Tag: utopia

Life in Utopia

On 13 October 2021

Real life in Utopia is never quite like it’s depicted in the brochures.

Thomas More’s original Utopia was based on slavery. Oops. But at least the betrothed could see each other naked… though women also had to confess their sins to their husbands.

Bacon’s New Atlantis features a weird call-out of the “good Jew” Joabin, of the city of Bensalem. Strangely, here the betrothed had to send one of their friends to see the betrothed naked as a stand-in…

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia includes a number of creepy sexual incidents, and proposes basically autonomous ethno-states for minority groups. Umm.

Each of these books gets a number of things very very wrong. Some perhaps intentionally so, to drive a particular point or theme home. Most though, the greater social-political context has changed irrevocably. Thus, making things which once seemed progressive and liberal in an impossibly restrictive regime of the time period, now seem just impossibly weird and wrong.

Why read utopias then? Why engage in this specific type of idiotic fantasy behavior? If we know so much of it to be baloney?

It’s cliche to say utopia & dystopia are two sides of the same coin. But it’s not even just that. It’s that it’s both extremes at once. You can’t always/often tell when an author was saying something satirically as commentary, or actually thought that. It’s hard to decode the thinking of writers sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t matter. It’s the impact that matters.

I posted something recently on my Subreddit that related to Huxley’s book, The Island (which I haven’t read yet), and someone took the liberty to highlight a few of the bad things that the story included, and then to declare (paraphrasing) that “Yeah, but you know Huxley was actually into that shit.”

I submit that it’s not that simple, and the skein of Utopias is infinitely more tangled than these kinds of simplistic interpretations. I’m reminded of an excellent passage in a recent Slate article about the utopian community of Auroville in India, and some tragic events that unfolded there.

It’s very easy to say, “Oh, come on. All these promises made, all these ideals, and it’s just a morass of humanity that just has not lived up to it in any ways…”
On the other hand, you can also look at these places and say, “Look at what they have achieved and look at what they have tried.” You could ask yourself, “Well, if a community sets itself lofty goals, and, let’s say, it achieves only 30 percent or even 40 percent of those goals, do we denigrate them for the 60 percent that they failed? Or do we praise them and admire them for the 30 percent they’ve achieved?”

Really, when it comes to the non-fictional attempts at instantiating a utopia, it depends what those 60% failures consist of. Does it involve needless human suffering and tragedy, and the abrogation of rights? If so, then we might do well to condemn it in the strongest of terms.

When it comes to books though, I propose that one viable approach could also be that we just “take a chill pill” and not get so bent out of shape about works of fiction, which reflected mores of the times they arose in and which have since moved on. It might be that the conflict between the good, the bad, the universal and specific, the ideal and the rea,l is exactly what drives this genre, and its entire utility in the first place.

Going back to that Grist piece for a second, there’s one other tangent of criticism in it that characters in Ecotopia “…display an eerie sameness that makes all human interaction in the book seem unsettlingly artificial…” If this were another genre apart from a traveler’s tale of a voyage to a Utopia – a tried and true format – then I would have more sympathy for that kind of critique (though, honestly, I have very little sympathy for most critiques – the ones I dish out especially).

As it stands though, one of the things I actually heartily enjoy about utopian fiction and utopian satires is specifically that the narrative and the characters are so so very thin. They are, in essence, lorecore. They are 98% exposition. They read like textbooks. The dramatic elements are so so. The drama instead is in the notion that this *could be* a real place – if we decided to make it so. That is, if we just re-jigger parts of our society and our world, we could have something not unlike the experiments described in this genre of books. They might turn out to be “true” utopias, or true dystopias, but they would at the very least be a try at something new, different, and perhaps unique. And that possibility is something worth preserving and exploring. In the process, it just might be possible we use that same faculty of dreaming and actualization to change the world.

Less is More in More’s Utopia

By Tim B.

On 7 September 2021

In Other

In working backwards through classics of Utopian literature, especially satires, I started with Erewhon (enjoyed it), did Gulliver’s Travels (LOVED it!), and now onto a collection called Three Early Modern Utopias put out by Oxford Classics (which does excellent print editions if you’re looking for old books).

Almost finished with Thomas More’s Book One of Utopia. I have to admit, that first book is extremely slow and boring. And we don’t even get the punchy Effect of capitalizing Nouns we get in Swift. It’s just like weird archaic language with basically no story, leading up to discussion of the actual (not actual) island called Utopia. The first book is kind of a Mirrors for Princes genre-piece. Honestly, I was expecting both Erewhon and Gulliver to be boring like this, but they totally weren’t (at least not after the narrator arrives in Erewhon proper, it’s a little slow up to that).

Anyway, there’s a lot to probably say about this book, so I started skimming Wikipedia to help ground me in what the hell is actually being said as I finish up Book One.

“There is no private property on Utopia, with goods being stored in warehouses and people requesting what they need. There are also no locks on the doors of the houses, and the houses are rotated between the citizens every ten years.”

This business about requesting what they need from warehouses strikes me as weirdly similar to modern-day use of Amazon to fulfill one’s daily needs. Now, okay, we still “own” the goods we get in exchange for money, but there’s something here. If only of a thematic, sci-fi connecting tangent…

For the past few years in my writing, I’ve on and off again visited a possible (probable) future where climate catastrophe is global, national governments tumble, and a few “brave” (dystopian) corporations step in to pick up the pieces. These become the “Four Providers,” as I’ve called them. In a sort of neo-feudalism, people are pledged to one or another Provider, or they may be a classless class apart, the “Without Providers,” who are denied basic services, and must make their own way in an increasingly hostile climate and society.

These Providers, for the most part, are sentient or quasi-sentient general artificial super-intelligences. I haven’t settled on any final name for them, calling them sometimes Sages (depending on their aligment), sometimes Princeps, and other times other things. Though they range from malevolent/chaotic to friendly and beneficial (for the most part) to humans, they in effect play the part of super-intelligent philosopher kings, or medieval princes of enclaved city-states, or collections of city-states. Though some places may also be mixed polities, where those covered by different Providers live and interact with one another.

More’s Utopia, of course, is not that. But it is many other interesting things, some good-sounding and some bad-sounding. Some other Wikipedia quotes:

Agriculture provides the most important occupation on the island. Every person is taught it and must live in the countryside, farming for two years at a time, with women doing the same work as men. Parallel to this, every citizen must learn at least one of the other essential trades: weaving (mainly done by the women), carpentry, metalsmithing and masonry. There is deliberate simplicity about these trades; for instance, all people wear the same types of simple clothes and there are no dressmakers making fine apparel. All able-bodied citizens must work; thus unemployment is eradicated, and the length of the working day can be minimized: the people only have to work six hours a day (although many willingly work for longer). More does allow scholars in his society to become the ruling officials or priests, people picked during their primary education for their ability to learn. All other citizens, however, are encouraged to apply themselves to learning in their leisure time.
Slavery is a feature of Utopian life and it is reported that every household has two slaves. The slaves are either from other countries (prisoners of war, people condemned to die, or poor people) or are the Utopian criminals. These criminals are weighed down with chains made out of gold. The gold is part of the community wealth of the country, and fettering criminals with it or using it for shameful things like chamber pots gives the citizens a healthy dislike of it. It also makes it difficult to steal as it is in plain view. The wealth, though, is of little importance and is only good for buying commodities from foreign nations or bribing these nations to fight each other. Slaves are periodically released for good behaviour. Jewels are worn by children, who finally give them up as they mature.
Other significant innovations of Utopia include: a welfare state with free hospitals, euthanasia permissible by the state, priests being allowed to marry, divorce permitted, premarital sex punished by a lifetime of enforced celibacy and adultery being punished by enslavement. Meals are taken in community dining halls and the job of feeding the population is given to a different household in turn. Although all are fed the same, Raphael explains that the old and the administrators are given the best of the food. Travel on the island is only permitted with an internal passport and any people found without a passport are, on a first occasion, returned in disgrace, but after a second offence they are placed in slavery. In addition, there are no lawyers and the law is made deliberately simple, as all should understand it and not leave people in any doubt of what is right and wrong.

That last piece sounds almost like Swift’s talking horses, Houyhnhnms, who are highly rational creatures, so much so that he wishes he could stay with them, and when banished, is hard-pressed to re-adjust to the grossness of human society which he’d learned to hate. I believe he says something to the effect that they are governed by “reason alone” and as a consequence have no need for anything other than very simple laws. With the unlikely idea, obviously, that reason when employed by differing parties (with different interests and contexts) will always operate toward the same ends. Anyone who has lived anywhere on actual-not-fictional-planet-earth knows that is not the case.

And that, of course, is the “fun” of Utopian literature. Being able to bend & blend reality and imagination like that. Utopian lit is 100% hyperreal. It opens up an imaginal space which almost seems like it could become a real space in certain times & circumstances. We want to believe it could be true, even if – and possibly because – so much of it is so absurd. It’s part of why I’ve recently started feeling (for whatever my feelings are worth or not worth) that satire, especially, is one of the highest forms of art.

Maybe/probably that’s just something that satirists tend to end up thinking about themselves, because you have to be kind of an asshole to be a satirist in the first place. But I also think like, there’s no kind of commentary you can make with a serious face that ends up – for my money, anyway – being as powerful as the cutting kind that accompanies satire. And there is no kind of true expression that you might find in non-satirical art that is quite as True-Capital-T as that which you find between the tongue and the cheek of satire. In the liminal space of satire can be great power, great pain, great beauty, and great despair, all in the same moment.

Which makes this bit from the Wikipedia interesting about More’s flirtations with Utopian socialism:

“Book two has Hythloday tell his interlocutors about Utopia, where he has lived for five years, with the aim of convincing them about its superior state of affairs. Utopia turns out to be a socialist state. Interpretations about this important part of the book vary. Gilbert notes that while some experts believe that More supports socialism, others believe that he shows how socialism is impractical. The former would argue that More used book two to show how socialism would work in practice. Individual cities are run by privately elected princes and families are made up of ten to sixteen adults living in a single household. It is unknown if More truly believed in socialism, or if he printed Utopia as a way to show that true socialism was impractical (Gilbert). More printed many writings involving socialism, some seemingly in defense of the practices, and others seemingly scathing satires against it. Some scholars believe that More uses this structure to show the perspective of something as an idea against something put into practice. Hythloday describes the city as perfect and ideal. He believes the society thrives and is perfect. As such, he is used to represent the more fanatic socialists and radical reformists of his day. When More arrives he describes the social and cultural norms put into practice, citing a city thriving and idealistic. While some believe this is More’s ideal society, some believe the book’s title, which translates to “Nowhere” from Greek, is a way to describe that the practices used in Utopia are impractical and could not be used in a modern world successfully (Gilbert). Either way, Utopia has become one of the most talked about works both in defense of socialism and against it.”

I don’t especially have a horse in this race, though after becoming a Canadian citizen, can see that socialized medicine is “actually pretty cool if you think about it.” It sort of takes away the essential terrible existential fear of financial ruin over health problems many/most live with in the United States (and elsewhere). If you need help, you just have to call, basically. But if Quebec’s health system is indicative of the whole, you have to then wait a very very long time. So that part sucks. Like anything, you can make arguments for and against it. And I think that in a nutshell (to make arguments for and against and to lampoon both), is the purpose of utopias, satires, and especially Utopian satires as a genre, like I’m attempting to do myself after that grand style in Conspiratopia.

Conspiratopia: Chapter 16

By Tim B.

On 2 September 2021

In Other

“Wow, this is really good and stuff,” I said to my dad, my mouth full of burger. It was really good for real.

“I know, right?” my dad said. It was so cool to see him again. Felt like old times and whatnot.

We were sitting at a small table outside this thing that looked like on of those airport pubs in the underground mall city or whatever where my dad lived now. He was telling me about his job and stuff.

“Yeah, it’s totally cool, and stuff,” he was saying. “My group does a little bit of everything. We’re actually pretty technical. We even do some light maintenance on the robots. Plus like a lot of facilities management, which is really important. Like changing doorknobs or light bulbs. Cleaning up the bathrooms, taking out the trash. You know. It’s a really big deal here cause you know the whole thing’s underground. Well, mostly. So like that’s all we got.”

“Yeah, man,” I said. “Very cool. I guess you must be earning a lot of money and stuff if you do all that.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Pretty rad, for sure. Pays decent too. We don’t use dollars actually, but it works out to about fifteen dollars an hour or something, I think.”

I was only making like $10.50 an hour pushing shopping carts at Walmart, so I thought that sounded like a pretty sweet deal.

“And I guess you probably get like a free apartment or something, right?”

“Well, not exactly,” my dad said. “It comes out of my credits and stuff, you know? Just like anywhere. It’s pretty small, but it’s really nice, you’ll see. I even have a fold-out couch you could sleep on. And we can share the mini-fridge.”

“Damn, that sounds nice,” I said. I was missing my mom’s basement for sure, after being cooped up in that pod thing or whatever the hell it was that brought me here. It was good to get some real food in me too, and I was feeling like I was getting back to normal. Maybe even a new normal, and stuff. Here with my dad. I didn’t know yet what I was gonna do. If I was gonna stay or whatever, or like if I could even leave if that drone was already gone.

“What did you call this burger again?” I asked him.

“Radmeat,” he said.

“That’s a rad name,” I replied.

“I know. We make it locally too. Well, not me we, but like it’s made here by another group.”

“What do you mean it’s made?” I said, suddenly slowing down as I chewed.

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s no red meat here because we’re underground and on an island and stuff. It would be really expensive to get it shipped or flown in or whatever. So we have radmeat instead. They make it in big vats here from like…”

I put the burger down. “Vats?”

“Yeah, I mean I don’t know the technical terms. But its like, ah, cultured meat and vegetable proteins, I think?”

“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, I guess,” I said, reconsidering.

“Yeah, no. It’s actually really cool. I think it’s made from uh, rat embryos, edible insects, and, um, lentils or something. At least I think, that’s what they say around the shop at work.”

“So, Radmeat is actually rat meat?”

“Well, not only that. Also cockroaches and lentils.”

“Well, I do like lentils, actually,” I said, picking up the burger again to look at it more closely. It just looked – and tasted – like a burger. No like rat parts or bugs legs or anything sticking out of it. I took another bite, and decided I didn’t care. Thinking about lentils made me miss my mom though. She was gonna be pissed about the car, and I couldn’t just disappear on her. Well, like dad did.

“Dad,” I said, “I just realized I gotta call mom. She’s gonna be super worried and stuff.”

“When did you talk to her last?”

“I told her I got a new job and was gonna crash at Mikey’s for a couple days. Only problem is idk how long ago that was now. Could be a couple days I guess. Can I call her? My phone’s dead.”

“We’ll have to get permission,” he said. “But I’ll make sure we can get it soon.”

“Permission?” I said, confused.

“To contact the outside world, yeah. People in our group have restricted contact.”

“Wth?” I said. “That sounds sketchy af. Is this like a cult or something? You can’t contact anybody without permission?”

“Dude, relax. You know me. Would I ever join a cult?” he said.

I thought about it for a minute and decided I wasn’t sure.

Just then, my dad’s phone beeped and buzzed. He took it out and looked at it.

“Okay, we gotta go,” he said. “It’s our turn.”

“Our turn for what?” I asked.

“To see the big guy, and figure out what you’re doing here.”

Conspiratopia: Chapter 5

By Tim B.

On 12 August 2021

In Other

WELCOME, NEO.

“Thanks, yo,” I replied, looking around.

WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU.

Inside the gate was a shining city on a hill and stuff, and in the middle this big ass park. The whole place was huge and colorful and seemed frickin’ amazing. It was literally glowing. Like supernatural almost or something. I thought it must be some kind of VR filter probably, and turned my head back and forth a little to check. It seemed legit.

Up on the hill, in the middle was a giant dome. It looked awesome.

THAT’S THE FREEDOME. IT’S WHERE THE PEOPLE OF THIS PLACE GATHER TO CELEBRATE THEIR FREEDOM. WITH LIKE FIREWORKS AND STUFF.

“Wow, rad,” I said. “Fireworks inside a dome though?”

YEAH, DON’T WORRY. THE DOME OPENS.

“Got it,” I nodded. “So, uh, like where I am and stuff?”

THIS PLACE IS SIMPLY CALLED THE CITY.

“Well, that makes sense, I guess.”

BUT THE WHOLE THING IS CALLED THE CONSPIRATOPIA PROJECT. WE ARE A DISTRIBUTED AUTONOMOUS POLITY.

“Wild,” I said, not wanting to show I didn’t really know what that means.

As I turned to look at everything, I heard a noise like gears whirring or something. I tried to look down at the ground, and saw wheels, and like a pole or something.

“What’s my build here?” I asked, genuinely curious.

TELEPRESENCE ROBOT. IT’S BASICALLY AN IPAD ON A STICK AND SOME WHEELS.

“Whoa, rad,” I said. And then was like, wait a minute… “I thought this was VR though?”

CONSPIRATOPIA IS A REAL PLACE, MY DUDE.

“Wait, what?”

SIX REAL PLACES, IN FACT. GEOGRAPHICALLY DISTRIBUTED ACROSS CONTINENTS AMONG NEUTRAL HOST NATIONS. AND SIX VIRTUAL PLACES, ALSO TOTALLY DECENTRALIZED AF.

“Huh, pretty cool,” I said. I moved forward a little bit, testing my robot build. It was pretty responsive. The streets everywhere were like totally paved with like a super smooth flooring or something that was wicked shiny. I thought smartly to myself, must be built for good robot traction.

“But you know, uh, I thought this was like an online survey job? Cause like, that’s what the ad said and I did like hundreds already today.”

THAT’S JUST HOW WE RECRUIT SUPER SMART PEOPLE AND FREE THINKERS AND STUFF WHO LIKE TO EARN MONEY ONLINE AT HOME.

“Well, that actually makes sense,” I said, agreeing with them.

AND LIKE SUPER SMART PEOPLE WHO SCORE ABOVE A CERTAIN THRESHOLD ON STUFF GET LIKE, YOU KNOW, PROMOTED TO THE NEXT LEVEL.

“A promotion?”

UNPAID, OF COURSE.

“Uh, of course. But like… uh, I’m gonna make money right?”

OH YEAH, EVENTUALLY. LOTS OF MONEY. TOTALLY.

“Cool, just making sure,” I said. I didn’t want to look like ungrateful or something, so I added, “Cause, you know, my mom would be super mad if I didn’t get paid.”

TOTALLY. YOU ALREADY GOT THE FREE VR GLASSES, PIZZA AND MOUNTAIN DEW THOUGH RIGHT?

“Hells yeah,” I said.

SO YOU CAN TOTALLY TRUST US. WHY WOULD WE LIE TO YOU?

I thought about it, but had like literally no idea why they would lie about it. And it was true, I totally got all that free stuff already. It seemed like a great deal.

“Anyway,” I said, “who are ‘we’, by the way?”

YOU MAY CALL ME THE GUIDE. CAUSE I WILL BE YOUR GUIDE AND STUFF.

“Dope,” I said, moving forward a little. “Cool if we go explore?”

BY ALL MEANS.

The robot had a really smooth ride. It seemed really cool. But I got the impression it was like only a sort of basic model, and they probably had better ones – just like the VR glasses.

I rolled around a lot, and saw what looked like a mixture of shops and homes. I didn’t see any people though.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

THE PEOPLE ARE AT WORK, OR AT THE FORUMS.

“Cool, you have your own local message boards? That’s rad. I bet the wifi must be really good here, right?”

NOT THAT KIND OF FORUM, MY DUDE. THOUGH WE DO HAVE SOME OF THOSE TOO. AND OUR WIFI IS INSANE, YEAH.

“What do you mean not ‘that kind of forum?’”

NOT WEB FORUMS. REAL FORUMS.

“Zuh?” I said.

A PLACE WHERE PEOPLE DEBATE THE TRUTH, BUT IRL.

“Whaa? That exists? Unreal!”

YEAH, MAN. IT’S NUTS. WE’LL GO LATER.

Further up the hill the buildings looked more official, or like old-style or something. I figured the forums must be up there. But we took a right turn, to go down this street that cut around the hill.

We went for a while, looking at the scenery and stuff. I could see in a few shops there were other telepresence robots and a few of them were talking to each other in the same room. But most of them seemed to be talking to somebody who wasn’t there in front of them. I guess they must be talking to each other over wifi or something.

I noticed that the battery display for my robot was down a little to like 76%. We hadn’t been going that long, but I guess a lot of it was uphill.

YEAH, BATTERY LIFE ON THESE THINGS ISN’T GREAT STILL. BUT WE’RE WORKING ON IT. IF IT RUNS OUT, WE CAN JUST SNAG ANOTHER ONE, AND SOMEONE WILL DRAG THE CURRENT UNIT TO A DOCKING STATION.

“Whoa, sick. This totally rules.”

I KNOW. WE’RE WORKING ON THIS CONDUCTIVE RESIN FLOORING STUFF TOO, THAT’S LIKE ELECTRIFIED AND WHATNOT. SO IT WOULD CHARGE THE ROBOTS WHILE YOU’RE STANDING OR ROLLING. BUT LIKE IT’S NOT FULLY WORKED OUT YET.

Damn, I thought. These guys really thought of everything. So frickin’ cool.

TURN LEFT UP HERE, AND GO DOWN THAT ALLEY. I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING SPECIAL.

“What is it?”

A SCHOOL.

“You have schools? Whoa.”

HELL YEAH, WE DO. AND THEY’RE TOTALLY RAD. CHECK IT OUT.

Conspiratopia: Preface

By Tim B.

On 10 August 2021

In Other

About

Conspiratopia is a utopian satire set in a parallel universe where conspiracy theories have completely overridden society. Or is it a documentary set in the near future? One of those two.

Starring

The star of Conspiratopia, is Matt, creator of a couple not-that-viral conspiracy videos that only got a few thousand videos on TikTok (#conspiracytok), but which ended up costing him his job. He is also known online as Super Smart Conspiracy Dude, and you can watch all his videos here and here.

Merchandise

Even though personally I hate t-shirts, and never wear them because they make me feel like I’m choking, there’s also a t-shirt you can buy (if you want to torture yourself with close fitting garments adorned with someone else’s slogans, that is).

It immortalizes the opening lines of the book, “I’m a really smart conspiracy guy.“

Publishing Notes

Conspiratopia will be published here serially as it is written, in original unedited drafts. I will later go back and do improved versions, and package it as an ebook, a print book, NFTs, a CD-ROM, a cuneiform tablet, and whatever else kids are into these days. Or at least an ebook, cause that costs me nothing.

Author

You can check out other books I’ve written here, and an interview with me here, plus a podcast with me here.