5 ms·

Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia

96 points by hownottowrite 10y ago

stcredzero 10y ago
information 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.)
- cestith 10y ago
  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.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    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.
    - nnfy 10y ago
      >A lot of technologists I meet are socially and culturally illiterate and do not seem competent to implement such systems And who are you to make such a judgement? What about the case that fear of bias is used as a tool of control? Perhaps in such a society, these "culturally illiterate" developers would be better suited to create a more minimally biased system.
      - anigbrowl 10y ago
        I'm an artist, mystic, and all-around fringe thinker. and I feel fine about having a cautiously qualified opinion.
  - Noos 10y ago
    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.
    - cestith 10y ago
      I'm not certain what specific symptoms could come about, but if there's one constant in human nature it's that people will find short-term reasons to oppose things no matter the long-term goals.
ideonexus 10y ago
The 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/415544/5082948/1260951403247/HORIZONS-MURAL-Rober-McCall.jpg http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...
- kleer001 10y ago
  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?
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    The perpetual childhood might be part of the torture?
    - kleer001 10y ago
api 10y ago
A utopia is a local maximum. Intelligent beings, having the ability to model and traverse fitness landscapes, eventually figure this out.
- Retra 10y ago
  But a global maximum is also a local maximum, so what good does it do you to figure that out?
jhbadger 10y ago
The 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.
Animats 10y ago
If you've never seen Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama from the 1939 World's Fair, here it is.[1] (480p). That was the GM vision of the future. Much of it was achieved, mostly the highway part. By 1956, GM's vision had progressed to a titanium body self-driving turbine car with huge tailfins.[2] That prototype car, the Firebird II, actually worked. In 1964, GM did Futureama 2 at the 1964 World's Fair. This was a future that didn't happen, with space stations, all-terrain vehicles on the moon, and giant road-building machines cutting roads through tropical jungles. The 1964 World's Fair perhaps represented "peak future", the high point of industrial-strength utopianism. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypxE5XdzLuY&t=467 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypxE5XdzLuY&t=467 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk

96 points by hownottowrite 10y ago

information 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.)

cestith 10y ago
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.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  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.
  - nnfy 10y ago
    >A lot of technologists I meet are socially and culturally illiterate and do not seem competent to implement such systems And who are you to make such a judgement? What about the case that fear of bias is used as a tool of control? Perhaps in such a society, these "culturally illiterate" developers would be better suited to create a more minimally biased system.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      I'm an artist, mystic, and all-around fringe thinker. and I feel fine about having a cautiously qualified opinion.
- Noos 10y ago
  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.
  - cestith 10y ago
    I'm not certain what specific symptoms could come about, but if there's one constant in human nature it's that people will find short-term reasons to oppose things no matter the long-term goals.

ideonexus 10y ago

The 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/415544/5082948/1260951403247/HORIZONS-MURAL-Rober-McCall.jpg http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...

kleer001 10y ago
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?
- jessaustin 10y ago
  The perpetual childhood might be part of the torture?
  - kleer001 10y ago

api 10y ago

A utopia is a local maximum. Intelligent beings, having the ability to model and traverse fitness landscapes, eventually figure this out.

Retra 10y ago
But a global maximum is also a local maximum, so what good does it do you to figure that out?

jhbadger 10y ago

The 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.

Animats 10y ago

If you've never seen Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama from the 1939 World's Fair, here it is.[1] (480p). That was the GM vision of the future. Much of it was achieved, mostly the highway part. By 1956, GM's vision had progressed to a titanium body self-driving turbine car with huge tailfins.[2] That prototype car, the Firebird II, actually worked. In 1964, GM did Futureama 2 at the 1964 World's Fair. This was a future that didn't happen, with space stations, all-terrain vehicles on the moon, and giant road-building machines cutting roads through tropical jungles. The 1964 World's Fair perhaps represented "peak future", the high point of industrial-strength utopianism. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypxE5XdzLuY&t=467 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypxE5XdzLuY&t=467 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk