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"There are therefore four logical combinations of the two oppositions, resource abundance vs. scarcity and egalitarianism vs. hierarchy. To put things in somewhat vulgar-Marxist terms, the first axis dictates the economic base of the post-capitalist future, while the second pertains to the socio-political superstructure. Two possible futures are socialisms (only one of which I will actually call by that name) while the other two are contrasting flavors of barbarism."
"I came to utopia by accident, having painted myself into a corner with an idea for a trilogy: three science fiction novels consisting of an after-the-fall novel, a dystopia and a utopia, all set in the same place, and about the same distance into the future. The idea came to me in 1972, and I didn’t know how to write a novel then, so the plan needed brooding on. Some sixteen years later, the time came for the utopia. I had written the after-the-fall novel, The Wild Shore, and the dystopia, The Gold Coast. The utopia was the only one left."
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I had also come to feel that many people, and especially many of my leftist colleagues, thought of science as merely the instrument of power — as the most active and effective wing of capitalism. This now struck me as wrong. To me it seemed that we actually exist in a situation that can better be described as ‘science versus capitalism’: a world in which smaller progressive concepts such as environmentalism, environmental justice, social justice, democracy itself — all these were going to be defeated together, unless they were aligned with the one great power that might yet still successfully oppose a completely capitalist future, which was science. I was thinking with a very broad brush at this point, almost mythologically you might say, but it struck me as an interesting story to tell, a new story with some possible analytic value. So I wrote the Science in the Capital trilogy with these thoughts in mind.
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Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. This is a big change. We need to take action to start history on a path onto the side of the peninsula representing one kind of better future or another; the details of it don’t matter, survival without catastrophe is what matters. In essence the seven billion people we have, and the nine to ten billion people we’re likely to have, exist at the tip of an entire improvised complex of prostheses, which is our technology considered as one big system. We live out at the end of this towering complex, and it has to work successfully for us to survive; we are far past the natural carrying capacity of the planet in terms of our numbers. There is something amazing about the human capacity to walk this tightrope over the abyss without paralysing fear. We’re good at ignoring dangers; but now, on the attenuating peninsula, on the crazy tower of prostheses — however you envision it, it is a real historical moment of great danger, and we need to push hard for utopia as survival, because failure now is simply unacceptable to our descendants, if we have any.
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"The following lists are an attempt to gather together some of the recent research in Communal Studies. Many, but not all, of the citations for 1993-1999 appeared in issues of the Newsletter of the Communal Studies Association."
"After all, the core postulate of true SF is that children can sometimes learn from their parents mistakes... not that they will always do so! This is why genuine sci fi tragedies like On The Beach and Soylent Green are so powerful.
"This does not have to happen," say Huxley and Orwell and Slonczewski and Tiptree, in their masterful self-preventing prophecies. Be smarter, better people. Be a better people."
"Today we've become so aware of the downsides of innovations, and so disappointed with the promises of past utopias, that we now find it hard to believe even in protopia -- that tomorrow will be better than today. We find it very difficult to imagine any kind of future we would want to live in. Name a single science fiction future that is both plausible and desirable?
No one wants to move to the future today. We are avoiding it. We don't have much desire for life one hundred years from now. Many dread it. That makes it hard to take the future seriously. So we don't take a generational perspective. We're stuck in the short now. We also adopt the Singularity perspective: that imagining the future in 100 years is technically impossible. So there is no protopia we are reaching for. "
Negative review by Russell Jacoby of Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright Verso, 2010, 394 pp.
by Matthew Cheney. Personal reflections on gun-control from left perspective.
...there's a profound ignorance across the tech advocacy community of the importance of politics to human society. Politics means conflict, debate, and frustration. It also means choice. A world without politics is a world where disagreement is illegitimate. It's a world where your ability to choose your future -- to make your future -- has been taken away, whether you like it or not.
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The core of the argument is straightforward: Politics is part of a healthy society -- it's what happens when you have a group of people with differential goals and a persistent relationship. It's not about partisanship, it's about power. And while even small groups have politics (think: supporting or opposing decisions, differing levels of power to achieve goals, deciding how to use limited resources), the more people involved, the more complex the politics. Factions, parties, ideologies and the like are simply ways of organizing politics in a complex social space -- they're symptoms of politics, not causes.
The combined impact of these disasters on the American psyche has left us adrift. The failure of Clinton's dot.com economy to pull us out of our desperate need for petroleum has been well documented by Stirling and others. Web 2.0 is a kind of "sure we don't get paid money for any of this work, but we sure are communicating!" response.
The cult of the singularity is an attempt to get beyond all that. To have something we can believe in again, a vision for the future. Regardless of its truth or falsity, human beings must have a vision to aspire toward.
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As you’ve probably noticed, conservatives tend to argue against liberalism/progressivism by asserting (plausibly) that Robespierre, or Stalin, or Hitler did bad things; then asserting (considerably less plausibly) that liberalism/progressivism somehow equals, or naturally tends to slide into, bad authoritarianism of a distinctively modern sort. Ever since Burke wrote his book about the French Revolution, some such slippery slope argument is the Ur-argument of conservatism as political philosophy.
Suppose we sketch out that thing that it is feared liberalism/progressivism will slipperily slide into. See if you don’t agree that the one thing every conservative swears up and down that he hates in all its many works and deeds, is anything resembling the following:
Intellectuals cook up some abstract, scientistic, rationalistic System. Blinded by the light of Enlightenment hubris, they conclude that a very great transformation of society can be happily effected in relatively short order. A political revolution shall ascend atop some alleged social science breakthrough which, we are assured, is a sold extension of more fundamental advances in the natural sciences. Mostly, the engine of change is the force of changed minds themselves. First, some activist elite manages to get their heads on straight. Then the people will eventually be dragged (if necessary) into the light. It’s Politics of Meaning as the Rule of Reason. The job of government is to understand what the right values are, and make sure those values permeate the lives of the (potentially false-consciousness afflicted) masses. For their own good.
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quite apart from his tendency to prescribe misery, what is notable about Murray is the degree to which he fits the science-turned-social-engineering-hubris bill. He claims that some people know what the true values are in life – the transcendent ones. What this enlightened elite should do is use the government (i.e. by forcibly shrinking it) to induce those who are deluded by false values to accept the true ones.
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[Frederic] Jameson’s been interested in science fiction for most of his career, but never before has he published so large a work devoted wholly to the genre—or, more specifically, devoted to utopia, here taken straightforward as a subset of SF.
Erik Olin Wright’s manuscript-in-progress, Envisioning Real Utopias is on the web.
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