Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
bostonreview.net
Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
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Re: Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
#2information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate
Profound! Lies and manipulations are also information. In a free society, who is to judge what is an unacceptable subtle lie and what is an unacceptable subtle manipulation?
(What if a private platform achieves some kind of network effect, such that it has a virtual monopoly? By going to a private website, you are giving up your freedom voluntarily, but through network effects, that private website can effectively suppress all speech through its dominated medium.)
Re: Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
#3information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate Profound! Lies and manipulations are also information. In a free society, who is to judge what is an unacceptable subtle lie and what is an unacceptable subtle manipulation? (What if a private platform achieves some kind of network effect, such that it has a virtual monopoly? By going to a private website, you are giving up your freedom voluntarily,…
If it's dominated by a single player then the information isn't actually free. Hence rather than anarchists we get the neoanarcbists fighting against tight control of the information rather than fighting control over the people themselves.
We'll also have neoluddites who are fine with physical machines leveraging human labor to great heights but who fear and rise up against expert systems and machine learning that threaten to automate away human control of those machines.
Re: Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
#4The remains of the 1939 Worlds Fair are found in the Bronx. I took a subway there once on a visit to NY. I was both inspired by the science center there, and dismayed to find it surrounded by antiquated residences and roads. It was like a vision of the future in a garden surrounded by the mundane suburban sprawl of reality. Futurism is still the closest thing I have to a religion, and so I admire that in Bel Geddes vision. My favorite bit of futurism is Robert McCall's "The Prologue and the Promise" mural found in the Disney Epcot center [1]. If we aren't striving for a better future, then what are we living for?
For the idea that "Inside Every Utopia is a Dystopia," the 1973 story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin [2] has always most starkly impressed this concept into my mind. In it, Omelas is a perfect utopian city where life is perfect, except this perfection is dependent on the incredible suffering of a single child kept hidden away in a dark place. At a certain age, child's suffering is revealed to each citizen. Most residents learn to live with this fact or rationalize it away. It's a serious oversimplification of certain dimensions of our own modern societies, but it is a powerful metaphor for thinking about how much our cheap modern conveniences rely on the services of minorities and the impoverished who serve us and manufacture our many shiny things. I wish this essay had delved deeper into this concept.
[1] http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
Re: Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
#5The remains of the 1939 Worlds Fair are found in the Bronx. I took a subway there once on a visit to NY. I was both inspired by the science center there, and dismayed to find it surrounded by antiquated residences and roads. It was like a vision of the future in a garden surrounded by the mundane suburban sprawl of reality. Futurism is still the closest thing I have to a religion, and so I admire that in Bel Geddes v…
I always wondered what happened to the kid as she aged. Killed? Shipped far away? Dies during child birth of the next pariah? Is it a guy? Kept in perpetual childhood?
Re: Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
#6The remains of the 1939 Worlds Fair are found in the Bronx. I took a subway there once on a visit to NY. I was both inspired by the science center there, and dismayed to find it surrounded by antiquated residences and roads. It was like a vision of the future in a garden surrounded by the mundane suburban sprawl of reality. Futurism is still the closest thing I have to a religion, and so I admire that in Bel Geddes v…
>The remains of the 1939 Worlds Fair are found in the Bronx.
Queens actually (Flushing Meadows) and what you see from the World's Fair today is almost certainly from the later 1964 fair.
Re: Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
#7A utopia is a local maximum. Intelligent beings, having the ability to model and traverse fitness landscapes, eventually figure this out.
Re: Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
#8information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate Profound! Lies and manipulations are also information. In a free society, who is to judge what is an unacceptable subtle lie and what is an unacceptable subtle manipulation? (What if a private platform achieves some kind of network effect, such that it has a virtual monopoly? By going to a private website, you are giving up your freedom voluntarily,…
If it's dominated by a single player then the information isn't actually free. Hence rather than anarchists we get the neoanarcbists fighting against tight control of the information rather than fighting control over the people themselves. We'll also have neoluddites who are fine with physical machines leveraging human labor to great heights but who fear and rise up against expert systems and machine learning that th…
I am skeptical of ML not because it will automate away human control of production (which would be quite a good thing in many respects) but because it is likely to reinforce arbitrary or implicit human biases while being sold as the epitome of rational objectivity. A lot of technologists I meet are socially and culturally illiterate and do not seem competent to implement such systems. I would further argue that employers have strong economic incentives to select for such illiteracy when hiring.
Re: Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
#9information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate Profound! Lies and manipulations are also information. In a free society, who is to judge what is an unacceptable subtle lie and what is an unacceptable subtle manipulation? (What if a private platform achieves some kind of network effect, such that it has a virtual monopoly? By going to a private website, you are giving up your freedom voluntarily,…
If it's dominated by a single player then the information isn't actually free. Hence rather than anarchists we get the neoanarcbists fighting against tight control of the information rather than fighting control over the people themselves. We'll also have neoluddites who are fine with physical machines leveraging human labor to great heights but who fear and rise up against expert systems and machine learning that th…
It probably won't be like that. Those in charge of the utopia generally never foresee the dystopian aspects well. Remember how people worried about overpopulation, until we found out westernization brings declining and even sub-replacement fertility.
More likely we'll be like some soviet socialist nightmare. All packed into dirty, ugly cities, eating our hummus and drinking our water as we are shuttled from our four hour a week job by an Uber and back to our shoddy, grey Mincome housing blocks to watch bread and circuses on Netflix.
Re: Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia
#10The review itself is worth reading for itself, but I found it interesting that its author is the novelist John Crowley. I wonder if it is just random that he was asked to review this book or if he is currently researching the topic for a new novel.