Utopia

JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. →This page on the premium JC utopia Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Technology Design Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Utopia
/juːˈtoʊpiə/ (n.)
The apocalypse, if you’re the sort of person who sees the glass half-full. The singularity. Nirvana.

Personally, I’m a cynic, and I think it sounds ghastly. I rather like the sound of the Apocalypse, on the other hand: the grim contemplation of getting what’s coming to me is swamped by the happy thoughts that so many other odious people getting what’s coming to them.

A utopia must be more than simply the aspiration for better than what we have now. That is not utopia: that is just the constant state of the system. It is always improving itself.

The OG: Thomas More’s original Utopia

Utopia, as described by the fellow who invented the word, doesn’t sound like much fun:

• No private property.
• No locks.
• Houses are rotated between citizens every ten years.
• Everyone must work at one of the essential trades (weaving, carpentry, smithing and masonry).
• Everyone is sent out to farm for two years at a time.
• The (mandatory) working day is six hours long (you may, but only a fool would, work for longer).
• Educated people get to be ruling officials and priests and they get the best food.
• Every house has two slaves (captured from other countries or adulterers).
• Hospitals are free.
• Euthanasia is allowed.
• Extra-marital sex is prohibited.
• The punishment for adultery is enslavement.
• Everyone must carry an internal ID card at all times, on pain of enslavement.
• There are no lawyers! Law is simple and everyone is expected to be in no doubt as to right and wrong.
• Privacy is discouraged: if you can see everyone, they are obliged to behave well.

Actual utopian visions tend to be vague and unspecific. We can state general principles easily enough — see above: they kind of suck — but as soon as you flesh them out they quickly start to self-contradict or resemble dystopia.

What should a good utopia be?

Easily expressed

It needs to be sellable, graspable and, in broad strokes, imaginable from a great height. If it requires nuance or complicated explanation, then citizens won’t understand it, and it won’t work. It will evaporate.

Plausibly unreachable

A large portion of “adherents” must support and believe in the Utopian state without any realistic expectation of ever experiencing it or dealing with it. So utopias that you can never get to, or that have practically insurmountable barriers to achieving the best ones, because their progenitors can’t be held to account. Singularities, Sunlit uplands, promised lands, hereafters, heaven: all are good, hearty Utopian ideas: hard to get to, and impossible to report back from if you ever do.

See also Bitcoin: still stuck in this imperfect fiat world.

But also ones that aren’t obviously unattainable, but for which there is always a weasel route when it doesn’t work because “it hasn’t been implemented properly or with sufficient rigour”: the free market, Communism, any political manifesto you care to mention.

Singularity/Simulation hypothesis: not enough processing power. (It is coming!)

Also excuses as to why it hasn't yet emerged or how it has been frustrated.

The need for sacrifice

Achieving Utopia demands commitment from the faithful: there must be forbearance, sacrifice, self-restraint or “contrary-to-own-interest” behaviour. Personal forbearance now vouches safe a state of collective bliss for everyone later. This trope — to suffer is divine — is a common religious one, and we also see it in certain strands of ideological environmentalism and effective altruism.

This ostensible state of bliss quickly becomes incoherent: an aspiration for, say, equality, diversity and fair treatment runs into problems because unless everyone is identical and homogenous, there must be majorities, minorities, margins and states of greater or lesser personal franchise. Alternative models of justice at the limit conflict. A diversity that implies diversity of outcome, which does not sound utopian at all. But then nor does equality of outcome.

There is the paradox: different conceptualisations of justice are, at the limits to which a pure utopia would push them, mutually incompatible: you have to define diversity in a way which means there can be no difference of opinion, because if there is, then there can be no utopia.

Finality

A settled Utopia also implies all challenges have been overcome, all mysteries solved, all differences of opinion resolved. which implies also that all valuable literature is written, all scientific discoveries are complete. But a utopian state is one in which we are free to explore the cosmos and discover these things. A world in which all things are resolved, and there is no wonder and no scope for exploration or hypothesis, is suboptimally dull.

Someone will be dissatisfied with the utopian state. It therefore either leads to a uniform kind of dystopia, or an elusive state we can never quite get to.

Narratisability

Even non-religious ones will tend to converge on existing archetypes, mythologies, stories we already know. These help us imagine a hypothetical utopian/dystopian state.

So Skynet/The Matrix are handy archetypes for ai utopianism.

Stable

Utopias must be, within themselves, internally stable, equilibria. They don’t develop: they represent (local) maxima, optimised so any “development” is logically a retrograde step.

A near utopia would be vulnerable to attacks from outside, a total utopia would not: it would necessarily be an end state.

I think this makes it a simple and not a complex system. It cannot reorganise itself to reveal a higher local maximum elsewhere. It also implies a degree of transcendental knowledge: for states to be stable, all participants in the state must accept that it is optimal. To do that, they must have some knowledge beyond the system itself or alternatively a means of engineering society-wide consensus without such knowledge: for example, with faith.

Partial utopia

There is a strain of Utopianism (including More’s) which provides an ideal world only for some of society. By these lights, slavery is commensurate with Utopia.

This at least solves the logical conundrum of being unable to appeal to everyone, but seems to be a basic form of factionalism which can only really survive if the utopian group is dominant enough to oppress other groups.

This doesn’t feel particularly utopian to me! We are still left with the conceptual problem that once the non-utopian segment has been enslaved, repressed or destroyed then the remainder will still have to deal with the same imbalance of supply and demand and the regular differences of opinion that we can expect to rise up in any diverse community.

Path dependency and utopia

We tend to imagine our utopia is equipped with the accoutrements and mod cons of our present non-utopian existence. Does importing the imperfect gadgets of our present somehow taint the paradise? Is this like drugs and licentiousness in a holy afterlife? What does it say that devices forged to suit unsaintly tastes in times of imperfection have a place in heaven? Could that have evolved otherwise? Perhaps the accretive convergence on virtue answers this.

Or perhaps Calvinist forbearance does.

Delayed gratification: “dangletopia”

Utopia later as a justification for permanent asceticism now:

A “dangletopia” — a word JC made up and claims possession over — is a Utopia due to arrive at a point so unfalsifiably distant that our own existence an only be an imperfect transitional state towards it. A kind of purgatorial subutopia, progressing haphazardly towards a paradise we will never personally see. This is us as Moses leading the children of Israel to the promised land. The effective altruists have contrived a way of permanently delaying gratification so that we are all in the Puritan service of a coming generation — even the coming generation.

Dangletopia’s appeal is that we don’t have to think too hard about what it would be like. We never have to confront its conundrums because we will be gone before they present themselves: how boring it would be, and how unpleasant, if all your descendants get to do is cleave perpetually to the same moral abstentions you heroically tolerated through your subutopian existence.

Or you don’t, in which case it is all a bit hypocritical.

If you can have 72 virgins later, why not now'?

Let’s run it and see

Let’s try it out and see how it goes. Generally, badly, as our icily high-minded atmospheric principles collide with our earthy urges of basic self-interest:

• Collapse into dystopia: This is the usual one. Where the community of interest is strong, the vision involves centralising, and the enemy is a well-identified unitary group — the bourgeoisie, intellectuals, certain minority interest groups — such that the power structures are strong enough to head off internecine fighting, these generally turn into totalitarian dystopias.
• Collapse into squabbling: Alternatively, the community of interest is too weak, and the “enemy” is not tightly enough defined, and the whole thing breaks down into squabbling and resentment. This is where identity politics is most likely going (the “aligned factions” are discovering they don’t have much in common at all, and the “enemy” is a bit too homogenous and ill-defined, and its figureheads are too well-organised and funded.
• Collapse into pragmatism: The community of interest is loose, decentralised and unguided, meaning there is no particular enemy, there is nothing to stop people from “defecting” and forming groups with common interests. This leads to pragamatic rules to manage that, and the utopian state never arises.

How do we measure progress?

Directed

We are going towards something, converging on a final truth, singularity and resolution. This presumes some kind of hard determinism: there is a “something”, and it already exists, and it could have been articulated from the beginning of the universe: the uncertainty is epistemic, not aleatory: it is there, we just haven’t found yet. In this world progress is a process of gradual revelation.

But this directedness implies some kind of intentionality on the part of the universe as a whole. That is basically theistic.

It also contradicts settled rules about entropy, in that it implies a world moving from disorder to order.

And it seems strikingly inefficient. Why isn’t the universe in a state of singularity already? If it isn’t, what grounds do we have for thinking it will naturally converge on one, without a directed hand moving it along?

Undirected

If undirected, we are moving away from an imperfect history, anecdotally fixing that which does not please us, or trimming the sales adjust to unexpected changes in the environment. Progress is a process of adjustment. This is a system and a process, not an end state.

What would this “undirected progress” look like? Wittgenstein’s pithy question cited by analytical philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe:

He once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the Earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?”

—G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction To Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959)

Collisions with reality

Having something to complain about is relative, not absolute: people will always find something that is unsatisfactory about the state of the world. This is the perennial engine of pragmatic undirected progress, but it is a problem for utopia, because we have to imagine a point where those with grievances concede they are settled, and no further claim is due. That is not how grievance politics works!

Per David Graeber: the very thing that keeps a society together is that sense of mutual indebtedness. Discharging all obligations gives the community less communal obligation. This would oblige people to give up their position of influence/authority in the power structure. If you are chair of interest group X and your cause has been resolved, then must you not disband? Has the chair of an interest group ever done that? But this isn’t how people people in power behave. They do not pack up their banners. They find other things to agitate about.

This in itself is a good reason for disblieving in utopias. It is too fundamental a power play in human society to gain traction by complaining about things.

But let us say we are satisfactorily shutting down greivances as we resolve them. Is not converging on a uniform state of bliss necessarily intolerant? That priority — accelerating towards final utopia — involves suppressing “misguided” opinions that distract from that priority. The mission is more sacred than the congregation!

Any convergence/directed progress theory is utopian

If we are converging on truth (rather than hurtling madly round design space like a deflating balloon) then there is a point where we will get there. And our advancing computer power means it is advancing ever more quickly. This is the implications of the singularity. But once we are there then —?

Game over? Start again at stage one?

Examples of utopian visions

• Religions that offer a post-mortem heaven or paradise — call these “dangletopian” programmes.
• Communism and Fascism: the big ideas to replace the death of God
• Modernism and high-modernism
• Laissez-faire capitalism — in the sense of pure, no rules, no government intervention whatsoever
• Bitcoin maximalism
• Effective altruism — also dangletopian
• Artificial intelligence
• Singularity
• The end of history — Francis Fukuyama

See also

• Omega