There Is No RETVRN

Stop looking backwards. That reality will never exist again.

“It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.” - Frank Zappa

I'm something of a sci-fi romanticist. In the early 90s I grew up with a computer that became a window into a world that before I'd never be allowed to see. The nostalgic sound of AOL dial up still sometimes plays in my dreams. The warm and familiar feeling I get from countryside valleys and forest tunnels in nature is the same one I get from server rooms, metal surfaces, LED keyboards, and glowing monitors in dark rooms.

One of the reasons I started writing science fiction is because so much of it felt cold and clinical to me. The brusque prose seemed antithetical to my own experience. I wanted to write about robotics, nanites, and other future-tech so I could infuse them with the same magic I felt around me. Romanticism shouldn't have been reserved for ballroom romances and countryside trysts. Anything could be beautiful if you saw it in the right light.

I was never a big fan of early sci-fi, but it wasn't because I didn't like the ideas. It was because I wanted the passion of lush prose. But I didn't grow up in the Golden Age of Sci-fi, in the 60s and 70s. That was back when computers were still not household objects and much of the tech we take for granted today was nothing but a frightening possibility. The golden age sci-fi authors weren't surrounded by the tech they imagined. What was a warning to others had become a comfort to me.

But that future has also quickly become my past. I find myself missing the days of a free range Internet that felt like the wild west. I miss Blockbuster and Pokémon on the Gameboy Color and the special moment of discovery when finding something new at a bookstore.

And I'm not alone. On Twitter there is a lot of talk of "r e t v r n." Or a "RETVRN to tradition." Some of it is tongue-in-cheek, most of it is not. RETVRN features a lot of black and white pictures of men and women in early 20th century dress, Nordic women with braids tending farms, and pastoral landscapes where children can play freely.

It is the same displaced dream that's always been, although probably exacerbated by the economic hardships that millennials and zoomers now face that their parents didn't. Most of us are miserably depressed, isolated, and yearning for the sense of home and community previous generations did. We’ve become fat on easy access to food. The population is decreasing. We’ve pursued hedonism and lost religion and become withered. Everything is more expensive and things that were considered basic necessities in the past are quickly becoming unavailable to us. “Own nothing and be happy,” has become the mantra of mass corporations that now control most of our world.

It’s easy to look at the past and think that the solution is to go back to when we didn’t create all these new problems for ourselves. All we have to do is drop the bombs and reverse the clocks.

But there's no going back and there never will be. Not only because that world will never exist again, but because I'll never be a child again. The mourning of an old world, bathed in a golden glow and scrubbed of all its hard edges, is also the mourning of childhood.

I've fallen into the trap that every single generation has before me. I long for a world that has become synonymous with magic and simplicity. In a way that's what romanticism is. Romanticism does not have the cold lighting of realism. Romanticism is passion without inconvenient detail.

But there has been no time in human history when we've ever walked backwards once we discovered a new and useful technology. It doesn't matter how many people railed and screamed that the cotton gin and the printing press were the unholy tools of Satan. As a human race we recognized the utility that these things provided. We couldn't stay away.

I can also say that even when we recognize the utility of a thing we're not smart enough to understand its consequences. Our exposure to new technology is often terrible for us, in ways we don't understand until generations later. But we have to introduce it before we can learn from it. We are the first species to make our own environmental pressures that force us to evolve.

And all the warnings in the world from philosophers and scientists and writers won't keep people away from being lured to the shiny, fast, cool efficiency of the future. Especially when they see their neighbors getting ahead because of it. Nobody is going to keep milking cows by hand when everyone else is using machines to produce a much higher yield. Unless it's a boutique spectacle for rich people, they'll quickly be driven out of business.

We will never return to the time of milking cows by hand, reading by candlelight, and living in secluded communities. People who attempt to do those things are just LARPIng. They're trying to find happiness in a past that no longer exists. But while they're trying to shut themselves away from the world, the world just keeps racing ahead.

They could try to find new technological solutions for the problems we've created. Instead they sequester themselves away in a fantasy. The way forward is messy and fraught with danger and death, but so was the world that they romanticized. Look a little closer at the dream and you'll see crippling childhood illness, a lack of women's rights, slavery, death in childbirth. You'll see poverty, infection, and the dirt that squirms with disease.

Of course many of those things still exist, but many have gotten better too. And not a single one of those issues could be resolved by turning back the clock and retreating, naked and shivering, into a glade of ignorance.

You have to give up the fantasy of milkmaids and tailored suits that never wrinkle in black and white photographs that last forever. Modernity has created some serious problems, as every age has before it. It's the only way to have a chance to create a better world for the future.

There is no RTVRN. Everything that refuses to evolve dies, and its children die along with it.

That doesn’t have to happen to us. You can help to give the future generation its romanticism and beauty. You can take your children out into the warm sunlight over a future horizon, and set your eyes on a sky that’s remembered in millions of years of DNA.

You have to go forward to go back.

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