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

Kevin Kelly:

"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)

More Information

• Utopia is a dangerous ideal