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BELL_BOTTOM_FUTURES
May-July 2020
There's a bit in Ernest Callenbach's
1975 novel "Ecotopia", where a
home-owner is proudly showing off a "Ecotopia" is a utopian
high-tech light-weight extruded foam Science Fiction novel set in
house-- the narrator's native guide is a future where the West
reluctant to comment at first, but he Coast has seceded from the
eventually reveals that he absolutely United States to form a more
*hates* these things. There's another enlightened union...
style of ecotopian housing the guide
much prefers, something with a low-tech
"natural" vibe-- log cabins or teepees
or something like that.
This reflects a real split among the
environmentalist greens that continues to
this day: there are techno-optimist greens
that are ascendant these days, but there's My own side is a faction
still a back-to-nature faction that lean you might call the
toward "going back to my plow". "radioactive greens".
RADIOACTIVE_GREENS
The back-to-nature idea seemed popular
(certainly it's proponents were vocal)
back in the 70s, but the idea was The pro-labor faction of
nearly abandoned in the 80s-- that the left seems to include
fliration with anti-technology some back-to-nature sentiment:
sentiment was suddenly abandoned after
the US had been shocked to learn they UTOPIAN_GREEN
now had serious industrial competition
from the likes of Japan. Which could explain
the "Planet of the
There was also a growing enthusiasm Humans" documentary
for microcomputer technology-- of Jeff Gibbs and
when "high-tech" was democratized Another problem Michale Moore.
it stopped seeming quite so scary. was the shocking
discovery made by HUMAN_PLANET
The personal much of the
computer vs the counter-culture
politically that farm work is
correct. hard work.
It's a bit of cheap shot, but here goes:
the documentary "Planet of the Humans" is
critical of Industrial Civilzation, but
it's a product of cheap digital video, and I would expect Jeff Gibbs would
distributed on the internet at the explain that in making his
google-owned youtube. And it's unlikely documentary he might very well
the filmmaker traveled around on bicycle. have been relying on modern
industy (vidcam, computers,
It was one of the puzzles of he cars, planes) but this was a
60s back-to-nature hippies: how necessary compromise to alert
did they square that with people of the problems in order
electric guitars and amplifiers?. to reach a de-industrialized
future.
And they didn't
stick to just But then, some of the arguments
"natural" in this documentary are on the
psychedelic level of "they burn coal to build
drugs, either. those solar panels!": even if
true, if you're an advocate of
solar what you'd say is this is
just a temporary state of
affairs, using dirty present-day
tech to bootstrap a future with
cleaner tech.
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