Happy 2015! Resolve to be a Protopian. A Protopian tries to make today a bit better than yesterday and tomorrow a bit better still. Utopias are impossible. Dystopias, their dark opposites, are possible, though unlikely. Dystopias are certainly fascinating, and a lot more entertaining than most utopias. There are also much easier to envision. Who can’t imagine an apocalyptic last-man-on-earth world, or a world run by robot overseers, or a disintegrating megacity, or simple armageddon? There are endless possibilities of how the modern civilization collapses. But just because dystopias are cinematic and dramatic, and much easier to imagine, that does not make them much more likely. I think our destination is neither utopia nor dystopia nor status quo, but protopia. Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict. But I am hoping that our current future-blindness is only a passing phase and that we will again begin to generate plausible visions of a desirable future, ones that are slightly better than today. These protopian visions won’t be as thrilling as either dystopias or utopias, but they might be thrilling enough to aim towards. kk.org/thetechnium/2011/05/protopia/
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 21:03:46 +0000