Kim Stanley Robinson breaks down the various flavors of utopia and dystopia and comes out in favor of writing about, and pursuing, utopias, despite their limitations.
These days I tend to think of dystopias as being fashionable, perhaps lazy, maybe even complacent, because one pleasure of reading them is cozying into the feeling that however bad our present moment is, it's nowhere near as bad as the ones these poor characters are suffering through…If this is right, dystopia is part of our all-encompassing hopelessness.
It is important to oppose political attacks on the idea of utopia, as these are usually reactionary statements on the behalf of the currently powerful, those who enjoy a poorly-hidden utopia-for-the-few alongside a dystopia-for-the-many.
It's interesting to read his comments in the context of reactions to politically progressive efforts like the Green New Deal and universal healthcare. Some of the loudest opposition has come from those who already enjoy the desired benefits.
Immediately many people will object that this is too hard, too implausible, contradictory to human nature, politically impossible, uneconomical, and so on. Yeah yeah. Here we see the shift from cruel optimism to stupid pessimism, or call it fashionable pessimism, or simply cynicism. It's very easy to object to the utopian turn by invoking some poorly-defined but seemingly omnipresent reality principle. Well-off people do this all the time.
Crafting a compelling utopia–or as I sometimes put it, designing a better way to live together–is the defining project of our generation. We have the resources and capability; what we still lack is the right design and pathway.
The past few years have taught the human race a few surprising things about itself, and they're not very flattering.
First, we are not the rational creatures we think we are; our decisions are largely driven by emotions, biases, and even unrelated activities. For instance, simply using hand sanitizer can temporarily change your political beliefs.
Second, the new way to exert power in the world is not physical but digital. Online social networks have immense mindshare and impact on our lives.
And third, dangerous, powerful professionals are using these digital tools to manipulate us.
Renee DiResta has written an in-depth article looking at how state-sponsored professional attackers use misinformation to divide and influence society. Increasingly, their strategy is to directly target individual citizens, through the media and social networks, feeding them misinformation to steer their minds in specific directions.
Combatants are now focusing on infiltration rather than automation: leveraging real, ideologically-aligned people to inadvertently spread real, ideologically-aligned content instead.
What's especially dangerous about this kind of polarization is that it's often good business. Digital influence is cheap, as online advertising platforms love to remind us, and angry or scared viewers are especially profitable.
Combatants evolve with remarkable speed, because digital munitions are very close to free. In fact, because of the digital advertising ecosystem, information warfare may even turn a profit.
If you've ever felt that a news show, reshared Facebook post, or blog post was designed to rile you up and make you angry…well, it probably was. And this misinformation will only get more extreme and convincing over time, as technologies like deepfaked videos move into politics.
The government has the ability to create meaningful deterrence, to make it an unquestionably bad idea to interfere in American democracy and manipulate American citizens.
As individuals, meanwhile, we can be far more critical in what we read and believe. Understanding that malevolent forces are constantly trying to manipulate us is a good first step.
We can also be more careful in what we repeat and share with others, checking multiple trusted sources and fact-checkers (like PolitiFact and Snopes) before resharing an article with friends or online. The best way to influence Americans, after all, is to get another American they trust to do it for you.
And there's never been a better time to support a professional, free, and independent press. One good way to tell if a news outlet is worth trusting and supporting is, of course, how they cover the news about digital manipulation and misinformation. People and sources that deny manipulation is happening are likely not worth trusting about other things either.
Be careful, little eyes, what you see.
It's going to take all of us, and it's going to take forever. And that's the point.
We're at an interesting point in history, where for the first time most of the people in the world have significant resources and freedom, but that has brought with it environmental destruction and growing inequality. It's clear that the current path we're on is not one that we can follow together forever…but what is a viable alternative?
It must provide a viable transition path from today's systems to the ideal future. As the author puts it, "this probably requires out-competing the current system, in a way that can scale to everyone, while obsoleting the destructive forms of competition within the new system." Beat capitalism at its own game, if you will.
Accumulation has reached a point where single individuals have more accumulated wealth than all of the world combined before the industrial revolution. And abstraction has reached the place where tens of trillions of dollars are moved around the world daily, in digital form only, based on financial statements seeking to maximize profits…the consequences of which can include war, species extinction, climate change, increases in poverty, and so on.
More on this perspective soon, from my recent reading of James C. Scott's Against the Grain.
Its source of competitive advantage (over the current system) has to come from optimizing coherence – of the agents with each other and with reality.
There's some pretty heavy economics jargon in there, but it's really interesting to think about designing systems that would feature these traits. My current strategy is optimizing collective intelligence through collaborative software; but worth thinking more broadly about how that interacts with the other parts of a future-viable system for all.
That was the first time I really considered that our way of life might not continue growing forever, and may end or transform completely. Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a short, poetic exploration of how we might come to terms with our mortality as a civilization, and if we must die out, learn how to die well. It's a dark book, but offers an unexpected olive branch in the form of the humanities as a way to avoid the worst of what might come.
Scranton highlights that the foundations of our civilization are the stories we tell ourselves. If we tell stories about endless technological progress and individual fulfillment, we are likely to fall into chaos once our resources run out. But if we tell stories about what's best–and most basic–about human culture, we build knowledge and a support system for harder times.
Rather than technology, this emphasizes the humanities as the most important area to develop in ourselves and our children. Scranton argues that reading, writing, singing and drawing new stories about "the good life" is the best way to protect against the dangers of climate change, resource depletion, and societal collapse.
The first step, though, is to personally and as a society realize our mortality and shift to a mindset of collective responsibility.
I've long wanted to write simple children's books about the future, and illustrating possible good lifestyles in a challenging environment seems like a good way to do that. Will make that a priority this year.
Azoulay asks her readers to project themselves into the scenes of photographs, to notice the power dynamics at play, to identify the participants, and to view the outcomes not as inevitable but as one possibility among many.
To be resisted, it seems, violence must be seen, and photography makes such vision possible.
Brooks, of course, wrote one of the defining books on what it means to be upper-middle class in America, with Bobos in Paradise back in 2000.
That said, it's ridiculous to say that "structural barriers…are less important than the informal social barriers." The financial, political, and racial disadvantages built into our society are far more difficult to overcome than challenges in choosing the right sandwich at the deli. But all of them are important.