
Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia - hownottowrite
http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/john-crowley-inside-every-utopia-dystopia
======
ideonexus
The remains of the 1939 Worlds Fair are found in the Bronx. I took a subway
there once on a visit to NY. I was both inspired by the science center there,
and dismayed to find it surrounded by antiquated residences and roads. It was
like a vision of the future in a garden surrounded by the mundane suburban
sprawl of reality. Futurism is still the closest thing I have to a religion,
and so I admire that in Bel Geddes vision. My favorite bit of futurism is
Robert McCall's "The Prologue and the Promise" mural found in the Disney Epcot
center [1]. If we aren't striving for a better future, then what are we living
for?

For the idea that "Inside Every Utopia is a Dystopia," the 1973 story "The
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin [2] has always most
starkly impressed this concept into my mind. In it, Omelas is a perfect
utopian city where life is perfect, except this perfection is dependent on the
incredible suffering of a single child kept hidden away in a dark place. At a
certain age, child's suffering is revealed to each citizen. Most residents
learn to live with this fact or rationalize it away. It's a serious
oversimplification of certain dimensions of our own modern societies, but it
is a powerful metaphor for thinking about how much our cheap modern
conveniences rely on the services of minorities and the impoverished who serve
us and manufacture our many shiny things. I wish this essay had delved deeper
into this concept.

[1]
[http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951...](http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951403247/HORIZONS-
MURAL-Rober-McCall.jpg)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
And insofar as _Omelas_ is trying to make a point about life in general,
history in general, potential societies or lives _in general_ , it is simply
reactionary. Who is even Ursula Le Guin to tell us that everything must have a
seed of evil in its core?

~~~
danharaj
I don't think that's le Guin's thesis. The Dispossessed is her book that
explores the nature of utopia, its subtitle is "an ambiguous utopia" even. I
think the focus of omelas is the juxtaposition of outward peace and prosperity
and internal brutality. The key to the book is how people react to seeing the
rotten core of their society. It's not a thesis on what all societies look
like-- le Guin has constructed many complex, lifelike societies that don't
have such brutally evil defects, but a kind of society that sounds awfully
familiar. The point of this story is how one reacts to the revelation of the
society's nature, both within the narrative and externally in the reader. Who
walks away from Omelas?

~~~
aomurphy
Yes, absolutely. I think LeGuin is the last "great" Utopian writer we've had.
The Dispossessed is a beautiful work, and one that doesn't have a dark heart.
It has bad parts, it might not last, but it's not Omelas. You're exactly
right, Omelas is about how we the reader would choose.

Would you leave everything behind because of evil? Would you live with it?

------
stcredzero
_information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate_

Profound! Lies and manipulations are also information. In a free society, who
is to judge what is an unacceptable subtle lie and what is an unacceptable
subtle manipulation?

(What if a private platform achieves some kind of network effect, such that it
has a virtual monopoly? By going to a private website, you are giving up your
freedom voluntarily, but through network effects, that private website can
effectively suppress all speech through its dominated medium.)

~~~
cestith
If it's dominated by a single player then the information isn't actually free.
Hence rather than anarchists we get the neoanarcbists fighting against tight
control of the information rather than fighting control over the people
themselves.

We'll also have neoluddites who are fine with physical machines leveraging
human labor to great heights but who fear and rise up against expert systems
and machine learning that threaten to automate away human control of those
machines.

~~~
anigbrowl
I am skeptical of ML not because it will automate away human control of
production (which would be quite a good thing in many respects) but because it
is likely to reinforce arbitrary or implicit human biases while being sold as
the epitome of rational objectivity. A lot of technologists I meet are
socially and culturally illiterate and do not seem competent to implement such
systems. I would further argue that employers have strong economic incentives
to select for such illiteracy when hiring.

~~~
nnfy
>A lot of technologists I meet are socially and culturally illiterate and do
not seem competent to implement such systems

And who are you to make such a judgement?

What about the case that fear of bias is used as a tool of control? Perhaps in
such a society, these "culturally illiterate" developers would be better
suited to create a more minimally biased system.

~~~
anigbrowl
I'm an artist, mystic, and all-around fringe thinker. and I feel fine about
having a cautiously qualified opinion.

------
Animats
If you've never seen Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama from the 1939 World's Fair,
here it is.[1] (480p). That was the GM vision of the future. Much of it was
achieved, mostly the highway part.

By 1956, GM's vision had progressed to a titanium body self-driving turbine
car with huge tailfins.[2] That prototype car, the Firebird II, actually
worked.

In 1964, GM did Futureama 2 at the 1964 World's Fair. This was a future that
didn't happen, with space stations, all-terrain vehicles on the moon, and
giant road-building machines cutting roads through tropical jungles. The 1964
World's Fair perhaps represented "peak future", the high point of industrial-
strength utopianism.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypxE5XdzLuY&t=467](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypxE5XdzLuY&t=467)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8)
[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk)

------
jhbadger
The review itself is worth reading for itself, but I found it interesting that
its author is the novelist John Crowley. I wonder if it is just random that he
was asked to review this book or if he is currently researching the topic for
a new novel.

------
api
A utopia is a local maximum. Intelligent beings, having the ability to model
and traverse fitness landscapes, eventually figure this out.

~~~
Retra
But a global maximum is also a local maximum, so what good does it do you to
figure that out?

