{"id":13161,"date":"2015-10-08T07:21:15","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T12:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13161"},"modified":"2015-10-08T07:21:15","modified_gmt":"2015-10-08T12:21:15","slug":"a-landscape-of-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13161","title":{"rendered":"A Landscape of Dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2015\/10\/a-landscape-of-dreams.html\" target=\"_blank\">A Landscape of Dreams<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>Maybe it\u2019s just the psychology of selective attention, but tolerably often when I want to go into more detail about a point made in a previous essay here, stories relevant to that point in one way or another start popping up on the news. That\u2019s been true even during this blog\u2019s forays into narrative fiction, so it should be no surprise that it\u2019s happened again\u2014even though, in this case, the point in question may not be obvious to most readers yet.<\/p>\n<p>One of the core themes of the Retrotopia narrative I\u2019ve been developing here over the last month or so is the yawning gap between the abstract notion of progress that we all have in our heads and the rather less pleasant realities to which this notion has been assigned. The imaginary Atlantic Republic, the home of the narrative\u2019s viewpoint character, is a place where progress as we know it has continued in exactly the same direction it\u2019s been going for the last half century or so. That\u2019s why it\u2019s a place where income is concentrated in ever fewer hands, leaving most of the population to struggle for survival via poorly paid part-time jobs or no jobs at all; a place where infrastructure has been allowed to fall into ruin, while investment gets focused instead on a handful of high-tech services such as the metanet (my hypothetical 2065 \u201cimprovement\u201d of today\u2019s internet); a place where people make do with shoddy, wretchedly unpleasant consumer goods because that\u2019s what a handful of big corporations want to sell them and there are no other alternatives, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Landscape of Dreams Maybe it\u2019s just the psychology of selective attention, but tolerably often when I want to go into more detail about a point made in a previous essay here, stories relevant to that point in one way or another start popping up on the news. That\u2019s been true even during this blog\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3463,311,341,1758,812],"class_list":["post-13161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-archdruid-report","tag-fiction","tag-future","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-trends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13162,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13161\/revisions\/13162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}