A utopian experiment that succeeded will not be recognized as utopian, for instance the Society of Friends, or formerly other names such as the Friends of the Inner Light of Truth, better known as Quakers. Few among them know how much of today's world came from the Quakers. E.g.: Barclays, Lloyds, Cadbury, most of the iron for the early industrial revolution, railroads, cast steel, fixed-price shops, the American-style nuclear family, Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr , Haverford, Swarthmore, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Dalton's atomic theory of chemistry, Young's proof of the wave theory of light, etc. etc. (But Quakers have nothing to do with the oatmeal brand, nor any historical link to the Amish.)
Formerly an endogamous group from the mid-1600s to around 1900, I estimate there were fewer than half a million silent-meeting Quakers in the US and Britain in history, with about 50,000 or so today, of whom only a very small fraction have long Quaker ancestry, as my family does. Virtually all of them now are converts (“convinced” Friends, rather than “birthright”); the sect had just about died out when the Quakers' automatic exemption from the the Vietnam War draft attracted a huge influx of Boomers. Today the silent-meeting Quakers are ultra-liberal clubs, defined mostly by extreme political correctness. It's ironic, because the Quakers were patient zero of the Progressive pandemic in the 19th century, but have been repeatedly reinfected by mutated strains of the woke mind virus.
I think the decline decline came from dropping endogamy and lowering membership requirements. That is also the problem for any future utopian experiment -- community, utopian or otherwise, is impossible without the ability to ward off incompatible types of people.
I spent the summer of '88, aged 16, as a part-time cowherd in the tiny, remote Quaker colony of Monteverde, in the Costa Rican Cloud forest. Utopia is possible.
I think I sent you a link to my posts, but here are most of the better bio bits I've written up so far:
I’m a born lawyer – living my first three years with four law students (aunts and uncles), with a Supreme Court clerk as babysitter … I could go on quite a bit in that vein – but I’ve tried to do something productive with my life instead, and though that hasn’t worked out as well as I had hoped, I have no regrets. But it seems like I may be forced to go back into it, there being no place in the economy for inventors.
***
Rudy [Rucker]’s blog is great, particularly his photos and his interviews with Godel . I made a few comments there years ago. Back in the mid-'90s I enjoyed using his 4-D visualization and cellular automata software on my '386-40. Of course, he’s best known for his insane novels, which are well worth reading, though I especially enjoyed the more conventional style of his first novel, White Light.
In high school in 1989 I came up with a new(?) type of positional number system in which place values were based on triangles, tetrahedrons, etc. rather than squares, cubes, etc. [See my "Ternary Factor Tree Representation" for a wilder but more useful system.]
***
[Druid Heights / Mill Valley]
Roger [Somers] Had this 7ft deep hot tub on his deck [in Muir Woods], which he always kept hot, with nothing other than stray eucalyptus leaves against microbes. I enjoyed a dip there with Dorsey, Roger, and a couple of attractive young German ladies, who I never saw before or since. The hot tub was one of the first in California, at least of the modern type with filter and heater. Zen writer Alan Watts was found dead right there on the deck, he used the hot tub pretty much daily for years. Busloads of Buddhists still make the pilgrimage to his old library there.
[awesome pictures]
I’ve heard too many stories to recount here, many of which wouldn’t be discreet to tell, even if the statutes of limitations have run out long ago. Unfortunately, the place is gradually returning to the soil.
*
[That time Switzerland colonized West Virginia]
My great-grandfather, Dr. Stuckey of Canton Bern, was Helvetia’s first doctor. Once over 300 people, it is now down to about 38.
Apparently, post-apocalyptic Helvetia is also a popular destination in the computer game Fallout 76.
*
... Lewis Wetzel [called "Deathwind" by the Indians] is a several-greats uncle [on my mother's side]. (A model for fictional adventures, [Hawkeye/Natty Bumppo] but more complicated and controversial than heroes of fiction, he fought a one-man war against the Indians for the rest of his life after he and his brother, (my g’g…-grandfather) were kidnapped as children. Wetzel County, WV is named after him.)
...
I’m related to Dr. Stuckey through my father’s side of the family, who lived mostly in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. My sister still has the oil portraits of my 4g-grandparents, Margaret Brisbane and her husband, William Dick [link to big art collection]...
was in charge of not only buildings, grounds, and equipment, [for the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, c.1820-1870] but also providing cadavers, demonstrations, prepared dissections, student discipline and selling and checking tickets ...
William and Margaret’s grandson, Harris Brisbane Dick, was a successful publisher who left his fortune to the Meropolitan Museum of Art, the HBD fund is listed on nearly 30,000 exhibits today [link]
*
The first germ of the Wide-Ownership Workshop Industrial Ecology idea came from visiting a makerspace, Freeside Atlanta. It used to be located in a complex of giant old Quonset-style former cotton warehouses, surrounded by barbed wire in a rough neighborhood. The complex was always open, with a guard at the gate – I’m not really sure what for – they seemed to let anybody in. It was a “temporary autonomous zone”, a /scene/. The several parallel buildings, each several hundred feet long had been split into dozens of workshops and other spaces, including a couple of illegal nightclubs. On the Thursday night I visited, it was energetic outside and in.
Freeside had several thousand square feet of all kinds of tools and materials. You could work all night if you felt like it and most of the other places would be active, too – when I visited, one guy was getting the latest iteration of a part run off on another shop’s laser cutter, while he went across the alley for a beer at the club. He got a sweetheart deal, paying only slightly more than the cost of running the cutter – in exchange, he would run off whatever the laser-cutter guy needed on Freeside’s tools.
Why couldn’t this continue? I wondered, though cool scenes never seem to last. Why couldn’t it be scaled up so you could make anything?
[...]
I had long been enthusiastic about the idea of molecular nanotechnology, reading Drexler’s Engines of Creation in 1989, and his very technical Nanosystems when it came out. In 2005 I coached a couple of boys, age 10 and 11, from my electronics class for gifted homeschoolers in a project for the Toshiba Exploravision invention contest. One of the boys wanted to invent something that would let him be a for-real giant. I couldn’t think of a way immediately, but then I remembered “utility fog”, which should allow basically anything you could do in a Star Trek holodeck. We came up with a pretty detailed design, with processing, networking, cooling, power, optical phased-array collective displays, actuators … and how to apply it to education: telepresence, historical simulations and simulations of dangerous chemical experiments. Whittled it down to ten pages, somehow. It was the only entry in the state to get honors that year.
In 2014, I had an epiphany about how to make self-reproducing factories work economically with any degree of automation – not only to work economically, but to work better than the current economy.
***
Imagine Indra’s net, filling all space and time with a web whose intersections are jewels, each reflecting all of the others. The jewels may also be seen through other schemata – Leibnizian monads, vertexes in Feynman diagrams, atomic perceptions/ perceivers of varied potentialities and probabilities. ....
***
With regard to the CDC particularly, in 2017-19 I drove dozens of CDC people for Uber. I’m relaxed about bio labs - my dad is a pathologist, with a decades-long solo clinical, anatomic and forensic practice; I lived near Ft. Detrick for years (the biowar lab that closed in 2019), I’ve done some bacteriology work myself. Most of the CDC people were lovely, especially the field researchers.
But there were a few that gave me the absolute heebie-jeebies - just off the charts bad vibes with nothing I could put my finger on as to why, other than the “duper’s delight” smirk. Evil, in a word. Driving, I had only intermittent glances in the mirror to go on, but my subconscious put its foot down and forced me to stop driving around November 2019. Several other pieces of information contributed - the closure of Ft. Detrick, the lung disease supposedly caused by vaping, but most of all, the unprecedented secret meetings at the CDC, with even top assistants barred, that I learned about from a passenger.
I think the two main reasons to be skeptical that utopias are possible now are:
1) Lots of people have tried and failed, and those failures are recent enough to be documented (with your post here an example of that documentation)
2) Governments are bigger, more capable, and more willing and able to limit technologically mediated change that could help create a utopia
Per 2, I can create a utopia - we need to legalize gengineering somewhere, and let market forces act so that people can pay to have much smarter, healthier, happier, and more attractive kids. When parents can choose the level of neuroticism (low), IQ (high), conscientiousness (high), etc their kids will have, those kids will be able to create better and more utopian societies together than their parents, and provided gengineering capabilities keep increasing, that can be a virtuous spiral.
But gengineering isn't legal anywhere. And it likely won't be legal anywhere for a good amount of time, and if it were legal somewhere, odds are enough people in other countries would agitate about it and try to make it illegal, via soft or hard power. Crabs in a bucket.
Similarly, if you let people sort themselves by things other than wealth and income. Take the people in the top decile of combined IQ, capability, conscientiousness, and mental health and let them form their own society and government. They'll get closer than anyone else to creating a better and more utopian society over time - but wait, we can't do that. There's no process to do it, it's called "secession" and it's a dirty word to all governments everywhere. That top decile pays a lot of taxes, after all. Also, it's probably not diverse or inclusive enough, so they'll all get cancelled or embargoed by trade partners or whatever, and this is also why we can't have tracking by ability in schools in the US.
Back in 18th-19th century times, the federal government was much weaker. Local governments were much weaker. You had a credible means to create a mini society that followed different rules, both legally and socially. You can't do any of that now.
If we did have some means to make more federated enclaves of different legal schemes, then we could have the requisite sorting by ability and inclination, and sorting by technologically-allowed-and-mediated change like gengineering, to actually try to do something different and better. But good luck convincing current governments to give up the cream of their current tax-paying crop and let them go form weird Prospera-like enclaves and have super-babies together.
Thank you for the thoughts. The idea that we are prisoners of our far better and more qualified legal structures is an interesting point and quite possibly a contributor to it at least today if not in the early 20th century.
"Lots of people tried and failed..." What does this mean in a world of 8 billion? How many are lots? Or perhaps a better line of questioning: what is the number of tried "cultures" versus untried ones? How well-trodden is the spectrum of culture and community structures, especially given the contemporary range of knowledge and technology resources?
The worst part of it is, even in this world of 8B, states and top-level government has increased in power so much that this may not be possible even in the developing world. Lots of African countries, as one example, pay China for the panopticon surveillance capabilities they've developed on their own people, so the African leaders can spy on and be the boot on the face of their own citizens forever.
But absolutely, from a theoretical perspective, the spectrum of "attempted" cultures is absolutely dwarfed by the infinite possible cultures. The real fun part is imagining where are the local attractors in that space that we can't get to now, because people generally suck in large numbers, but COULD get to those further-off culture places with a higher IQ, higher conscientiousness, more cooperative subset of people? Whether that subset gets there by simple selection, gengineering, or even machine / AI enhancements doesn't really matter.
But how to reach a point where forming those subset and enclaves is possible again? I can really only see it happening in a "frontier" society, so IMO, we need a thriving space colonization society for it to be able to happen again. I don't see it happening on earth, with the current scope and level of developement of the governments here.
I moved back after a decade abroad and am shocked by our malaise and cynicism. CA is approaching UK/EU levels. It's sadder to see in our art/entertainment too. I blame the intellectual climate more than economic. We've never had more leverage and are close to multiplying it. Regulation aside, we have plenty of frontiers in that every one of our paradigms must be reinvented. Physically we have the space and resources to build Babylons and Shangri-Las. More importantly, America is the world's best hope rn. The stakes are far higher than ourselves, and we need to be riffing on the fantastical.
Enjoyed your take but expected your vision before it ended. You could draw a compelling one with the thought you've given here. I wrote one through the lens of health you might find useful.
There are still some glimmers, seasteading and charter cities come to mind. There’s a commune in Ithaca NY that’s interesting. It’s a capital-intensive endeavor, though.
The one example I kept thinking about while reading your post was the Khmer Rouge and how they strived to achieve what they saw as the perfect form of communism and they ended up massacaring a quarter of the Cambodian population.
Absolutely. And Lenin's disastrous attempt to end money (quickly followed by the "New Economic Policy"), and his forced collectivization of farms and murder of kulaks. The number of deaths is staggering, in the tens of millions.
As far as I can tell from my experience of studying architecture, I feel strongly that both in academia and in practice, the central theme is that of encouraging collective action and collaborative living. The idea of utopia is not thrown around too much but I think that is a good thing, perhaps it demonstrates that we have learned to be more humble and grounded towards even ‘noble’ ambitions. I think the general vibe is more on the side of slouching towards rather than directly creating utopia.
My guess is there are all sorts of little attempts to create utopias all over the place; they just don't get the same attention as before. But the bigger issue that our technical prowess meant that we had the power to pursue utopian dreams in the 20th century, and terrible results of those utopian dreams continue to haunt us.
I hope so, either we're stuck under a deluge of info such that these things get buried, or there isn't a sustained belief that we can even create utopias. I fear it's the latter. The haunting of the communist regimes for sure is a major reason today, though the utopians died out even towards the end of the 19th century.
To be a true Utopia that Utopia must, necessarily, outcompete opposing or, at least, alternative systems. i.e. from a Darwinian perspective, it needs to be an evolutionarily stable strategy and a good one at that. Today, we have seen so many try and fail that the evidence appears pretty conclusive that many of the traits that we all believe should be part of our Utopia are actually inherently unstable. Utopia appears to be a logical impossibility, a contradiction in terms. Human beings are denied the possibility of Utopia for so long as they are human beings.
I came across the link to this post in another article, which I can no longer remember. The article below was also linked in it, and both of your posts were the same day. Guess it was Utopia Day in my feed. Hazards of opening links and then closing the original article.
Thought provoking stuff! I'm curious as to why you omitted the hippie communes of the 1960s and 1970s; those seem like utopian community experiments to me, but maybe I'm thinking of them differently.
Mostly only because they felt too inward looking rather than trying to model a new way to live to the whole world. It felt a pulling back than a pushing forward, though admittedly it's not a precise distinction.
Ah, gotcha, thanks for the clarification! I see where you're coming from and I agree.
Perhaps that's another stage in the process, then. People saw the problems with earlier utopias and felt they had to prove the model inwardly and practically first before proselytizing it and declaring it correct. Which, come to think of it, isn't a bad idea.
The kids are totally down for new utopian experiments. They just need good leadership. Those leaders don’t seem to be emerging. Maybe you can help them out.
Very interesting- so many utopias seem to have foundered on the question of who gets to exercise power. Effective altruism would seem to be yet another example of this.
I definitely agree that the lack of frontiers is a major factor dampening utopian (or extropian) thinking and especially practice. While I applaud efforts to create free zones, it's incredibly hard to sustain in a world saturated with governments and nation states. My goal is to stay alive long enough -- or to be revived in the future -- when we can get off this planet at reasonable cost in large numbers. That will be time for social and economic experimentation to flourish.
First, thanks for the charts, Rohit, they're most useful.
Beyond that, yes, no, not really, we can't get there from here.
Let's look at your last paragraph. Your last sentence: "It is worth asking why this form of optimism is no longer around." YES. But I've got doubts about the first sentence of that paragraph: "The spirit of pioneering ambition is perhaps our best features as a species." I know what the words mean, and I have half-a-hunch what you mean by the sentence, and I'm not buying it.
I live in an intellectual world where evolutionary psychology is important. I don't buy it, but I take it seriously. In THAT world your sentence is most easily read as an assertion about our biological nature. I don't think that pioneering ambition is somehow in our genes. But, for example, I'm willing to believe that an exploratory urge is in our genes, and not only ours, but in many animal species. And I'm quite willing to believe that that urge enters into the construction of pioneering ambition.
What do I mean by that, construction? As a crude analogy, think of chess. On the one hand we have the rules of the game, the 8 by 8 board, the different pieces, and the legal moves. You have to know that in order to play the game at all. Think of that as analogous to our biological nature. In order to play even a halfway decent game of chess you need to learn some tactics and strategy; those things are defined over the basic rules, but cannot be reduced to them. That's cultural evolution.
And that's where we get pioneering ambition. That takes us to your next sentence: "We only seem to get it in glimpses as you glance through history, seemingly at random as if a capricious muse bestows it on us, outside our control." But it seems to crop up most strongly in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I once asked my humanist colleagues: When did we start thinking about the future as a time and place when things would be different from they are now, when they would be better, and made so by effort we can undertake now? That's what they told me (https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2021/07/when-did-future-become-site-for-human.html). The American Revolution started in 1776, the French Revolution a decade later. Note that the American Constitution contained a procedure for making amendments because the framers believed that the future would be different in consequential ways.
Why then? You mention the Enlightenment. Yes, but it didn't come out of nowhere. There's a history there, a lot of cultural evolution. The same with the Industrial Revolution. How are the cognitive underpinnings of those developments constructed out of the "raw stuff" of biological human nature? Hardly anyone is even asking the question. But it's the sort of thing David Hays and I gave careful thought to in elaborating our theory of cultural ranks (https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/cultural%20ranks). That's just the barest beginning but it does provide a way of thinking about how something like pioneering ambition might be constructed.
Beyond that, well, it's complicated. Walt Disney was optimistic about the future and perhaps did more to promote the idea of a technology-fueled quasi-utopian future than any other single person. You can see his vision in a short promotional film he made in 1966, a few months before he died. In that film (https://youtu.be/UEm-09B0px8?si=5tnQh4-zh52qdWm-) he lays out his vision for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow (EPCOT). What actually got built as EPCOT is far less interesting. After Walt died the world that had nurtured that vision fell apart, though not because Disney died. For all sorts of reasons, some of which you mention.
We can't go back. We need to figure out a new vision (or visions) for the future. One way I have of thinking about that is something I call Kisangani 2150 (https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/Kisangani2150). Why that name? It's derived from New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson's novel about the world in 2140. It's neither utopian or dystopian. But it's believable. My idea is to take the world, more or less, run it forward 10 years and center the story in Kisangani. Why Kisangani? Because it's deep in the Congo Basin, which is a very different part of the world from New York. Also, there's literary resonance. Kisangani is the location of the Inner Station in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. That, as you may recall, is where Kurtz went mad. And there's music, which I explain in the post where I first entertained the idea: Kisangani 2150, or Reconstructing Civilization on a New Model, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/07/kisangani-2150-or-reconstructing.html
Basically, we have to rethink EVERYTHING. No time to waste.
On the Enlightenment and thoughts about the improvability of humanity, I especially like Richard Tarnas's beautifully written book, The Passion of the West Mind.
A utopian experiment that succeeded will not be recognized as utopian, for instance the Society of Friends, or formerly other names such as the Friends of the Inner Light of Truth, better known as Quakers. Few among them know how much of today's world came from the Quakers. E.g.: Barclays, Lloyds, Cadbury, most of the iron for the early industrial revolution, railroads, cast steel, fixed-price shops, the American-style nuclear family, Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr , Haverford, Swarthmore, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Dalton's atomic theory of chemistry, Young's proof of the wave theory of light, etc. etc. (But Quakers have nothing to do with the oatmeal brand, nor any historical link to the Amish.)
Formerly an endogamous group from the mid-1600s to around 1900, I estimate there were fewer than half a million silent-meeting Quakers in the US and Britain in history, with about 50,000 or so today, of whom only a very small fraction have long Quaker ancestry, as my family does. Virtually all of them now are converts (“convinced” Friends, rather than “birthright”); the sect had just about died out when the Quakers' automatic exemption from the the Vietnam War draft attracted a huge influx of Boomers. Today the silent-meeting Quakers are ultra-liberal clubs, defined mostly by extreme political correctness. It's ironic, because the Quakers were patient zero of the Progressive pandemic in the 19th century, but have been repeatedly reinfected by mutated strains of the woke mind virus.
I think the decline decline came from dropping endogamy and lowering membership requirements. That is also the problem for any future utopian experiment -- community, utopian or otherwise, is impossible without the ability to ward off incompatible types of people.
I spent the summer of '88, aged 16, as a part-time cowherd in the tiny, remote Quaker colony of Monteverde, in the Costa Rican Cloud forest. Utopia is possible.
At this point I must insist you write an account of your life. It sounds cool!!
I think I sent you a link to my posts, but here are most of the better bio bits I've written up so far:
I’m a born lawyer – living my first three years with four law students (aunts and uncles), with a Supreme Court clerk as babysitter … I could go on quite a bit in that vein – but I’ve tried to do something productive with my life instead, and though that hasn’t worked out as well as I had hoped, I have no regrets. But it seems like I may be forced to go back into it, there being no place in the economy for inventors.
***
Rudy [Rucker]’s blog is great, particularly his photos and his interviews with Godel . I made a few comments there years ago. Back in the mid-'90s I enjoyed using his 4-D visualization and cellular automata software on my '386-40. Of course, he’s best known for his insane novels, which are well worth reading, though I especially enjoyed the more conventional style of his first novel, White Light.
In high school in 1989 I came up with a new(?) type of positional number system in which place values were based on triangles, tetrahedrons, etc. rather than squares, cubes, etc. [See my "Ternary Factor Tree Representation" for a wilder but more useful system.]
***
[Druid Heights / Mill Valley]
Roger [Somers] Had this 7ft deep hot tub on his deck [in Muir Woods], which he always kept hot, with nothing other than stray eucalyptus leaves against microbes. I enjoyed a dip there with Dorsey, Roger, and a couple of attractive young German ladies, who I never saw before or since. The hot tub was one of the first in California, at least of the modern type with filter and heater. Zen writer Alan Watts was found dead right there on the deck, he used the hot tub pretty much daily for years. Busloads of Buddhists still make the pilgrimage to his old library there.
[awesome pictures]
I’ve heard too many stories to recount here, many of which wouldn’t be discreet to tell, even if the statutes of limitations have run out long ago. Unfortunately, the place is gradually returning to the soil.
*
[That time Switzerland colonized West Virginia]
My great-grandfather, Dr. Stuckey of Canton Bern, was Helvetia’s first doctor. Once over 300 people, it is now down to about 38.
Apparently, post-apocalyptic Helvetia is also a popular destination in the computer game Fallout 76.
*
... Lewis Wetzel [called "Deathwind" by the Indians] is a several-greats uncle [on my mother's side]. (A model for fictional adventures, [Hawkeye/Natty Bumppo] but more complicated and controversial than heroes of fiction, he fought a one-man war against the Indians for the rest of his life after he and his brother, (my g’g…-grandfather) were kidnapped as children. Wetzel County, WV is named after him.)
...
I’m related to Dr. Stuckey through my father’s side of the family, who lived mostly in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. My sister still has the oil portraits of my 4g-grandparents, Margaret Brisbane and her husband, William Dick [link to big art collection]...
was in charge of not only buildings, grounds, and equipment, [for the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, c.1820-1870] but also providing cadavers, demonstrations, prepared dissections, student discipline and selling and checking tickets ...
William and Margaret’s grandson, Harris Brisbane Dick, was a successful publisher who left his fortune to the Meropolitan Museum of Art, the HBD fund is listed on nearly 30,000 exhibits today [link]
*
The first germ of the Wide-Ownership Workshop Industrial Ecology idea came from visiting a makerspace, Freeside Atlanta. It used to be located in a complex of giant old Quonset-style former cotton warehouses, surrounded by barbed wire in a rough neighborhood. The complex was always open, with a guard at the gate – I’m not really sure what for – they seemed to let anybody in. It was a “temporary autonomous zone”, a /scene/. The several parallel buildings, each several hundred feet long had been split into dozens of workshops and other spaces, including a couple of illegal nightclubs. On the Thursday night I visited, it was energetic outside and in.
Freeside had several thousand square feet of all kinds of tools and materials. You could work all night if you felt like it and most of the other places would be active, too – when I visited, one guy was getting the latest iteration of a part run off on another shop’s laser cutter, while he went across the alley for a beer at the club. He got a sweetheart deal, paying only slightly more than the cost of running the cutter – in exchange, he would run off whatever the laser-cutter guy needed on Freeside’s tools.
Why couldn’t this continue? I wondered, though cool scenes never seem to last. Why couldn’t it be scaled up so you could make anything?
[...]
I had long been enthusiastic about the idea of molecular nanotechnology, reading Drexler’s Engines of Creation in 1989, and his very technical Nanosystems when it came out. In 2005 I coached a couple of boys, age 10 and 11, from my electronics class for gifted homeschoolers in a project for the Toshiba Exploravision invention contest. One of the boys wanted to invent something that would let him be a for-real giant. I couldn’t think of a way immediately, but then I remembered “utility fog”, which should allow basically anything you could do in a Star Trek holodeck. We came up with a pretty detailed design, with processing, networking, cooling, power, optical phased-array collective displays, actuators … and how to apply it to education: telepresence, historical simulations and simulations of dangerous chemical experiments. Whittled it down to ten pages, somehow. It was the only entry in the state to get honors that year.
In 2014, I had an epiphany about how to make self-reproducing factories work economically with any degree of automation – not only to work economically, but to work better than the current economy.
***
Imagine Indra’s net, filling all space and time with a web whose intersections are jewels, each reflecting all of the others. The jewels may also be seen through other schemata – Leibnizian monads, vertexes in Feynman diagrams, atomic perceptions/ perceivers of varied potentialities and probabilities. ....
***
With regard to the CDC particularly, in 2017-19 I drove dozens of CDC people for Uber. I’m relaxed about bio labs - my dad is a pathologist, with a decades-long solo clinical, anatomic and forensic practice; I lived near Ft. Detrick for years (the biowar lab that closed in 2019), I’ve done some bacteriology work myself. Most of the CDC people were lovely, especially the field researchers.
But there were a few that gave me the absolute heebie-jeebies - just off the charts bad vibes with nothing I could put my finger on as to why, other than the “duper’s delight” smirk. Evil, in a word. Driving, I had only intermittent glances in the mirror to go on, but my subconscious put its foot down and forced me to stop driving around November 2019. Several other pieces of information contributed - the closure of Ft. Detrick, the lung disease supposedly caused by vaping, but most of all, the unprecedented secret meetings at the CDC, with even top assistants barred, that I learned about from a passenger.
I was born at a very young age ....
Many such cases
I think the two main reasons to be skeptical that utopias are possible now are:
1) Lots of people have tried and failed, and those failures are recent enough to be documented (with your post here an example of that documentation)
2) Governments are bigger, more capable, and more willing and able to limit technologically mediated change that could help create a utopia
Per 2, I can create a utopia - we need to legalize gengineering somewhere, and let market forces act so that people can pay to have much smarter, healthier, happier, and more attractive kids. When parents can choose the level of neuroticism (low), IQ (high), conscientiousness (high), etc their kids will have, those kids will be able to create better and more utopian societies together than their parents, and provided gengineering capabilities keep increasing, that can be a virtuous spiral.
But gengineering isn't legal anywhere. And it likely won't be legal anywhere for a good amount of time, and if it were legal somewhere, odds are enough people in other countries would agitate about it and try to make it illegal, via soft or hard power. Crabs in a bucket.
Similarly, if you let people sort themselves by things other than wealth and income. Take the people in the top decile of combined IQ, capability, conscientiousness, and mental health and let them form their own society and government. They'll get closer than anyone else to creating a better and more utopian society over time - but wait, we can't do that. There's no process to do it, it's called "secession" and it's a dirty word to all governments everywhere. That top decile pays a lot of taxes, after all. Also, it's probably not diverse or inclusive enough, so they'll all get cancelled or embargoed by trade partners or whatever, and this is also why we can't have tracking by ability in schools in the US.
Back in 18th-19th century times, the federal government was much weaker. Local governments were much weaker. You had a credible means to create a mini society that followed different rules, both legally and socially. You can't do any of that now.
If we did have some means to make more federated enclaves of different legal schemes, then we could have the requisite sorting by ability and inclination, and sorting by technologically-allowed-and-mediated change like gengineering, to actually try to do something different and better. But good luck convincing current governments to give up the cream of their current tax-paying crop and let them go form weird Prospera-like enclaves and have super-babies together.
Thank you for the thoughts. The idea that we are prisoners of our far better and more qualified legal structures is an interesting point and quite possibly a contributor to it at least today if not in the early 20th century.
"Lots of people tried and failed..." What does this mean in a world of 8 billion? How many are lots? Or perhaps a better line of questioning: what is the number of tried "cultures" versus untried ones? How well-trodden is the spectrum of culture and community structures, especially given the contemporary range of knowledge and technology resources?
The worst part of it is, even in this world of 8B, states and top-level government has increased in power so much that this may not be possible even in the developing world. Lots of African countries, as one example, pay China for the panopticon surveillance capabilities they've developed on their own people, so the African leaders can spy on and be the boot on the face of their own citizens forever.
But absolutely, from a theoretical perspective, the spectrum of "attempted" cultures is absolutely dwarfed by the infinite possible cultures. The real fun part is imagining where are the local attractors in that space that we can't get to now, because people generally suck in large numbers, but COULD get to those further-off culture places with a higher IQ, higher conscientiousness, more cooperative subset of people? Whether that subset gets there by simple selection, gengineering, or even machine / AI enhancements doesn't really matter.
But how to reach a point where forming those subset and enclaves is possible again? I can really only see it happening in a "frontier" society, so IMO, we need a thriving space colonization society for it to be able to happen again. I don't see it happening on earth, with the current scope and level of developement of the governments here.
I moved back after a decade abroad and am shocked by our malaise and cynicism. CA is approaching UK/EU levels. It's sadder to see in our art/entertainment too. I blame the intellectual climate more than economic. We've never had more leverage and are close to multiplying it. Regulation aside, we have plenty of frontiers in that every one of our paradigms must be reinvented. Physically we have the space and resources to build Babylons and Shangri-Las. More importantly, America is the world's best hope rn. The stakes are far higher than ourselves, and we need to be riffing on the fantastical.
Enjoyed your take but expected your vision before it ended. You could draw a compelling one with the thought you've given here. I wrote one through the lens of health you might find useful.
https://jonnyabates.substack.com/p/restoring-american-health-and-our
It got too long so I thought I would leave it for another day, but thank you!
There are still some glimmers, seasteading and charter cities come to mind. There’s a commune in Ithaca NY that’s interesting. It’s a capital-intensive endeavor, though.
Those are ideals too, and a good thing, though they all seem so small in their dreams. I hope there's many more.
You never know, Neom could pan out.
The one example I kept thinking about while reading your post was the Khmer Rouge and how they strived to achieve what they saw as the perfect form of communism and they ended up massacaring a quarter of the Cambodian population.
Absolutely. And Lenin's disastrous attempt to end money (quickly followed by the "New Economic Policy"), and his forced collectivization of farms and murder of kulaks. The number of deaths is staggering, in the tens of millions.
Yup.
As far as I can tell from my experience of studying architecture, I feel strongly that both in academia and in practice, the central theme is that of encouraging collective action and collaborative living. The idea of utopia is not thrown around too much but I think that is a good thing, perhaps it demonstrates that we have learned to be more humble and grounded towards even ‘noble’ ambitions. I think the general vibe is more on the side of slouching towards rather than directly creating utopia.
I don't know that it's good, I do think ambition is useful and necessary. And I loved Brad's book! https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/slouching-towards-utopia
My guess is there are all sorts of little attempts to create utopias all over the place; they just don't get the same attention as before. But the bigger issue that our technical prowess meant that we had the power to pursue utopian dreams in the 20th century, and terrible results of those utopian dreams continue to haunt us.
I hope so, either we're stuck under a deluge of info such that these things get buried, or there isn't a sustained belief that we can even create utopias. I fear it's the latter. The haunting of the communist regimes for sure is a major reason today, though the utopians died out even towards the end of the 19th century.
Various silicon valley adjacent types are trying both the commune thing:
https://neighborhoodsf.com/
And the new town thing:
https://www.edgeesmeralda.com/
Maybe not as ambitious as you might like, but directionally relevant, no?
This is also an interesting study about this subject: https://books.google.cm/books?id=25aUbOSwQ44C
I think there are still many Utopian approaches out there, in fact I’ve made an effort to collect them (the ones that are available to be found)
https://agartha.one
To be a true Utopia that Utopia must, necessarily, outcompete opposing or, at least, alternative systems. i.e. from a Darwinian perspective, it needs to be an evolutionarily stable strategy and a good one at that. Today, we have seen so many try and fail that the evidence appears pretty conclusive that many of the traits that we all believe should be part of our Utopia are actually inherently unstable. Utopia appears to be a logical impossibility, a contradiction in terms. Human beings are denied the possibility of Utopia for so long as they are human beings.
I came across the link to this post in another article, which I can no longer remember. The article below was also linked in it, and both of your posts were the same day. Guess it was Utopia Day in my feed. Hazards of opening links and then closing the original article.
https://www.noemamag.com/chasing-utopia-startup-style/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter
Thought provoking stuff! I'm curious as to why you omitted the hippie communes of the 1960s and 1970s; those seem like utopian community experiments to me, but maybe I'm thinking of them differently.
Mostly only because they felt too inward looking rather than trying to model a new way to live to the whole world. It felt a pulling back than a pushing forward, though admittedly it's not a precise distinction.
Ah, gotcha, thanks for the clarification! I see where you're coming from and I agree.
Perhaps that's another stage in the process, then. People saw the problems with earlier utopias and felt they had to prove the model inwardly and practically first before proselytizing it and declaring it correct. Which, come to think of it, isn't a bad idea.
The kids are totally down for new utopian experiments. They just need good leadership. Those leaders don’t seem to be emerging. Maybe you can help them out.
To the promised land!
Very interesting- so many utopias seem to have foundered on the question of who gets to exercise power. Effective altruism would seem to be yet another example of this.
I definitely agree that the lack of frontiers is a major factor dampening utopian (or extropian) thinking and especially practice. While I applaud efforts to create free zones, it's incredibly hard to sustain in a world saturated with governments and nation states. My goal is to stay alive long enough -- or to be revived in the future -- when we can get off this planet at reasonable cost in large numbers. That will be time for social and economic experimentation to flourish.
First, thanks for the charts, Rohit, they're most useful.
Beyond that, yes, no, not really, we can't get there from here.
Let's look at your last paragraph. Your last sentence: "It is worth asking why this form of optimism is no longer around." YES. But I've got doubts about the first sentence of that paragraph: "The spirit of pioneering ambition is perhaps our best features as a species." I know what the words mean, and I have half-a-hunch what you mean by the sentence, and I'm not buying it.
I live in an intellectual world where evolutionary psychology is important. I don't buy it, but I take it seriously. In THAT world your sentence is most easily read as an assertion about our biological nature. I don't think that pioneering ambition is somehow in our genes. But, for example, I'm willing to believe that an exploratory urge is in our genes, and not only ours, but in many animal species. And I'm quite willing to believe that that urge enters into the construction of pioneering ambition.
What do I mean by that, construction? As a crude analogy, think of chess. On the one hand we have the rules of the game, the 8 by 8 board, the different pieces, and the legal moves. You have to know that in order to play the game at all. Think of that as analogous to our biological nature. In order to play even a halfway decent game of chess you need to learn some tactics and strategy; those things are defined over the basic rules, but cannot be reduced to them. That's cultural evolution.
And that's where we get pioneering ambition. That takes us to your next sentence: "We only seem to get it in glimpses as you glance through history, seemingly at random as if a capricious muse bestows it on us, outside our control." But it seems to crop up most strongly in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I once asked my humanist colleagues: When did we start thinking about the future as a time and place when things would be different from they are now, when they would be better, and made so by effort we can undertake now? That's what they told me (https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2021/07/when-did-future-become-site-for-human.html). The American Revolution started in 1776, the French Revolution a decade later. Note that the American Constitution contained a procedure for making amendments because the framers believed that the future would be different in consequential ways.
Why then? You mention the Enlightenment. Yes, but it didn't come out of nowhere. There's a history there, a lot of cultural evolution. The same with the Industrial Revolution. How are the cognitive underpinnings of those developments constructed out of the "raw stuff" of biological human nature? Hardly anyone is even asking the question. But it's the sort of thing David Hays and I gave careful thought to in elaborating our theory of cultural ranks (https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/cultural%20ranks). That's just the barest beginning but it does provide a way of thinking about how something like pioneering ambition might be constructed.
Beyond that, well, it's complicated. Walt Disney was optimistic about the future and perhaps did more to promote the idea of a technology-fueled quasi-utopian future than any other single person. You can see his vision in a short promotional film he made in 1966, a few months before he died. In that film (https://youtu.be/UEm-09B0px8?si=5tnQh4-zh52qdWm-) he lays out his vision for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow (EPCOT). What actually got built as EPCOT is far less interesting. After Walt died the world that had nurtured that vision fell apart, though not because Disney died. For all sorts of reasons, some of which you mention.
We can't go back. We need to figure out a new vision (or visions) for the future. One way I have of thinking about that is something I call Kisangani 2150 (https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/Kisangani2150). Why that name? It's derived from New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson's novel about the world in 2140. It's neither utopian or dystopian. But it's believable. My idea is to take the world, more or less, run it forward 10 years and center the story in Kisangani. Why Kisangani? Because it's deep in the Congo Basin, which is a very different part of the world from New York. Also, there's literary resonance. Kisangani is the location of the Inner Station in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. That, as you may recall, is where Kurtz went mad. And there's music, which I explain in the post where I first entertained the idea: Kisangani 2150, or Reconstructing Civilization on a New Model, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/07/kisangani-2150-or-reconstructing.html
Basically, we have to rethink EVERYTHING. No time to waste.
Thanks for the soapbox.
On the Enlightenment and thoughts about the improvability of humanity, I especially like Richard Tarnas's beautifully written book, The Passion of the West Mind.