by Neil Vodavzny

As you may gather from previous instalments, any alternative to a trillion dollar social-gadget-heavy future is likely to be more of a retro-futurism. The future as seen through the eyes and techniques of the recent past isn’t blindly led by the pied piper of virtual technology. Instead, it’s an artistic vision which, for reasons previously discussed, is truthful to our subconscious drives and what you might call “prejudices”.

There are some who call Zuckerberg a superman (or zuperman) for the times, but the will to succeed should never be confused with the will to power. An underlying problem is that humans tend to become too “attached”. I happened to get a box-set of the first series of The Outer Limits (1963) and the first instalment, The Galaxy Being, features a being from Andromeda composed of light-waves who is attracted by a frequency of radio-static emanating from an inventor’s shed. By some means he is materialized, but has to return to face the music (a transgression of Galactic protocol). “End of transmission” he intones, and blinks out.  Replace the static with a time-machine peering into our future, and the same phrase might apply to switched-on Facebook drones.

The Twilight Zone (1959) and The Outer Limits came out of EC comics’ line of horror/weird sci-fi titles that were so influential, a commission on morals in the comics industry , led by the ludicrous Werther, found them pernicious. Hence we get the comics code authority and superhero explosion. The EC formula was faithfully followed by TZ and OL, with dark but truthful morality – no Hollywood endings. In The Man Who Was Never Born, the future may become “A dark and empty road” unless love conquers … and loses. The Bellero Shield is stylized and suggestive psycho-drama, seemingly written by a fan of Ibsen. A laser invention acts as a signal to another world. “I called it our Bifrost, our bridge to another world – and it is!” Ambitions are invariably thwarted by “The Human Factor”.

Well, exactly. That’s a view you won’t get now. There are powerful and unstoppable forces, instincts and emotions. Extrapolating from pulp sci-fi, they have a connection to blood and soil. They are the outsiders who create darkly poetic versions of the future (Le Guin, Ellison). The human alternative to a shiny-bright techno-land is invariably dark-edged, if not violent. But the element of hope peeks out from behind the clouds. You could perhaps contrast that with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugs, which implies inventors always advance human progress. Rand famously was in denial about any instinctive drive, relying on pure mental prowess; but denial has seen off Pharaohs and Israelites and will do the same to her!

Only connect, as they say, in the days when it meant more than a new acquisition by Zuperberg. What’s the common factor of outsider-groups? Apart from Texan get-togethers, there are the myth-makers of the prairies. Yeah the cowboys, but also their nemeses the Apache braves. What boy’s own journal would be complete without such fabulous birds of prey? It was the iron-road that finally eclipsed both camps, the products of the industrial north-west moving into vistas of rawhide and horseflesh. So, obviously heavy industries and oil were the initial enemies of the old west, both red and white.

Now, if the Right are more racially aware it does not necessarily follow that that should blind us to common ground with other outsider-groups against the liberal mainstream. That common ground is essentially the ecology of living with Mother Earth; the sort of future would have made Ayn Rand see red – if she had been capable of emotion – since it suggests a rugged lifestyle of relative simplicity.

Have you ever noticed that any work of art has relative simplicity? It has to be composed of beginning, middle, end, bridging sections etc. or we the observer couldn’t make sense of it. One consequence of the industrial world is it breeds activities which are almost Kafka-esque. If, say, 99% of service jobs disappeared, what would happen apart from a lot of unemployment? Cyber-tech seems to multiply the effect into a lot of virtual “nothingness”, which could just disappear with no ill effects, or a positive boon. Our friend Zuperberg may be full of ideas, but they’re all essentially variations on the theme of “how to make money out of less and less”. That may be an inevitable consequence of the loss of ties – not necessarily Euro-exclusive, of kinship with Mother Earth.

Yet another instalment of OL, O.B.I.T, has a telling if not terrifying sci-fi spin on cyber-tech as a form of debilitating influence on mankind. The episode takes the form of a military courtroom drama into a secretive security device that spies on citizens 24/7. The hapless colonel in charge under close-questioning owns, “I … I can’t not watch!” The machine has the demoralising effect of sapping humans of their self-awareness by enabling such close surveillance. It transpires the machines are alien plants to facilitate a mass takeover (very EC).

It does strike me as a quite likely close-approximation to social-media, as it’s not a morale-builder but a morale-sapper. Morale is built by kinship – fellow-feeling, shared instinct and “prejudices” – which absolutely must come from close-knit groups. Artists’ cliques, like the Texan Juntoes, just happen to be easy to identify as such, but it applies to any form of kinship – shared living, shared resources – especially one that’s land-based and therefore self-reliant, a traditional village or an Indian camp, say.

Kinship, not necessarily of race, is a morale-booster because you are living on instincts and feelings primarily, a sense of living creatively. It’s the type of life that engenders a carefree attitude, especially if it encompasses the environment of which you are part, feeding the psyche, and morale-building sense of fellowship (as with Vienna and other centres of the old European order that produced Mozart, or at least gave him space to breathe).

The ultimate cause of our misfortunes is detachment from such forms of multifaceted kinship and the carefree sense of living free (the image of happy-go-lucky peasants is actually the opposite of witless, slack-jawed stupidity, which you might find in front of a monitor, say). This seems to be driven by the fact that economics is not a description, merely a means. We have to say “enough!” of a prescriptive economy, when the word “economy” is not a description of anything apart from management, or efficiency. Since these are dependent on money-supply, it’s a prescription for anything that depends on money-supply (in order to describe something you have to be a bit more creative, frankly).

Enough to anything that is essentially run by the volatility of global markets, and which automatically legitimised anything large-scale, and since that automatically implies egalitarian, what you might call Liberal Monetary Economics (LME). Germany shut-down its nuclear future, and it would be just as simple to switch from fossil to electric-cars. Enough to:

Economic migration (cause LME)
Hydrocarbon industry (cause LME)
Traipsing round Mother Earth on cheap flights (LME)
Social-media’s trillion dollar malaise (LME)
Mono-agriculture cutting rural/smalltown ties (LME)
Big pharma (LME)

What happens when means become ends, when messenger becomes message? From a Right wing perspective we need to belong to the land itself including its resources, an ecology of resources. This could come from a type of retro-futurist tech, with a correspondingly more artistic sense of place, a vernacular tradition and feel. Fossil-driven cars could be replaced by electric (or hybrid electro-veg-oil), slower means of transport such as dirigibles introduced, the hydrocarbon industry replaced by plastics-derived 3D printing, run by the net.

Anti-LME could be an umbrella movement corralling outsider-groups who can agree around certain principles - those principles are seen in natural systems. It’s Earth-centric, even “hippy-ish”, and since it has to be anti-liberal would effectively eliminate the mainstream hordes of think-alikes, in-breds, call them what you will. It would enable sharing of links or resources between, say, the Amerindian Nations and European Right-wingers, and would therefore be explicitly ethnocentric.