For this Issue of Smesher, it was almost too tempting to just link to Hary Kunzruās podcast When We Were Cyber.
Itās about the novelistās days as a philosophy MA student at Warwick University, next to Coventry, England, in the 1990s. And while the word Protopia doesnāt appear in the podcast even once, itās somehow exactly what Protopia is about. But weāre getting ahead of ourselves. So first, what is protopia?
Protopia 101
Coined by Kevin Kelly in 2011, in a blog post by the same name. He was thinking about how the future was imagined as either utopia or dystopia. And he didnāt like either.
āI donāt believe in utopias,ā he wrote, āI have not met a utopia I would even want to live in.ד
But that didnāt mean he believed in dystopia either. דJust because dystopias are cinematic and dramatic, and much easier to imagine, that does not make them much more likelyד, he wrote. āReal dystopias are more like the old Soviet Union, or Libya, rather than Mad Max or Blade Runner: they are stifling bureaucratic rather than lawless.ā
So instead of these two perceptions of the future, Kelly came up with a third one: āprotopia 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.ā
Three years later, he made his vision even clearer with a Tweet saying: āI donāt believe in utopia. I believe in protopia ā that through progress and process tomorrow will be slightly better than today.ā
Do we live in the past or in the future?
People often describe the current time, 2022, as āweāre living in the futureā. COVID seemed like it was taken from a dystopian book or film. Ads retargeting us seem like something out of Spielbergās Minority Report (as this Jon Bird article suggests).
So are we? Living āin the futureā?
Consider this: āIn reality, we live in the past. That is, the world that surrounds us is not new. The things in it ā our houses, the places we work, even our clothes and our cars ā arenāt created anew every day. So any particular period is an amalgam of many earlier times.ā Interesting thought, huh? This quote, by the way, is not from a philosophical essay about the future. Itās from the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself ā a must for any movie buff.
We think, that if you are willing to accept that āany period is an amalgam of past and futureā, then itās easy to accept the concept of protopia; the notion that in order to reach a better future, we need to propel incremental changes.
How do we reach protopia?
Futurist Monika Bielskyte agrees with Kevin Kelly, about finding both utopia and dystopia equally unappealing. She points to both Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany as examples for her claim that:
āUtopia has always been someone elseās distopia.ā
So she too prefers protopia. And the first step to getting there is not to give in to the feeling of not having control over current events. āWhen we disengage from future-making, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,ā she says.
Another piece of advice she offers is āto think about technology as something unexotic, simply as an extension of our bodies and our minds.ā This is because, according to Bielskyte, ātechnological innovation without humanitarian evolution always equals oppressive future.ā We couldnāt agree with her more when she reasons that ātechnology doesnāt lead the way, it follows our intentions.ā
Artistic Intentions
But perhaps the most interesting point that Bielskyte makes about protopia and future-making, is her point about who makes the future. According to her, itās not the Jeff Bezoses or Mark Zuckerbergs of the world. Itās the writers, the directors, the dream weavers. Because they shape our fantasies about the future, the fantasies that construct what we see as the realm of possibilities:
Which brings us back to Coventry
Coventry in the 1990s, as Hary Kunzru describes it, was a town designed and built from scratch, after it was bombarded flat by the Nazis. It was āreimagined by city planners, who wanted a modernist rational machine for living.ā
In other words, the city planners believed they were shaping the future. Which was true. But it ended up being a different future than the one they had hoped for. How different? Enough to earn it the song Ghost Town by The Specials.
But perhaps because it was such a ghost town, the grad students of Warwick University, where Kunzru was studying, were looking for ways to be inspired. Some of them, like Kunzru, were into sci-fi, techno music, fractal patterns, a thing called the internet (then with 130 websites worldwide) andā¦ William Gibson, whose books were exploring āhow humans were becoming connected to machines and how we were linking ourselves together to networks.ā
The grad student started a conference, called Virtual Futures. These were festive events, which attracted such iconic figures as Orlan and Stelarc. But the confrences werenāt just about cutting edge artists and partying. In a way, they were the first protopian events. They were exploring possible futures that incorporated elements of the now, without committing to one version of the future.
How does crypto fit in?
In todayās issue, this section will not point to any specific project. The takeaway is different: It is that crypto, just like any other technology, needs āto follow our intentions.ā And if we want tomorrow to be āslightly betterā than today, our intentions need to be geared towards doing good. We need to utilize crypto to do good. Not to establish a utopia that will be someone elseās dystopia.
Follow us on Twitter this week, for all the cool stuff that didnāt make it into this issue Ā» https://twitter.com/smesher_io š£
Want to talk to us, about protopia and other matters? Would you prefer Discord, Twitter Communities, or a meetup? Let us know by replying, or leaving us a comment below. š
And, as always, we made you a playlist inspired by protopia