Triple Feature: Greer's Retrotopia, Retro Future, and an Interview

This is essentially the same material in three different formats.  Retrotopia is a short didactic novel spelling out the ideas espoused in the non-fiction book Retro Future, and you can get a lot of it in a very condensed form in this linked podcast interview (careful; it's a little tricky to download, and it's a nearly 700 MB .wav file; that's 10x the size it would be in .mp3).

Back to the core ideas alluded to above.  In a nutshell, the claim is that current technology has largely reached or passed the point of diminishing returns.  Increasing complexity, decreasing functionality, and a general non-obvious interface user-unfriendliness have taken hold.

In the novel form, Retrotopia is set in the American midwest about fifty years into the future.  Due to a brief period of unpleasantries the U.S.A. is no longer a cohesive whole, and various regions have re-coalesced into smaller nations.  The protagonist is a trade envoy from the northeastern seaboard nation, which is desperately trying to hang onto a modern-seeming high-tech way of life.  He moves through the novel taking his time to poke around as he, and we, are shown How To Do It the Old-School Way.  Points are made, another catastrophe ensues (Kessler syndrome, a chain-reaction of satellite debris collisions), and while diplomatic visitors from other regions lose their comms and remaining marbles, the residents of the retrotopian Lakeland Republic simply shrug and go about their resilient business.

Alright, that's the plot and the plot devices.  On to the ideas, which are explicitly given in Retro Future.  There's a lot of pointing out what's currently going wrong throughout most of the book, but many of the positive parts are spelled out in the section Seven Sustainable Technologies.  Here they are, with a few comments on the ones I'm on good terms with:
1. Organic intensive gardening.  Incredible strides have been made in this over the past 50 years, to the point where it can be commercially viable (example), or at least worth the effort for a residential food gardener.
2. Solar thermal technologies.  Good thermodynamics here.  I've always though that it is silly to turn beautiful 60 Hz AC sine waves into hot water when free sunlight abounds.  The hitch is that this currently revolves around mostly non-$tandard cu$tom plumbing in$stall$, but that can change as it becomes more common.
3. Sustainable wood heating.  Same comments as #2.  What about air conditioning?  What about it, I grew up without it.  In Florida.  It's no big deal once you acclimate and get used to changing the bedsheets more often.
4. Sustainable health care.  Hrm, that's a big topic for another day.
5. Letterpress printing and its related technologies.  Another one from my youth.  Technologically sustainable, but oh is it hard work.  As a side note, fully a quarter of my undergraduate physics classmates were escapees from their parents' hot-metal print shops, and through grad school and ensuing career I keep running into fellow refugees.  We always share the same gruesome stories of Saturdays spent melting down used linotype slugs, late nights fixing broken machinery, etc.
6. Low-tech shortwave radio.  Yeah, it works well, and it doesn't need a constellation of comms sats.  Takes some education and skill though.
7. Computer-free mathematics.  Here's where Greer steps out of his depth.  Yes, there are lots of useful things that can be done with pencil and paper, and I have done many of them.  However, there are many more useful differential equations where closed-form solutions can be shown not to even exist and numerical methods provide the only solutions available.  Furthermore, for problems that require even relatively small data sets as input, it is frequently impossible to carry them out in a useful computation time by pencil and paper.  For example, weather data assimilation and forecasting fall into this class.

There's also a lot about energy-efficient transportation methods (canals, rail, sail, etc.), but this post is running long and you get the idea.

To sum it all up, both of these books were interesting reading.  Perhaps the fictional presentation or the just-the-facts-ma'am version is better suited to your liking, but either way it's much the same content.  Take a listen to the above-linked podcast in any case to decide if you want more.

It is funny though, the discussion on the local 2m repeater yesterday morning was all about the weird, unusable turns computer software has been taking over the last few decades.  This is exactly the sort of "side grade" Greer discusses in these three works, and it's clearly a problem in today's world.  It's good to see some possible solutions in print.