Tag: retro-futurist

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Why retro-futurist?

There’s a reason this site focuses on retro-futurist techno-utopias, and not techno-utopias in general: Because in many cases the retro-futurist ones are already possible.

There are an infinite number of techo-utopias that are impossible—some that are only impossible now, others that will probably always be impossible. Those aren’t really very interesting. But other techno-utopias are possible, and among the retro-futurist ones the hunting grounds are rich.

What is “retro-futurist” anyway?

Anything written about the future is futurist. I use “retro-futurist” to describe things written in the past about the future they saw.

Of course, retro-futurist visions are rarely realized just as the visionary anticipates. Even so, there are many common threads of retro-futurist thinking that have come to be realized. For example, one broad category of retro-futurist techno-utopias feature technological advances that reduce the need for human labor to the point that an ordinary worker could provide for the necessities of life with only a few hours of labor per week. Those retro-futurist techno-utopias are already possible. We have the technology.

Why aren’t we already there?

If techno-utopias are already possible, why are we living in a world with so much hunger, poverty, and misery?

There are a lot of reasons, some historical, some having to do with human nature, and others with the limits of technology (and the planet). But just because we aren’t all living in a techno-utopia doesn’t mean that any particular one of us can’t choose to build a techno-utopia just for ourselves.

Helping you do so is exactly what this site is for.

Choose a techno-utopia that’s a utopia for you. Choose a retro-futurist one, to increase the chance that the one you choose will be possible today.

Then get started building it. That’s what this site is all about.

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A couple of techno-utopias

For decades, forward thinkers have been promising us a future where technology solves the big problems of today: a techno-utopia.

Of course, what your techno-utopia looks like depends very much on what you think are the big problems of today.

For example economist John Maynard Keynes was worried about poverty, so his techno-utopia was one in which technological improvement made us all much wealthier:

We may be on the eve of improvements in the efficiency of food production as great as those which have already taken place in mining, manufacture, and transport. In quite a few years—in our own lifetimes I mean—we may be able to perform all the operations of agriculture, mining, and manufacture with a quarter of the human effort to which we have been accustomed.

Keynes goes on for the rest of the paper to talk about how, in such a world, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

Another forward thinker, Karl Marx, saw how the division of labor was forcing each person to specialize in a single productive activity. He yearned for a utopia where it was:

. . . possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

I have my own ideas about techno-utopias, and I’ll talk about them here and there, but this site is about helping you build your own techno-utopia—the techno-utopia that solves for you the most pressing problems of today.

The Keynes quote is from “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (pdf link).

The Marx quote is from The German Ideology.