Home » Posts tagged 'past'
Tag Archives: past
The Whisper of the Shutoff Valve
The Whisper of the Shutoff Valve
Last week’s post on the impending decline and fall of the internet fielded a great many responses. That was no surprise, to be sure; nor was I startled in the least to find that many of them rejected the thesis of the post with some heat. Contemporary pop culture’s strident insistence that technological progress is a clock that never runs backwards made such counterclaims inevitable.
Still, it’s always educational to watch the arguments fielded to prop up the increasingly shaky edifice of the modern mythology of progress, and the last week was no exception. A response I found particularly interesting from that standpoint appeared on one of the many online venues where Archdruid Report posts appear. One of the commenters insisted that my post should be rejected out of hand as mere doom and gloom; after all, he pointed out, it was ridiculous for me to suggest that fifty years from now, a majority of the population of the United States might be without reliable electricity or running water.
I’ve made the same prediction here and elsewhere a good many times. Each time, most of my readers or listeners seem to have taken it as a piece of sheer rhetorical hyperbole. The electrical grid and the assorted systems that send potable water flowing out of faucets are so basic to the rituals of everyday life in today’s America that their continued presence is taken for granted. At most, it’s conceivable that individuals might choose not to connect to them; there’s a certain amount of talk about off-grid living here and there in the alternative media, for example. That people who want these things might not have access to them, though, is pretty much unthinkable.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Retro Future
The Retro Future
Is it just me, or has the United States taken yet another great leap forward into the surreal over the last few days? Glancing through the news, I find another round of articles babbling about how fracking has guaranteed America a gaudy future as a petroleum and natural gas exporter. Somehow none of these articles get around to mentioning that the United States is a major net importer of both commodities, that most of the big-name firms in the fracking industry have been losing money at a rate of billions a year since the boom began, and that the pileup of bad loans to fracking firms is pushing the US banking industry into a significant credit crunch, but that’s just par for the course nowadays.
Then there’s the current tempest in the media’s teapot, Hillary Clinton’s presidential run. I’ve come to think of Clinton as the Khloe Kardashian of American politics, since she owed her original fame to the mere fact that she’s related to someone else who once caught the public eye. Since then she’s cycled through various roles because, basically, that’s what Famous People do, and the US presidency is just the next reality-TV gig on her bucket list. I grant that there’s a certain wry amusement to be gained from watching this child of privilege, with the help of her multimillionaire friends, posturing as a champion of the downtrodden, but I trust that none of my readers are under the illusion that this rhetoric will amount to anything more than all that chatter about hope and change eight years ago.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Reframing Progress | Post Growth Institute
Reframing Progress | Post Growth Institute.
“…Progress is one of the most powerful notions in the modern world” writes John Dryzek in
The Politics of the Earth.
I’m inclined to agree with him. Progress acts as a kind of meta-narrative, an incredibly potent and pervasive trope that is woven through stories ancient and contemporary, and forms a core part of our culture. The idea of progress is essentially about things getting better, about the future being better than the past and the present. This hopeful idea, tied up with assumptions about how it will happen, forms our shared story of progress – our progress story. It’s natural that humans should be attracted to a notion like this, as it gives people hope, satisfaction, a sense of achievement and empowerment. What isn’t so natural is the way the idea of progress has become so wedded to the idea of economic growth, fuelled by rampant consumerism.
As this earlier post discusses, growing dissatisfaction with GDP as an entirely misleading and insufficient measure of progress has led to a recent explosion of new indicators, such as theHappy Planet Index, the Genuine Progress Indicator and Gross National Happiness, to name just a few. The groups and individuals behind these ideas are getting the conversation started on what we value, what we consider to be progress, and how best to measure it. This is incredibly important work. But it’s not just official indicators that determine what the progress story is all about. The media forms a very influential gateway between the official statistics and measurements and most ordinary people – meaning it’s the media representation that is directly encountered. I think that the work being done on developing new indicators would be greatly supplemented and reinforced by an effort to reframe and redirect the progress story in terms of the language we use to talk about it and the way it’s represented in the media.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
