ocean and that’s good enough.
The "something completely different" was an alternate answer to the "what's their endgame" question, but I won't post that until and unless I actually find it.
9/17/16, 8:39 AM
Raymond Duckling said...
On what we'd like seeing explored further on the paper edition of Retrotopia.
Ii have been meditating on progress and its fruits, and I have come to the conclusion that there are 2 (actually, 3) types of benefits one gets from progress: technology and knowledge.
The work as is does a very good job at exploring the diminishing return of investment on technology development, so I will say nothing further there. It is the knowledge side of things that interest me now.
I.e. think about fire-fighters. Sure, they have much more technology now, but its benefits are eatten away by the challenges posed by having to act in a more techno-rich environment: Mechanical ladders that fall short of reaching to the highest buildings, fire retardant in garments that have to stand much hotter chemical fires, respirators that have to protect against not just regular smoke but much more toxic fumes, etc.
Yet, modern fire fighters are nonetheless more effective than their peers from 150 years ago. I suspect this has to do with having a relatively small number of people devoting
their lives to figure out the details of how fires work, and what can or cannot humans do to mess with the natural working of fires in an effective way. Then there is a larger number fo people that devotes a fair share of their time to learn that knowledge, distill specific tactics and operation procedures, and drill down those into becoming teams of people that can fight fires effectively.
From those come types 2 and 3. Some of those knowledges can be just passed down indefinitely was long as there are youngsters willing to pass the torch to the next generation. But others require a minimum of infrastructure to keep going. I don't see modern fire-fighter stations in counties of tier 1, 2, and maybe 3; though I do see every tier can have organized, trained volunteers that do hold day jobs but still serve as first (and in some cases, only) responders when needed.
I do think this part was kind of covered in the military side of things, when Clnl Papas explained the defense strategy of Lakeland Republic, but at first I dismissed this as a special case and did not think about its implications for other professions as well. Progress applies a limit on only to the "technological level" of a society, but also to its "organizational level" as well.
I do see doctors and teachers bypassing this with an appropriate use of apprenticeship, but others are not so easy. Fire-fighters come to mind, as do law enforcement. It is not hard to pick a bunch of (mostly) law abiding citizens that are not shy about using (a proper level of) violence to put trouble makers in their place, but then you end up with frontier/pose level of justice, and all the fine grained stuff about patrol work, or detective work, etc, just gets lost.
John, you probably will not open new arcs for the sake of this, but maybe you could hint at this issue while discussing the cases that are already there?
9/19/16, 9:52 AM
Neo Tuxedo said...
About five minutes later, I found it or it found me, and it is, as William S. Burroughs said of shooting up, a wildly unpretty spectacle. It explains why the Montrose administration's biggest struggle may be disentangling the Atlantic Republic from the World Bank*, why the rentier class seems to be swooping into its grave like cummings' shrill collective myth**, and why you may be wrong about AI being impossible:
http://aberrant-eyes.tumblr.com/post/142123318928/capitalism-as-geobiological-extinction-event
"What happens when human survival stops being an absolute limit on capital’s ability to infinitely expand itself? What will it mean when humanity becomes yet another barrier for capital to overcome? [...]
"By some estimates, upwards of 70% of the volume of trades in the US stock market are made by automated algorithms. These high frequency trades occur thousands of times per second at the speed of light across a globally-integrated communications infrastructure constructed to coordinate the planetary distribution of resources. This tendency in political economy is a marked shift from a few short decades ago, when trading times were measured in hours if not days. Vitally, human agency is irrelevant to these decisions. The agents which now operates a majority of finance capital are nonhuman ones. Humanity is rapidly becoming obsolete to the functioning of market economies. [I]t is naive to presume that human survival imposes an absolute limit on capital’s operation - that capitalism will reach the point at which it threatens humanity’s planetary dominance and then stop. Indeed, as the trend towards market automation shows, the more machinic, the more alien, the more inhuman which capital becomes, the more efficient its operation. [...]
"Just as the aerobic mode of production revolutionised and terminated the anaerobic population which sustained it, planetary technocapital is rapidly approaching the point at which humanity will no longer be a necessary component in its functioning. Beyond that? It’s possible all of human society to this point has served only as a precondition for the capitalised and posthuman beings still yet to come. Human history until now may be a mere trace to be detected in the geological record in a thousand thousand years by our unrecognisable descendants, as moved by our deaths as we are by the suffering of our anaerobic ancestors."
Or, alternatively, they could drive us into extinction and then, with nobody around to do maintenance on the computers that run them, follow us.
TL;DR The world economy is dominated by the closest thing to artificial intelligence we have, and we exist in the same relationship to it that the anaerobic bacteria had to the cyanobacteria at the time of the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, or possibly that the ant has to the brainworm as it climbs to the top of the leaf and waits to be devoured.
* Unless they already have and I missed or forgot where you mentioned it.
** Line 9 of "all ignorance toboggans into know"
9/20/16, 6:25 AM
Raymond Duckling said...
The article was interesting and engaging, but IMHO your fears are misplaced.
Your premise seems to be that computer assisted trading, aka High Frecuency Trading (HFT) is somehow pushing the economy into some sort of exponential self renforcing loop. This is not correct. HFT does not increase economic activity, just realocate financial resources backing preexistent economic activity over and over again.
If this realocation was done with the purpose of making the economy more "efficient" (for some objective definition of that word) you might be onto something; you'd see how HFT would asymptotically approach some "ideal allocation" of money to make maximum use of industrial capacity or whatever. That is not the case. I've never worked in the financial industry, but know people who have done so (at least one as HFT programmer). The utility function they are pursueing is short term financial gains. Sure, the algorithms are complex and try to detect patterns that humans cannot, but more often than not those patterns are related with the volatility of markets rather than the industrial capacity itself.
At the end of day, HFT does not uncover the mythic long-term pulse of the economy, but just tries to arbitrage the process of financial allocation itself by analyzing the noise in the signal and placing buy/sell calls ahead of unsophisticated investors (or other HFT machines executing an almost equivalent algorithm just a handful of microseconds slower than yourself). HFT transactions do not set new trends, they just rip off a few cents, here and there, from the naturally ocurring trends; and they do so at the cost of making the whole system much more chaotic.
That HFT is seen as the shiny new thing is, again IMHO, not a sign of strengt but of weakness. If professional investors had bigger fish to fry they would not dream on pursuing this strategy that forces them to deal with finicky computers and the weirdos that control them. To me, it looks like they are scrapping the bottom of the barrel and are using computers to scoop into the crevices that their own hands are too big and clumsky to reach.
Now... if you add the Internet of Things into the mix... that's a whole new dimension of hurt that computers could cause once they are left to pursue their mechanistic, ill-defined goals in the physical world.
9/21/16, 10:23 AM