7 ms·

Protopia

53 points by surprisetalk 2mo ago

boxed 2mo ago
Isn't this just a case of euphemism treadmill? The Culture and Star Trek are clearly utopian visions of the future and also fits this protoian definition 100%. There is no difference, except that some people think, incorrectly, that you can jump from the current society (imo a utopia itself by any time traveller from 150 years ago) to a new ideal world without passing the intermediate steps. I think of these people as the creationists of social evolution, just totally wrong on basic facts and intellectually dishonest.
- aetherspawn 2mo ago
  Who in the hell would think 50x annual wage house prices is any type of utopia.
  - boxed 2mo ago
    Someone who understands that you can't measure progress with a single variable. Look at food prices 50 years ago. They were astronomical compared to today. Expensive mortgages are an investment, you're literally paying back the loan as a type of savings. Food on the other hand? You ain't getting that money back.
throwthrowuknow 2mo ago
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 without taking a hard look at what the longer term effects of the “progress” we’ve made along the way. We keep doubling down on the same strategies though and so things are continuing to escalate as we accumulate bugs in the system without fixing anything fundamental, worse we continue to chip away at the things that were working well.
- boxed 2mo ago
  Every time we try to fix anything fundamental, we end up with revolutions that make everything much worse and sometimes just get stuck in their new dystopia. Meanwhile incrementalist economies+democracies are racing ahead quite well.
  - throwthrowuknow 2mo ago
    I’m not calling for a revolution but we need to identify and address problems before they get out of control in order to fix them incrementally.
- chaos_emergent 2mo ago
  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”.
  - throwthrowuknow 2mo ago
    It’s quite easy when the effects are small at first and the changes occur over decades. People just get used to the smaller changes or were not alive to experience the earlier state. Only when things become so unstable that any minor change can have extreme consequences do people start to notice.
domstatecraft 2mo ago
"If Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease which is evidently opposite to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal."
koliber 2mo ago
I’ve been mulling a congruent idea. When we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life. We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases. It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic. More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring. I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed. Not sure if this is clear or how to call it. 2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?
- sph 2mo ago
  A few notes about your comment, that I feel is well-meaning but carries a lot of common misconceptions: - aiming for an end goal is not fine in most cases, it is simply a very common, terrible idea. You need a process, not a goal. "Journey over destination", yadda yadda - 99% of human behaviour is governed by processes we call habits. Operating on the habit system is the key to long-term behavioural change, but one also has to recognize replacing habits is a long, delicate affair and one tends to ask too much of themselves. The metaphor I carry in my head is you're trying to steer a bull with a feather; easy does it. "Tiny Habits" is a good self-help book with good science behind it - life is indeed dynamic but I feel such a hyper-rational, mechanistic way of approaching the conundrum is setting yourself up to failure. I recommend philosophy rather, especially Taoism, to embrace all of these concepts into a unified worldview of change: change being intrinsic to the universe, doing with little effort, and not forcing yourself (to burnout). You are not a machine.
  - koliber 2mo ago
    Appreciate your thoughts. I think if we sat down and talked we would agree on a lot of things. re: end goals: in most cases, you still need an end goal in mind in order to craft a process that will get you there. In the end, it is the process that matters and the goal is there only for measuring progress and adjusting course. However, a single process for a single goal is not enough in a dynamic changing world. You need a way of being able to react and adjust or even drastically change the process. re: habits. Again, fully agree given a static goal. But if the circumstances change, the existing habits might no longer serve you. You need to be able to adjust habits. re: hyper-rational. This is my style. I find that I can think, explain, and execute mechanically more effectively. It's practical. Deep down, there is a philosophy behind this, but I have a hard time explaining and applying philosophy.
forestrywat 2mo ago
This sure suggests that we're all choosing to build this dystopia we're trending towards. I agree very much with the idea that we should be making the world better little by little, but better... better for who? Who benefits is a genuinely important question to answer. I believe "better for most", which means using our wealth to lift up many. Others believe "better for me" or "better for my tribe" or "better for my nation". The two styles are fundamentally at odds -- my "redistribute the wealth of billionaires" goal is just never going to square with "billionaires deserve their wealth". So you have to answer "better for who" before you can efficiently climb "better" on your graph.
- Telemakhos 2mo ago
  There’s an unquestioned assumption underlying “using our wealth to lift up many,” namely that wealth lifts people up. A great deal of money has long been thrown at social problems that remain unsolved. Another way to look at it is that self-control lifts people up, and the accumulation or dissipation of wealth is consequent upon self-control. Pro athletes and lottery winners who never learned to manage budgets growing up tend to run through their money quickly and end up poor again because they lack the self-control needed to maintain and accumulate wealth. Having or lacking money is a result, not a cause; changing the consequent without addressing what is antecedent to the consequent will not result in lasting change.
  - Avicebron 2mo ago
    Ah yes the old "structural failing is actually a moral failing of the losers". If you care to educate yourself so the rest of us aren't just snickering behind our hands next time you speak. Read Watts, Duncan, and Quan (2018), and Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao about how poverty extracts "self-control". Or even just Webber's theodicy of fortune.
  - forestrywat 2mo ago
    I'm not super interested in debating the specifics because I was trying to point out that people will disagree about what "better" means and prevent progress. Thank you for so succinctly and promptly demonstrating that point, even knowing my post was an obviously simplified example for the purpose of brevity.
ang_cire 2mo ago
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'). But if you're trying to convince people that technology is in fact not the thing that's enabling mass surveillance and economic decline and black-mirror-like-drone-warfare and climate disasters and tyranny right now, then it would make sense to leave out the most common understanding of what a dystopia looks like. "No, AI is totally gonna result in Star Trek, not the Panopticon, I swear! What's a Palantir?" It feels like some kind of weird enlightened-techno-centrism.
- bko 2mo ago
  > 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, and half the number in the peak year of 1997. The combination of falling arrests and rising resident population has driven down the national arrest rate, which in 2024 was 30% lower than in 2019 and 71% below its peak in 1994. I think most (non-online) people would prefer more enforcement of laws. I've never had a conversation in real life where someone argued there should be less order and enforcement. That's an insane position to take and ahistorical. The idea you hear online that you can get rid of prisons. It's neither left nor right. You think failed communist states didn't arrest people? It's an idea whose intellectual roots go back only around 50 years and for good reason. It doesn't work, or at least doesn't produce societies that endure and get passed on. > Climate disasters Similarly, climate related deaths worldwide have dropped and continue to do so, pretty much a straight line. 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. > Economic decline The middle class is shrinking, but the upper and upper-middle is growing. So it's a bit of a barbell. But I'll also note that many of these measures are households, and there have been changes in typical households. Many people are staying single well into their 30s which means its a household of 1 compared to what would be a 2 person household in the past > Done warfare Isn't this better than boots on the ground? I don't think the problem is technology, it's armed conflict. I guess if you consider that armed conflicts are more likely because nations don't need to put as much lives at risk, and maybe that is a factor. But I'm not convinced somehow drones are driving this. https://counciloncj.org/who-gets-arrested-in-america-trends-across-four-decades-1980-2024/ https://counciloncj.org/who-gets-arrested-in-america-trends-... https://www.wsj.com/opinion/climate-activists-disasters-fire-storms-deaths-change-cop26-glasgow-global-warming-11635973538 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/climate-activists-disasters-fire...
Avicebron 2mo ago
At some point the problems compound faster than the "1% improvement" each year. The author deliberately doesn't wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.
- boxed 2mo ago
  > At some point the problems compound faster than the "1% improvement" each year. We've been going for literally hundreds of years or multiple thousands depending on how you count, and this isn't obvious at all. > The author deliberately doesn't [address] wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously. Wealth equality is imo a mirage. Most wealth inequality is driven by ownership of corporations. If we move that ownership to the states, and keep corporate controls intact, basically nothing happens except wealth equality goes way down. It's a mathematical magic trick that is utterly irrelevant. Misaligned financial incentives are a different matter though, and I agree there's a lot of problems there. But "driving misery" seems hyperbolic. What is actually "driving misery" is the lack of economic development of the poorest countries.
yogthos 2mo ago
I see somebody discovered the concept of dialectical materialism from first principles.
jonstewart 2mo ago
Imagine writing several paragraphs defining “utopia” and not mentioning Thomas More.
eulgro 2mo ago
Unfortunately for some problems like climate change, improving 1-2% per year starting today still leads to disaster.
Krasnol 2mo ago
> 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?
abetusk 2mo ago
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.
jrowen 2mo ago
The result of this bias is that virtually every movie that has ever been made about the future contains a dystopia, with very few exceptions. It's somewhat sad to me that this phenomenon is borne out in the comments (of this thread and, I would say, generally across HN in my experience). It's so easy to prophecy doom, ignoring the fact that life and humanity has generally prevailed and continued "progress" in the face of adversity, evil, extinction events, and other setbacks. I'm generally in agreement with this article, although, I'm not sure I'm onboard with the dismissal of utopia. Utopia can be whatever you want it to be, it doesn't have to be defined as impossible nonsense. If we're in a protopia, and we want to see protopia, there's sort of a tautological nothingness, akin to pointing out that there's no such thing as free will. The message then boils down to "well just keep on truckin' as is."

53 points by surprisetalk 2mo ago

boxed 2mo ago

Isn't this just a case of euphemism treadmill? The Culture and Star Trek are clearly utopian visions of the future and also fits this protoian definition 100%. There is no difference, except that some people think, incorrectly, that you can jump from the current society (imo a utopia itself by any time traveller from 150 years ago) to a new ideal world without passing the intermediate steps. I think of these people as the creationists of social evolution, just totally wrong on basic facts and intellectually dishonest.

aetherspawn 2mo ago
Who in the hell would think 50x annual wage house prices is any type of utopia.
- boxed 2mo ago
  Someone who understands that you can't measure progress with a single variable. Look at food prices 50 years ago. They were astronomical compared to today. Expensive mortgages are an investment, you're literally paying back the loan as a type of savings. Food on the other hand? You ain't getting that money back.

throwthrowuknow 2mo ago

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 without taking a hard look at what the longer term effects of the “progress” we’ve made along the way. We keep doubling down on the same strategies though and so things are continuing to escalate as we accumulate bugs in the system without fixing anything fundamental, worse we continue to chip away at the things that were working well.

boxed 2mo ago
Every time we try to fix anything fundamental, we end up with revolutions that make everything much worse and sometimes just get stuck in their new dystopia. Meanwhile incrementalist economies+democracies are racing ahead quite well.
- throwthrowuknow 2mo ago
  I’m not calling for a revolution but we need to identify and address problems before they get out of control in order to fix them incrementally.
chaos_emergent 2mo ago
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”.
- throwthrowuknow 2mo ago
  It’s quite easy when the effects are small at first and the changes occur over decades. People just get used to the smaller changes or were not alive to experience the earlier state. Only when things become so unstable that any minor change can have extreme consequences do people start to notice.

domstatecraft 2mo ago

"If Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease which is evidently opposite to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal."

koliber 2mo ago

I’ve been mulling a congruent idea. When we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life. We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases. It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic. More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring. I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed. Not sure if this is clear or how to call it. 2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?

sph 2mo ago
A few notes about your comment, that I feel is well-meaning but carries a lot of common misconceptions: - aiming for an end goal is not fine in most cases, it is simply a very common, terrible idea. You need a process, not a goal. "Journey over destination", yadda yadda - 99% of human behaviour is governed by processes we call habits. Operating on the habit system is the key to long-term behavioural change, but one also has to recognize replacing habits is a long, delicate affair and one tends to ask too much of themselves. The metaphor I carry in my head is you're trying to steer a bull with a feather; easy does it. "Tiny Habits" is a good self-help book with good science behind it - life is indeed dynamic but I feel such a hyper-rational, mechanistic way of approaching the conundrum is setting yourself up to failure. I recommend philosophy rather, especially Taoism, to embrace all of these concepts into a unified worldview of change: change being intrinsic to the universe, doing with little effort, and not forcing yourself (to burnout). You are not a machine.
- koliber 2mo ago
  Appreciate your thoughts. I think if we sat down and talked we would agree on a lot of things. re: end goals: in most cases, you still need an end goal in mind in order to craft a process that will get you there. In the end, it is the process that matters and the goal is there only for measuring progress and adjusting course. However, a single process for a single goal is not enough in a dynamic changing world. You need a way of being able to react and adjust or even drastically change the process. re: habits. Again, fully agree given a static goal. But if the circumstances change, the existing habits might no longer serve you. You need to be able to adjust habits. re: hyper-rational. This is my style. I find that I can think, explain, and execute mechanically more effectively. It's practical. Deep down, there is a philosophy behind this, but I have a hard time explaining and applying philosophy.

forestrywat 2mo ago

This sure suggests that we're all choosing to build this dystopia we're trending towards. I agree very much with the idea that we should be making the world better little by little, but better... better for who? Who benefits is a genuinely important question to answer. I believe "better for most", which means using our wealth to lift up many. Others believe "better for me" or "better for my tribe" or "better for my nation". The two styles are fundamentally at odds -- my "redistribute the wealth of billionaires" goal is just never going to square with "billionaires deserve their wealth". So you have to answer "better for who" before you can efficiently climb "better" on your graph.

Telemakhos 2mo ago
There’s an unquestioned assumption underlying “using our wealth to lift up many,” namely that wealth lifts people up. A great deal of money has long been thrown at social problems that remain unsolved. Another way to look at it is that self-control lifts people up, and the accumulation or dissipation of wealth is consequent upon self-control. Pro athletes and lottery winners who never learned to manage budgets growing up tend to run through their money quickly and end up poor again because they lack the self-control needed to maintain and accumulate wealth. Having or lacking money is a result, not a cause; changing the consequent without addressing what is antecedent to the consequent will not result in lasting change.
- Avicebron 2mo ago
  Ah yes the old "structural failing is actually a moral failing of the losers". If you care to educate yourself so the rest of us aren't just snickering behind our hands next time you speak. Read Watts, Duncan, and Quan (2018), and Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao about how poverty extracts "self-control". Or even just Webber's theodicy of fortune.
- forestrywat 2mo ago
  I'm not super interested in debating the specifics because I was trying to point out that people will disagree about what "better" means and prevent progress. Thank you for so succinctly and promptly demonstrating that point, even knowing my post was an obviously simplified example for the purpose of brevity.

ang_cire 2mo ago

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'). But if you're trying to convince people that technology is in fact not the thing that's enabling mass surveillance and economic decline and black-mirror-like-drone-warfare and climate disasters and tyranny right now, then it would make sense to leave out the most common understanding of what a dystopia looks like. "No, AI is totally gonna result in Star Trek, not the Panopticon, I swear! What's a Palantir?" It feels like some kind of weird enlightened-techno-centrism.

bko 2mo ago
> 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, and half the number in the peak year of 1997. The combination of falling arrests and rising resident population has driven down the national arrest rate, which in 2024 was 30% lower than in 2019 and 71% below its peak in 1994. I think most (non-online) people would prefer more enforcement of laws. I've never had a conversation in real life where someone argued there should be less order and enforcement. That's an insane position to take and ahistorical. The idea you hear online that you can get rid of prisons. It's neither left nor right. You think failed communist states didn't arrest people? It's an idea whose intellectual roots go back only around 50 years and for good reason. It doesn't work, or at least doesn't produce societies that endure and get passed on. > Climate disasters Similarly, climate related deaths worldwide have dropped and continue to do so, pretty much a straight line. 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. > Economic decline The middle class is shrinking, but the upper and upper-middle is growing. So it's a bit of a barbell. But I'll also note that many of these measures are households, and there have been changes in typical households. Many people are staying single well into their 30s which means its a household of 1 compared to what would be a 2 person household in the past > Done warfare Isn't this better than boots on the ground? I don't think the problem is technology, it's armed conflict. I guess if you consider that armed conflicts are more likely because nations don't need to put as much lives at risk, and maybe that is a factor. But I'm not convinced somehow drones are driving this. https://counciloncj.org/who-gets-arrested-in-america-trends-across-four-decades-1980-2024/ https://counciloncj.org/who-gets-arrested-in-america-trends-... https://www.wsj.com/opinion/climate-activists-disasters-fire-storms-deaths-change-cop26-glasgow-global-warming-11635973538 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/climate-activists-disasters-fire...

Avicebron 2mo ago

At some point the problems compound faster than the "1% improvement" each year. The author deliberately doesn't wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.

boxed 2mo ago
> At some point the problems compound faster than the "1% improvement" each year. We've been going for literally hundreds of years or multiple thousands depending on how you count, and this isn't obvious at all. > The author deliberately doesn't [address] wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously. Wealth equality is imo a mirage. Most wealth inequality is driven by ownership of corporations. If we move that ownership to the states, and keep corporate controls intact, basically nothing happens except wealth equality goes way down. It's a mathematical magic trick that is utterly irrelevant. Misaligned financial incentives are a different matter though, and I agree there's a lot of problems there. But "driving misery" seems hyperbolic. What is actually "driving misery" is the lack of economic development of the poorest countries.

yogthos 2mo ago

I see somebody discovered the concept of dialectical materialism from first principles.

jonstewart 2mo ago

Imagine writing several paragraphs defining “utopia” and not mentioning Thomas More.

eulgro 2mo ago

Unfortunately for some problems like climate change, improving 1-2% per year starting today still leads to disaster.

Krasnol 2mo ago

> 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?

abetusk 2mo ago

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.

jrowen 2mo ago

The result of this bias is that virtually every movie that has ever been made about the future contains a dystopia, with very few exceptions. It's somewhat sad to me that this phenomenon is borne out in the comments (of this thread and, I would say, generally across HN in my experience). It's so easy to prophecy doom, ignoring the fact that life and humanity has generally prevailed and continued "progress" in the face of adversity, evil, extinction events, and other setbacks. I'm generally in agreement with this article, although, I'm not sure I'm onboard with the dismissal of utopia. Utopia can be whatever you want it to be, it doesn't have to be defined as impossible nonsense. If we're in a protopia, and we want to see protopia, there's sort of a tautological nothingness, akin to pointing out that there's no such thing as free will. The message then boils down to "well just keep on truckin' as is."