Protopia
Description
Hanzi Freinacht:
"“Protopia” is another recent term, coined by futurist Kevin Kelly and it is defined as the opposite of a “Dystopia”. In Dystopia, people are stuck in some kind of recurring pattern of suffering (like George Orwell’s “foot trampling a human face — for ever”, as in 1984). A Protopian society, then, is one where people are free from such gridlocks and can thus work actively to improve life. It’s a more carefully stated form of a dream of societal transformation: It doesn’t say that “everything will be good for everyone”; it focuses not on the state-of-things-at-a-given-moment, but on the possibility — the shared capacity — to move in mutually desirable directions. Simply stated, one could say that a Protopian society is one that has the capacity to become incrementally better as a result of the freedom of its members."
(https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/protopia-beyond-utopia-8200a20b2c43)
Discussion
"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.
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.
It may be that this future-blindness is simply the inescapable affliction of our modern world. Perhaps at this stage in civilization and technological advance, we enter into permanent and ceaseless future-blindness. Utopia, dystopia, and protopia all disappear. There is only the Blind Now.
That is possible. 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."
(http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/05/protopia.php)
Protopia: Beyond Kelly’s original definition
Hanzi Freinacht:
"In its original, minimalist — and admittedly rather lacking — formulation by Kevin Kelly, Protopia is simply a term that denotes the gradual improvement of society over time, without claiming either perfection or the reaching of a point of stability. If we cannot allow ourselves to believe in a future paradise that has stabilized around a blissful state of affairs (Utopia), and we find it insufficient to look for those beautiful little exceptions of what life and society can be in certain regards under specific circumstances (Eutopia), perhaps we can more cautiously and realistically allow hope and faith in gradual but over time substantial improvements of society. As mentioned earlier, Kelly views such a capacity to improve as the true opposite of Dystopia.
That’s Kelly’s original take on the term, Protopia. We could stop there, but frankly, it’s not a particularly enlightening or inspiring prospect in and of itself. Still — it’s a helpful point of departure.
There are more and less generous ways to read Kelly’s take on Protopia. Naturally, if improvement is constant and there are never any setbacks, that’s also an unchanging state of affairs (like Utopia’s static vision)—the derivative of an even slope is still a line. If that’s how we interpret Kelly’s idea — as literally an improvement on key measures from year to year, indefinitely — it would be equally or more unrealistic than Utopia’s static “perfect world”. Likewise, this would mean that whatever direction in which society is “improving” needs to be constant and correctly defined for all time — that its direction can never shift. That is also untenable: The measure of a society’s “success” necessarily shifts over time, and thus the vectors of what is considered to be an improvement must shift as well.
At the very least, then, a more generous interpretation of Kelly’s Protopia — one that gives it more intellectual credit — would grant that it allows for society to fluctuate between good and bad periods, but that it has the capacity to shift into oscillations that, as a whole, are preferable to what existed before. There is improvement, but not necessarily every year. Rather, in the pattern of how good and bad events play out. And, of course, that a society’s way of understanding itself and what it means to “improve” things becomes “wiser” over time. If we use a convoluted term from philosophy, we could say that Protopia allows for authentic dialectics: for good and bad things, as interpreted from widely different perspectives of the good and bad, to emerge together in ever-surprising but ultimately non-arbitrary manners.
Or, another way to say it, drawing on the chaos theory tradition: Protopia is not the constant (linear) improvement of society from year to year, but an improvement of society’s “phase space”, i.e. a shift of which phases society can enter into as it evolves: desirable and undesirable phases included.
Let’s use the more gracious interpretation as we go on.
* Protopia: Beyond Kelly’s original definition
The correct synthesis of Utopia and Eutopia should be able to do more: It should inspire hope and spark the imagination beyond what reforms and gradual improvements can; it should bring a coordinating shared sense of direction for millions of unique but inter-related collaborators who are somehow part of the same societal transformation across sectors (tech, arts, spirituality, business, politics, movements, academia); and it should combine the sense of the tremendous, the open horizon of Utopia and the vision of a world so much better than all we have known, with the multi-perspectivalism and curiosity of the Eutopian search for the hidden-in-plain-sight beauties that we’ve looked past. In brief, it should be able to combine the best of both worlds while avoiding their respective pitfalls.
And so, if we are to mine the concept of Protopia for a deeper meaning — one that is worth rallying around across sectors and across projects, over different cultures, and across longer stretches of time — we may need to expand upon Kelly’s original formulation. I would claim, however, that the below suggested expansion carries forward the spirit of the original meaning, just adding more layers to it.
We are now thus taking a turn into the Metamodern: we must coordinate the sense of direction and progress of the Modern (Utopia) with the sensitivity and critical awareness of the Postmodern (Eutopia). Metamodernism is that which emerges from the skepticism of Postmodern skepticism. As Jason Ananda Storm has argued, the Postmodern mind is skeptical of everything but its very own skepticism. Once you begin to question your own skepticism, you come to embody the position of sincere irony, or informed naivety. That is to say, you begin to allow yourself to believe in grand schemes again, even if you know that your “Utopias” are fictional and possibly dangerous. There is a recognition that the lack of a great story to weave reality with, is just as dangerous. You start looking for the pattern that connects the many little Eutopias — The Good Place found in strange corners and exceptions — and in that pattern, you begin to see the vast field of potential of many different social realities that have been, that could be, and that should be.
So The Good Place does happen — but not arbitrarily. It happens given certain circumstances. It flickers past in history, in moments in our lives, in special places… But what then are the best possible conditions for the increased likelihood for such little Eutopias to emerge — always unique, always context-bound, always unexpected, by their nature impossible to predict? That’s the question. To the extent it can be said that we are still looking for a Utopia, a grand direction, it is the abstract direction that will create the greater number and intensity of little Eutopias flickering by in the cosmos.
That is Protopia: the non-arbitrary pattern that connects the multiplicity of Eutopias; it is the search for the conditions that generate Eutopias — i.e. the “generative conditions” of Eutopia.
This Metamodernist mode of seeing potentials in the world begins from studying the many possibilities, the Eutopias, each of which offers a unique perspective and critique of the status quo. But it doesn't simply leave all of those Eutopias as disconnected fragments floating about in a larger void of meaninglessness. It lets the different Eutopias inform one another. It weighs and pits them against one another; it triangulates from their conflicting insights and ways of life — and as such it develops a context-sensitive form of utopianism, of dreamy faith. Or should I say: Protopianism.
With the Protopian stance, no compromise needs to be made: The faith, the zeal of the revolutionary, is there for the taking, but the path towards it is always by learning more, by listening in to the hidden potentials of everyday life that the multiplicity of human experience (and/or that of other lifeforms) offers.
* Protopia: Another set of assumptions generate another set of futures
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Protopian activism requires some different basic assumptions about reality than Eutopian activism. In a sense, the Protopian vision breaks the one great taboo of the Postmodern mind: to order and organize different perspectives into a grander scheme. But it is no longer the scheme of a 3D world with a certain goal in the distance — it corresponds, rather, to folding through a fourth or even fifth dimension, showing how many different goals are possible, yet complexly interlinked on a more abstract plane of analysis.
It is a horizon opening up as the Protopian perspective unfolds, but not a singular horizon, but a multiple horizon. It is the horizon of the property space of all possible events — what one might term an “event horizon” (drawing an analogy to the warped space-time around a black hole, where time collapses so that all events occur simultaneously; a real cosmological phenomenon). Somewhat more poetically put — to be a Protopian is to try to touch the event horizon.
Hopefully, then, readers will agree that Metamodernism needs Protopia and vice versa, that the two concepts seem intertwined, and that the Metamodern mindset unlocks the great adventure of Utopian dreams, albeit in a space of playful experimentation with coordinating the many lessons that come from transcending and transgressing the limitations of Modern society and its trajectories. Let me simply end by highlighting a few key differences between the Utopian, Eutopian, and Protopian stances on societal transformation.
The Utopian believes in progress. The Eutopian believes in critique and a rediscovery of simpler wisdoms and relationships. The Protopian believes that progress can be enacted by understanding how the many critiques and rediscoveries of wisdom are interconnected into a larger whole.
The Utopian envisions a linear path towards a brighter future. The Eutopian believes that pearls of happy and sane society are found precisely by looking away from the trodden path. The Protopian envisions a non-linear pathway to a wider range of possibilities, a chaotic or strange attractor, which in itself constitutes the wider map of potential futures (or the “phase space” of society’s evolution), but where it is impossible to foresee which future will actually occur. So: from linear, to non-linear, to chaotic thinking. The Utopian is driven by sincere faith. The Eutopian is driven by an ironic distance to plots and plans and only trusts the genuinely surprising. The Protopian is driven by a sincerely-ironically held faith — not in the actual future (that may fly or fall, as things do) but in the potential of what marvels are always-already possible.
The Utopian believes in the future. The Eutopian believes in alternate timelines. The Protopian believes that alternate timelines can and should be skillfully weaved into a multiplicity of beautiful futures — but that it is not determined that they will be. The Protopian relates to what we may call the “topology of timelines”.
The Utopian believes that the games of life, competition, strife, pain, will wither away once Utopia is achieved. The Eutopian believes that a resting place is already available if we could only look away from the grand narratives that have enthralled us, that the games of life are actually only an illusion to awaken from. The Protopian believes that the games of life are real and just as hurtful as we experience them, but that they have been changed throughout history, they can be changed again, and they very likely will be at one time or another. The Protopian believes in Game Change and what I have formerly called “relative utopia” — if slavery did end and democracy did prevail, why shouldn’t corresponding leaps be possible in the future?
The Utopian believes that the world gets better if people work to improve it. The Eutopian believes that people ruin the world more than they help it by all their plans, plots, and attempts at controlling everything. The Protopian believes that progress is inherent to the universe, but that it always comes at a terrible price — of new problems emerging, and of old beauties lost. Consider the above list carefully before you get a tattoo.
In brief — let us tread the multiple but intrinsically interlinked paths to Protopia, while keeping an ironic smile at our own self-importance. Protopia is a “vision of visions”. It works not with one future, but with the entire event horizon of all possible futures.
We know it won’t work, that a thousand surprises will corrode whatever paths we may cut. But it is the very knowledge of certain failure that guarantees our non-linear victory and the emergence of Protopia in the world — that is to say, a real improvement over time. That’s why Protopia is more than a fairy tale.
And that’s a good enough reason for Protopians around the world to unite. The quality of Protopian unity is not that of the monolith, however, nor of the bundle of rods. It is the unity of mycelium: infinitely interconnected, always in flux, busy breaking down the dying while creating soil for the new to blossom."
(https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/protopia-beyond-utopia-8200a20b2c43)