{"id":21096,"date":"2016-06-18T19:29:55","date_gmt":"2016-06-19T00:29:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21096"},"modified":"2016-06-18T19:29:55","modified_gmt":"2016-06-19T00:29:55","slug":"retrotopia-diminishing-returns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21096","title":{"rendered":"Retrotopia: Diminishing Returns"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2016\/06\/retrotopia-diminishing-returns.html\">Retrotopia: Diminishing Returns<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>This is the nineteenth installment of an exploration of some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative fiction. Our narrator, forced to grapple with the cognitive dissonance between everything he believes about progress and the facts of life in the Lakeland Republic, tries to evade the issue for an evening\u2014and ends up even deeper in perplexity&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>***********<\/p>\n<p>The next day was Saturday, and for a change, I didn\u2019t have anything planned. The marathon sessions of negotiation with President Meeker\u2019s staff, exhausting though they\u2019d been, had taken up less of my time in Toledo than I\u2019d expected; even if I sat on my rump in my room until it was time to catch the train home Wednesday, I\u2019d still get back to Philadelphia with everything taken care of that I\u2019d officially been asked to do. That was comforting\u2014or it should have been.<\/p>\n<p>As it was, I woke up in a foul mood, and things didn\u2019t get any better as I went through my morning routine and then stared at the window, trying to decide what to do with the day. Partly, I was annoyed at the way the evening had gone, annoyed with myself for almost getting into a fight with Melanie Berger, and with her for almost getting into a fight with me. The worst of it, though, was the bizarre logic she\u2019d used to brush aside my concerns about the Lakeland Republic\u2019s survival. Her notion that progress had somehow turned into the enemy of prosperity and the source of most of the world\u2019s problems\u2014I could barely frame the idea in my mind without shaking my head and laughing, it was so obviously wrong.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Retrotopia: Diminishing Returns This is the nineteenth installment of an exploration of some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative fiction. Our narrator, forced to grapple with the cognitive dissonance between everything he believes about progress and the facts of life in the Lakeland Republic, tries to evade the [&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":[311,341,1758,8722],"class_list":["post-21096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-fiction","tag-future","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-retrotopia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21096","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=21096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21097,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21096\/revisions\/21097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}