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Protopia

kevinkelly.substack.com

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Re: Protopia

#41

Post by p_j_w »

bko wrote: post #30
discreteevent wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a more reliable proxy than the $1b damage climate events, because the other is due to development on risky coast lines and overall increase in property values above inflation. I don't think coastal property prices are the main concern. Most of climate change damage doesn't directly show up on a balance sheet but it's already there. Drought and storm damage are causing food shortages leading to terror and wa…

Shouldn't deaths be up if climate damage is wrecking havock? That's my point

GP’s point is that the havok being wreaked isn’t being attributed to climate in instances where it should be. The Syria civil war, for example. There’s a case to be made that it started in large part due to climate change, but does anyone count any of those deaths as climate deaths?

Re: Protopia

#42

Post by ang_cire »

paytonjjones wrote: post #34
ang_cire wrote: post #7

I like how the author defines dystopia as > reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos. rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly -strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings')…

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" There are many forms of dystopia and picking two that prominently feature absolute institutional control also seems like cherry picking. The Hunger Games, World War Z, and Fallout are also dystopias.

The hunger games is also about an authoritarian society with mass surveillance, though?

WWZ is about a literal zombie outbreak, and while I can't comment on whether the book is actually using it as a vehicle to critique or extrapolate real-world social systems, the movie sure as hell didn't.

Without going into a very long rant about Bethesda missing the point of Fallout as a universe, suffice it to say that it is also not intended to be a serious examination of what life might or even could become, ever. In fact, it was intended to be a platform for social critique via parody and caricaturism.

Re: Protopia

#43

Post by etdznots »

bko wrote: post #10
ang_cire wrote: post #7

I like how the author defines dystopia as > reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos. rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly -strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings')…

> mass surveillance I hear this complaint here a lot and I guess there are more cameras, but arrests have gone down in absolute terms in the US despite growing population. > The total number of arrests in the U.S. fell sharply in 2020 during pandemic-driven shifts in public activity and enforcement—and it has changed little since then. The 2024 arrest total was 25% lower than in 2019, the year before the pandemic, an…

There should be more order and enforcement (bounded by civil liberties).

mass surveillance is totally orthogonal and will not reduce disorder or disregard for laws.

we know that empirically from the last twenty or so years where mass surveillance has only gotten more and more aggressive, while at least in cities: decay and disorder are rising.

Re: Protopia

#44

Post by etdznots »

bko wrote: post #31
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> D[r]one warfare > Isn't this better than boots on the ground? The answer to this question depends on whether you firsthand experienced sleepless nights in a city when drones fly directly over your house while you wait for them do dive or get missile defenced into it, a neighbour's house, or somewhere else, and then hear explosions and wait for the morning news to learn how many people died this night, to such litt…

The answer to this question depends on whether you firsthand experienced sleepless nights in a city while an invading army advances toward your neighborhood, while you wait to learn whether soldiers will enter your street, your house, a neighbor’s house, or somewhere else, and then hear gunfire and explosions and wait for the morning news to learn how many people were killed that night, to such little grief in the ne…

Yeah I’d much rather be subjected to the invading army then the drone swarm

Re: Protopia

#45

Post by chaos_emergent »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #3

This is much too simplistic and ignores the compounding effects of bad decisions. It’s basically an argument for the happy path where nothing goes wrong but things have been going wrong for a long time. We are facing many economic, political, cultural and environmental problems that are the direct result of a viewpoint like this, that everything will just keep getting better if we keep doing more of the same thing wi…

It’s hard to compound in a negative direction for too long, no? People see a compounded value for a short period of time and say “that’s not the direction we want to go, let’s course correct”.

Re: Protopia

#46

Post by staplers »

arcwhite wrote: post #39
jfengel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally, it's less "redistribute billionaires' wealth" so much as "figure out what parts of the system allow some people to accumulate money orders of magnitude more than the effort they've put in, and tune them to allow anyone who works to afford a comfortable life". As it is, money makes money, while effort alone makes barely enough to scrape by (or not even that much). There are many, many paths to fix it, and the…

We can do both, adding some additional upper tax brackets and clamping down on tax evasion can go hand in hand with other reforms.

It saddens me that these 2 simple things would go so far to fix so many problems. Knowing they are so far out of reach in current reality

Re: Protopia

#47

Post by Krasnol »

> Yet the prospect of utopia is both impossible, and also undesirable. Undesirable, because it would become boring fast.

Author should read Iain M. Banks.

Maybe he wouldn't want to because it's easier to handle caricatures of utopia and dystopia in such a way that you could replace them with "heaven" & "hell". This is theology aimed to make Protopia look sane.

(Utopia doesn't mean an absence of problems. People working together to solve problems would be an aspect of Utopia. Something worth aspiring.)

I liked the idea of growing choices as an indicator however it also shows where the author likes to not look at. Going from farming to web developer is nice. The American Dream! And it happens. However the more likely path is: farmer to driver with their children having to struggle to climb the slope.

This and the diminishing choices in the middle classes are what show that this is rather just another path towards dystopia. Yes "we" have progress. But there is a strong inequality within those who profit from it. The author notices that half the world can be crap and still calls the direction progress, but never asks who is holding which half, or whether that split is itself widening.

So what is this Protopia the author describes here actually? Any state of the world can be called slightly better than last year if you choose the metrics after the fact.

What observation would count as evidence that we are NOT in it?

Re: Protopia

#48

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ang_cire wrote: post #7

I like how the author defines dystopia as > reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos. rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly -strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings')…

> I like how the author defines dystopia as [ ... ] rather than [... ]

There's no need to choose. Dystopia is more than one thing, and both of the sets of things you mention are just different kinds of dystopia.

Re: Protopia

#49

Post by abetusk »

1% compounding "positive impact", however that's defined, still leads to a singularity like event. Moore's law-like effects are doubling computing power for fixed cost at 1.5 to 2 years, so it's noticeably fast, especially as we get near the "hockey stick" point, but there are other exponential effects that are happening in tandem, notably solar.

Global energy usage is rising at a yearly rate of about 2.5%. In my view, this is one of the most basic statistics that correlates to improved quality of life.

Regardless of what measure of "progress" you use, if it's compounded, it leads to drastic changes very quickly.

Re: Protopia

#50

Post by bko »

etdznots wrote: post #44
bko wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to this question depends on whether you firsthand experienced sleepless nights in a city while an invading army advances toward your neighborhood, while you wait to learn whether soldiers will enter your street, your house, a neighbor’s house, or somewhere else, and then hear gunfire and explosions and wait for the morning news to learn how many people were killed that night, to such little grief in the ne…

Yeah I’d much rather be subjected to the invading army then the drone swarm

Disagree. Drones are more precise, tend to attack military targets. Invading army is more indiscriminate
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