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A world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also stagnant. A world perfectly fair in some dimensions would be horribly unfair in others. A utopia has no problems to solve, but therefore no opportunities either.
None of us have to worry about these utopia paradoxes, because utopias never work. Every utopian scenario contains self-corrupting flaws. My aversion to utopias goes even deeper. I have not met a speculative utopia I would want to live in. I’d be bored in utopia. Dystopias, their dark opposites, are a lot more entertaining. They are also much easier to envision. Who can’t imagine an apocalyptic last-person-on-earth finale, or a world run by robot overlords, or a megacity planet slowly disintegrating into slums, or, easiest of all, a simple nuclear 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 likely.
The flaw in most dystopian narratives is that they are not sustainable. Shutting down civilization is actually hard. The fiercer the disaster, the faster the chaos burns out. The outlaws and underworlds that seem so exciting at “first demise” are soon taken over by organized crime and militants, so that lawlessness quickly becomes racketeering and, even quicker, racketeering becomes a type of corrupted government—all to maximize the income of the bandits. In a sense, greed cures anarchy. Real dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union rather than Mad Max: They are stiflingly bureaucratic rather than lawless. Ruled by fear, their society is hobbled except for the benefit of a few, but, like the sea pirates two centuries ago, there is far more law and order than appears. In fact, in real broken societies, the outrageous outlawry we associate with dystopias is not permitted. The big bandits keep the small bandits and dystopian chaos to a minimum.
However, neither dystopia nor utopia is our destination. Rather, technology is taking us to protopia. More accurately, we have already arrived in protopia.
Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better. It is incremental improvement or mild progress. The “pro” in protopian stems from the notions of process and progress. This subtle progress is not dramatic, not exciting. It is easy to miss because a protopia generates almost as many new problems as new benefits. The problems of today were caused by yesterday’s technological successes, and the technological solutions to today’s problems will cause the problems of tomorrow. This circular expansion of both problems and solutions hides a steady accumulation of small net benefits over time. Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. Its benefits never star in movies.
Protopia is hard to see because it is a becoming. It is a process that is constantly changing how other things change, and, changing itself, is mutating and growing. It’s difficult to cheer for a soft process that is shape-shifting. But it is important to see it.
Today we’ve become so aware of the downsides of innovations, and so disappointed with the promises of past utopias, that we find it hard to believe even in a mild protopian future—one in which tomorrow will be a little better than today. We find it very difficult to imagine any kind of future at all that we desire. Can you name a single science fiction future on this planet that is both plausible and desirable? (Star Trek doesn’t count; it’s in space.)
There is no happy flying-car future beckoning us any longer. Unlike the last century, nobody wants to move to the distant future. Many dread it. That makes it hard to take the future seriously. So we’re stuck in the short now, a present without a generational perspective. Some have adopted the perspective of believers in a Singularity who claim that imagining the future in 100 years is technically impossible. That makes us future-blind. This future-blindness may simply be the inescapable affliction of our modern world. Perhaps at this stage in civilization and technological advance, we enter into a permanent and ceaseless present, without past or future. Utopia, dystopia, and protopia all disappear. There is only the Blind Now.
The other alternative is to embrace the future and its becoming. The future we are aimed at is the product of a process—a becoming—that we can see right now. We can embrace the current emerging shifts that will become the future.
The problem with constant becoming (especially in a protopian crawl) is that unceasing change can blind us to its incremental changes. In constant motion we no longer notice the motion. Becoming is thus a self-cloaking action often seen only in retrospect. More important, we tend to see new things from the frame of the old. We extend our current perspective to the future, which in fact distorts the new to fit into what we already know. That is why the first movies were filmed like theatrical plays and the first VRs shot like movies. This shoehorning is not always bad. Storytellers exploit this human reflex in order to relate the new to the old, but when we are trying to discern what will happen in front of us, this habit can fool us. We have great difficulty perceiving change that is happening right now. Sometimes its apparent trajectory seems impossible, implausible, or ridiculous, so we dismiss it. We are constantly surprised by things that have been happening for 20 years or longer.
I am not immune from this distraction. I was deeply involved in the birth of the online world 30 years ago, and a decade later the arrival of the web. Yet at every stage, what was becoming was hard to see in the moment. Often it was hard to believe. Sometimes we didn’t see what was becoming because we didn’t want it to happen that way.
We don’t need to be blind to this continuous process. The rate of change in recent times has been unprecedented, which caught us off guard. But now we know: We are, and will remain, perpetual newbies. We need to believe in improbable things more often. Everything is in flux, and the new forms will be an uncomfortable remix of the old. With effort and imagination we can learn to discern what’s ahead more clearly, without blinders.
Let me give you an example of what we can learn about our future from the very recent history of the web. Before the graphic Netscape browser illuminated the web in 1994, the text-only internet did not exist for most people. It was hard to use. You needed to type code. There were no pictures. Who wanted to waste time on something so boring? If it was acknowledged at all in the 1980s, the internet was dismissed as either corporate email (as exciting as a necktie) or a clubhouse for teenage boys. Although it did exist, the internet was totally ignored.
Any promising new invention will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the nays. It’s not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the web/internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the internet would never go mainstream: “It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals.” Wow! Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: “The Internet? Bah!” The article was written by an astrophysicist and network expert, Cliff Stoll, who argued that online shopping and online communities were an unrealistic fantasy that betrayed common sense. “The truth is no online database will replace your newspaper,” he claimed. “Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.” Stoll captured the prevailing skepticism of a digital world full of “interacting libraries, virtual communities, and electronic commerce” with one word: “baloney.”