> When picturing humanity's future, dark visions are everywhere - but are there alternatives? Historian Thomas Moynihan explores what we can learn from forecasters 100 years ago.
#Utopias#Communism#Marxism#Fiction: "...[T]he reality is that the suppression of open class conflict throughout society—combined with the generally low level of hands-on knowledge of production induced by deindustrialization—has tended to impoverish the practical or functional aspect of "political thought" in general and of discourse and imagination in particular. The result is that most signals of apparent political or strategic difference are in fact little more than an index of the tastes, aesthetics, and desires prioritized by different authors and audiences occupying their different subcultural niches in the cavernous marketplace. Today's utopias therefore operate over an enormous breadth: ranging from hyperbolic tales of the permanently-embarrassed futurist ("fully automated luxury communism"), to planning schema that would channel resources and populations at the behest of aspiring technocrats ("half-earth socialism," "degrowth communism"), to folksier fairytales of city-scale "communes" popping up like little mushrooms of self-organization in the interstices of society or under the umbrella of insurrection. Some of the more fanciful visions will contain the occasional moment of lucidity, while others are wholly detached from reality.
Despite their apparent divergences, all tend to operate according to a shared logic that is utopian not because it is imaginative but because it lacks any real substance or depth. Though their forms seem multifarious, such stories cast a single shadow onto that same flat surface, off-white. In other words, these utopias are unified less by the positive content of the worlds that they envision than by the fact that they all share the same glaring absences etched onto the same fictive flatness: first and foremost, we find the absence of "politics" itself, in the sense of some strategic sequence of struggle stretched between the immediate world and the envisioned utopia..."
"It’s increasingly looking like this may be one of the most hilariously inappropriate applications of AI that we’ve seen yet." I am riveted by the extensive documentation of how ChatGPT-powered Bing is now completely unhinged. @simon has chronicled it beautifully here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/
...later published two consecutive very (aka too) professional press releases trying to downplay the (IMO) #FreudianSlip incident as mere "thought experiments," which I found rather hard to believe. (If you are interested in a detailed discussion, scroll down.)
It is more important, however, to continue the #ArtificialIntelligence and what lessons can be learned from the #SciFi subgenre of negative #utopias thread here: