More News From Nowhere

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the author
• Bibliography of probable sources
• Blog: Owl's Farm
• Updates (related news)

Perhaps to know so familiar a place better it must become strange again.

Reinterpreting Utopia

This project began as an attempt to study the development of William Morris's philosophy of technology, his debt to Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, and his influence on American thinkers like Henry Adams and Lewis Mumford. But reading Morris's utopian ideas in News From Nowhere as well as his prose romances, and poems like A Dream of John Ball and The Earthly Paradise, made me realize that Morris's views on technology and art pervade all of his work, and that together these works provide a well-developed view of how the world could be: how we might live, as opposed to how we do live.

News From Nowhere (first published serially in 1890) envisions England in a future far removed temporally, philosophically, and economically from nineteenth-century London: after the "revolution" of 1952, in the year 2006. The proximity of 2006 to the present (that is, when the project began) led me to wonder, as Morris had, what might happen given some kind of revolution or change on the order of what he imagined.

However, although Morris's Nowhere emerged from the ashes of a violent revolution, he could not have conceived of the means of total destruction that human beings had developed by 1952: the atomic and hydrogen bombs and the other "weapons of mass destruction" that would come to preoccupy those in power and terrify the world's population as a whole. So I began to wonder what a different "nowhere" would look like, in light of what we now know about how things really turned out, and how very far Morris's vision was from present-day reality.

Long after I had begun to re-imagine Morris's ou-topia, and after having convinced myself that what I was trying to envision was essentially unimaginable in the context of this world, I came upon David Orr's thoughtful collection of essays, The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention. Reading this book made me realize that those of us who construct utopias do not do so in a vacuum. The urge for change that prompts thought experiments like News From Nowhere emerges from conversation and speculation within an intellectual community.

The particular conversations that led to my desire to revisit Morris's Nowhere began in 1994 when I taught a course at UTD called "Utopia and Technology," and continued in two subsequent courses, "Philosophy and/of Technology" and "The Arts and Crafts Movement." In all three, from different perspectives, my students and I discussed the utopian impulse, ways to imagine appropriate technologies, and various attempts made throughout history to forge solutions to technological dilemmas.

Drawing on my background in anthropology, geology, and ecology, I then began to explore the connections—rather than the divisions—between the humanities and the sciences. More News From Nowhere draws upon an academic background that spans over forty years, during which I studied archaeology, ancient history and languages, anthropology, geology, literature, ecology, astronomy, the history and philosophy of science and technology, and the history of art and design.

The project originally consisted of four parts: this preamble, the story, and an annotated bibliography of those works that led directly to its construction, followed by an additional bibliography of sources on utopian studies, Morris, and other aspects of the project. I have recently added a fifth component, a blog begun in the summer of 2007, called "Owl's Farm, or Reflections on Nowhere", in which I have been musing about related topics as they occur in the "real" world, here and now.

If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.