The Doom Blogging post got me thinking that I should write about something positive, so here goes.

John Michael Greer wrote a novel, entitled Retrotopia, that imagines a possible future where faith in technology doesn’t equal prosperity. Greer, as an avid historian, employs retrovation, the strategy of using the past as a resource for problem-solving in the present, to describe a fictional society that had finally noticed the declining quality of technology and adjusted public policies accordingly.

To most Americans this idea is heresy. They believe with all their might in progress: that human history is hard-wired to move from worse things to better things over time. Yet if you ask them most Americans will admit that every software “upgrade” these days has more bugs and fewer useful features that what it replaced, and every round of “new and improved” products is more shoddily made than the last. Somehow, though, a good many Americans that experience this reality still insist that the future will be a technological paradise. Of course, faith doesn’t depend on evidence, and yes, dear American reader, faith in technology has largely replaced faith in God.

In Retrotopia, Greer imagines the Lakeland Republic–where people are valued rather than markets, technology and machines. In a contrast to modern day America, where when a corporation spends money to buy machines they count as assets, and there are tax benefits from depreciation, but when the same firm spends money to hire employees to do the same tasks they don’t count as assets. Furthermore, when a company hires employees, it has to spend much more that the cost of wages and salaries. It has to pay into the social-security system, health-care, unemployment, etc. for the people it hires. If a corporation buys machines instead, it doesn’t have pay any of those things. Nor is there kind of tax to cover the cost to society of replacing the jobs that went away due to automation, or to pay for any increased generating capacity the electrical grid will require to power the new machines, or any of the other costs that automation places on the rest of the community.

In the US, tax codes and other government regulations subsidize automation and punish employment. But we’re meant to ignore how this public policy contributes to making one more “economical” and “efficient” than the other. However, in the Greer’s world, when a company hires an employee to do a job their only cost is wages and salaries, and any other money put into training counts as credit against other taxes since it helps give the fictionalized Republic a better trained workforce. Social-security, health care and the rest of it comes out of other taxes, rather than punishing employers for hiring people.

As the story progresses, there are many other examples of a world where people and society benefit from a different way of living. The biggest contrast to our present milieu is how people in the Lakeland Republic are valued rather than viewed as superfluous. Instead of giant corporations, factory-farms and consumers, there are small businesses, family farms and citizens. Instead of people buried in debt there’s public banking. Then there’s the difference in spending priorities, where instead of a world-wide empire of bases the Lakeland Republic Army focuses on the actual defense of their territory.

The caveat is that this fictional republic is only possible because of a brutal civil war that’s decimated the United States as we know it. As Greer relates: “The year is 2065. Decades ago, the United States of America fell apart after four brutal years of civil war, and the fragments coalesced into new nations divided by economic and political rivalries. Most of the post-US America is wracked by poverty and civil strife, with high-tech skyscrapers rising above crowded, starving slums—but one of the new nations, the Lakeland Republic of the upper Midwest, has gone its own way, isolated from the rest by closed frontiers and trade embargoes.”

Retrototopia, deconstructs not just our faith in technology but our faith in ideology and offers a lens to view just how dis-functional and deformed America has become and, more importantly, that there are alternatives to the frantic late-stage capitalist neoliberalism that’s subsumed us. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are always alternative ways of organizing our society despite Margaret Thatcher’s admonishment, an issue that has animated this blog since the very beginning.