The Retro Future: Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future
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About this ebook
To most people paying attention to the collision between industrial society and the hard limits of a finite planet, it's clear that things are going very, very wrong. We no longer have unlimited time and resources to deal with the crises that define our future, and the options are limited to the tools we have on hand right now.
This book is about one very powerful option: deliberate technological regression.
Technological regression isn't about 'going back,' it's about using the past as a resource to meet the needs of the present. It starts from the recognition that older technologies generally use fewer resources and cost less than modern equivalents, and it embraces the heresy of technological choice, our ability to choose or refuse the technologies pushed by corporate interests. People are already ditching smartphones in favor of 'dumb phones' and land lines and eBook sales are declining, while printed books rebound. Clear signs among many that blind faith in progress is faltering and opening up the possibility that the best way forward may well involve going back.
A must-read for anyone willing to think the unthinkable and embrace the possibilities of a retro future.
John Michael Greer, one of the most influential authors exploring the future of industrial society, writes the widely cited blog The Archdruid Report. He has authored more than forty books including The Long Descent and Dark Age America. He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old mill town in the Appalachians, with his wife Sara.
John Michael Greer
John Michael Greer has published 10 books about occult traditions and the unexplained. Recent books include ‘Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings’ (Llewellyn, 2001), which was picked up by One Spirit Book Club and has appeared in Spanish and Hungarian editions, and ‘The New Encyclopedia of the Occult’ (Llewellyn, 2003).
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Reviews for The Retro Future
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Another book by Greer on the unsustainability of our so-called progress and the false dichotomy between progress and utter destitution. Greer points out that there are many technological suites that can be sustained at a lower level of energy consumption than our current one and that a comfortable existence is possible using those technologies. For an more engaging view of this assertion see his fiction _Retrotopia_ which portrays a portion of a decades from now N. America with a society that values human employment over profit.