Protopia
kevinkelly.substack.com
kevinkelly.substack.com
> reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions, climate disasters, a black mirror of stunted humanity descending into chaos.
rather than the much more common understanding or portrayals like 1984 or Handmaid's Tale, which in fact feature incredibly, overly-strong institutions, and a tyrannical lack of autonomy (so not a whole lot of 'reckless uprisings').
But if you're trying to convince people that technology is in fact not the thing that's enabling mass surveillance and economic decline and black-mirror-like-drone-warfare and climate disasters and tyranny right now, then it would make sense to leave out the most common understanding of what a dystopia looks like.
"No, AI is totally gonna result in Star Trek, not the Panopticon, I swear! What's a Palantir?"
It feels like some kind of weird enlightened-techno-centrism.
I hear this complaint here a lot and I guess there are more cameras, but arrests have gone down in absolute terms in the US despite growing population.
> The total number of arrests in the U.S. fell sharply in 2020 during pandemic-driven shifts in public activity and enforcement—and it has changed little since then. The 2024 arrest total was 25% lower than in 2019, the year before the pandemic, and half the number in the peak year of 1997. The combination of falling arrests and rising resident population has driven down the national arrest rate, which in 2024 was 30% lower than in 2019 and 71% below its peak in 1994.
I think most (non-online) people would prefer more enforcement of laws. I've never had a conversation in real life where someone argued there should be less order and enforcement. That's an insane position to take and ahistorical. The idea you hear online that you can get rid of prisons. It's neither left nor right. You think failed communist states didn't arrest people? It's an idea whose intellectual roots go back only around 50 years and for good reason. It doesn't work, or at least doesn't produce societies that endure and get passed on.
> Climate disasters
Similarly, climate related deaths worldwide have dropped and continue to do so, pretty much a straight line. This is a more reliable proxy than the $1b damage climate events, because the other is due to development on risky coast lines and overall increase in property values above inflation.
> Economic decline
The middle class is shrinking, but the upper and upper-middle is growing. So it's a bit of a barbell. But I'll also note that many of these measures are households, and there have been changes in typical households. Many people are staying single well into their 30s which means its a household of 1 compared to what would be a 2 person household in the past
> Done warfare
Isn't this better than boots on the ground? I don't think the problem is technology, it's armed conflict. I guess if you consider that armed conflicts are more likely because nations don't need to put as much lives at risk, and maybe that is a factor. But I'm not convinced somehow drones are driving this.
https://counciloncj.org/who-gets-arrested-in-america-trends-...
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/climate-activists-disasters-fire...
> Isn't this better than boots on the ground?
The answer to this question depends on whether you firsthand experienced sleepless nights in a city when drones fly directly over your house while you wait for them do dive or get missile defenced into it, a neighbour's house, or somewhere else, and then hear explosions and wait for the morning news to learn how many people died this night, to such little grief in news' comments it makes you wonder if there is any hope for this humankind at all.
Parroting the original comment almost never looks good, but that aside, at least when you know that soldiers are about to enter your street, you know 100% that it's a war and you should be out of the city and flee for your life.
In case of drone warfare, it's a fucking Orwell's warpeace, when everyone around tries to pretend nothing happens and go on with their lives, getting maimed day by day morally and spiritually more than physically, if luck allows.
You don't even know if there's a human operator behind that Skynet machine that flew over your house last night.
Boots on the ground are at least honest, oldschool war, and drone warfare is a goddamn satanic "special military operation" of the new world order.
> The middle class is shrinking, but the upper and upper-middle is growing.
Growing is size maybe, but the middle and lower classes are both getting much richer.
This is an illusion caused by poor measurement. You can argue all you want about how much a pickup truck's safety/bell and whistles have improved, but from the 60s - 80s, a day laborer carpenter could purchase a new truck on a third of their salary. Now a truck that serves the same function is 1.5x their salary.
I don't think coastal property prices are the main concern. Most of climate change damage doesn't directly show up on a balance sheet but it's already there. Drought and storm damage are causing food shortages leading to terror and war. But the people it affects are sometimes not even part of the recorded economy.
Here's some actual cited evidence:
The WHO fact sheet on heat and health [1] says:
> The number of people exposed to extreme heat is growing exponentially due to climate change in all world regions. Heat-related mortality for people over 65 years of age increased by approximately 85% between 2000–2004 and 2017–2021 (1).
> Between 2000–2019 studies show approximately 489 000 heat-related deaths occur each year, with 45% of these in Asia and 36% in Europe (2). In Europe alone in the summer of 2022, an estimated 61 672 heat-related excess deaths occurred (3). High intensity heatwave events can bring high acute mortality; in 2003, 70 000 people in Europe died as a result of the June–August event. In 2010, 56 000 excess deaths occurred during a 44–day heatwave in the Russian Federation.
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...
The author claims:
> A century ago, almost half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. Over the next 10 decades, global annual deaths from these causes declined 96%, to 18,000. In 2020, they dropped to 14,000.
In no universe is this remotely true, if he's attempting to be accurate about climate deaths. The US alone had 4,000 direct heat exposure deaths annually as of 2020, and an average 47,500 cold exposure deaths. As in, people literally dying of extreme heat and cold exposure. That doesn't include every other climate impact death, and, once again, that's US only.
That's from Yale [2], btw:
> In a new study, YSPH researchers found that while cold weather continues to be a leading contributor to U.S. deaths annually, deaths linked to heat exposure surged more than 50% over the past two decades. Cold-related deaths rose from about 44,000 between 2000 and 2009 to more than 47,500 between 2010 and 2020, a 7% increase. Meanwhile, deaths associated with high temperatures climbed by 53%, from an annual average of 2,670 between 2000 and 2009 to more than 4,000 between 2010 and 2020.
[2] https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/warming-us-climate-linked...
Globally, heat deaths alone in 2023 were over 178,000 [3].
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266667582...
I'll leave debunking the rest of this misinformation to others, as this comment is already long enough.
mass surveillance is totally orthogonal and will not reduce disorder or disregard for laws.
we know that empirically from the last twenty or so years where mass surveillance has only gotten more and more aggressive, while at least in cities: decay and disorder are rising.
There are many forms of dystopia and picking two that prominently feature absolute institutional control also seems like cherry picking.
The Hunger Games, World War Z, and Fallout are also dystopias.
and hunger games is about institutional control and rebelling against it
Yes, institutional control features heavily in The Hunger Games, but so do "reckless uprisings, a long dark age, the collapse of institutions..." which is why it came to mind.
WWZ is about a literal zombie outbreak, and while I can't comment on whether the book is actually using it as a vehicle to critique or extrapolate real-world social systems, the movie sure as hell didn't.
Without going into a very long rant about Bethesda missing the point of Fallout as a universe, suffice it to say that it is also not intended to be a serious examination of what life might or even could become, ever. In fact, it was intended to be a platform for social critique via parody and caricaturism.
Overall I really enjoyed it. I should re-read it…
There's no need to choose. Dystopia is more than one thing, and both of the sets of things you mention are just different kinds of dystopia.
When we think about goals we usually imagine a static end state. 75 kg body weight. 1,000,000 USD in my bank account. A happy life.
We try to define the goals using units and aim for them. This is fine in most cases.
It’s a way of thinking that is based around a static goal. But life is dynamic.
More recently I started thinking of having dynamic goals. Instead of a body weight goal, I will focus on a goal of building mechanisms that allow me to change my weight. If I lose a leg in the future and can’t run and my weight is 74 kg I did not hit my goal. If I develop different ways of limiting caloric input and different exercise routines that allow me to burn calories in different circumstances, I will be better prepared for whatever the future may bring.
I think it can be summed up as this: My goals will be based on building agile methods for adjusting course in a desirable direction, as needed.
Not sure if this is clear or how to call it. 2nd order goals? Dynamic goals?
- aiming for an end goal is not fine in most cases, it is simply a very common, terrible idea. You need a process, not a goal. "Journey over destination", yadda yadda
- 99% of human behaviour is governed by processes we call habits. Operating on the habit system is the key to long-term behavioural change, but one also has to recognize replacing habits is a long, delicate affair and one tends to ask too much of themselves. The metaphor I carry in my head is you're trying to steer a bull with a feather; easy does it. "Tiny Habits" is a good self-help book with good science behind it
- life is indeed dynamic but I feel such a hyper-rational, mechanistic way of approaching the conundrum is setting yourself up to failure. I recommend philosophy rather, especially Taoism, to embrace all of these concepts into a unified worldview of change: change being intrinsic to the universe, doing with little effort, and not forcing yourself (to burnout). You are not a machine.
re: end goals: in most cases, you still need an end goal in mind in order to craft a process that will get you there. In the end, it is the process that matters and the goal is there only for measuring progress and adjusting course. However, a single process for a single goal is not enough in a dynamic changing world. You need a way of being able to react and adjust or even drastically change the process.
re: habits. Again, fully agree given a static goal. But if the circumstances change, the existing habits might no longer serve you. You need to be able to adjust habits.
re: hyper-rational. This is my style. I find that I can think, explain, and execute mechanically more effectively. It's practical. Deep down, there is a philosophy behind this, but I have a hard time explaining and applying philosophy.
Thanks for the gratifying discussion
The most resilient systems aren't built to reach a final form.They are built to be highly observable and easy to pivot when requirements inevitably change. Optimizing for adaptability (what you call dynamic goals) is far more valuable than optimizing for a fixed milestone. It's fascinating to see this engineering principle applied so perfectly to personal life.
Author should read Iain M. Banks.
Maybe he wouldn't want to because it's easier to handle caricatures of utopia and dystopia in such a way that you could replace them with "heaven" & "hell". This is theology aimed to make Protopia look sane.
(Utopia doesn't mean an absence of problems. People working together to solve problems would be an aspect of Utopia. Something worth aspiring.)
I liked the idea of growing choices as an indicator however it also shows where the author likes to not look at. Going from farming to web developer is nice. The American Dream! And it happens. However the more likely path is: farmer to driver with their children having to struggle to climb the slope.
This and the diminishing choices in the middle classes are what show that this is rather just another path towards dystopia. Yes "we" have progress. But there is a strong inequality within those who profit from it. The author notices that half the world can be crap and still calls the direction progress, but never asks who is holding which half, or whether that split is itself widening.
So what is this Protopia the author describes here actually? Any state of the world can be called slightly better than last year if you choose the metrics after the fact.
What observation would count as evidence that we are NOT in it?
It's somewhat sad to me that this phenomenon is borne out in the comments (of this thread and, I would say, generally across HN in my experience). It's so easy to prophecy doom, ignoring the fact that life and humanity has generally prevailed and continued "progress" in the face of adversity, evil, extinction events, and other setbacks.
I'm generally in agreement with this article, although, I'm not sure I'm onboard with the dismissal of utopia. Utopia can be whatever you want it to be, it doesn't have to be defined as impossible nonsense. If we're in a protopia, and we want to see protopia, there's sort of a tautological nothingness, akin to pointing out that there's no such thing as free will. The message then boils down to "well just keep on truckin' as is."
Global energy usage is rising at a yearly rate of about 2.5%. In my view, this is one of the most basic statistics that correlates to improved quality of life.
Regardless of what measure of "progress" you use, if it's compounded, it leads to drastic changes very quickly.
I agree very much with the idea that we should be making the world better little by little, but better... better for who? Who benefits is a genuinely important question to answer. I believe "better for most", which means using our wealth to lift up many. Others believe "better for me" or "better for my tribe" or "better for my nation". The two styles are fundamentally at odds -- my "redistribute the wealth of billionaires" goal is just never going to square with "billionaires deserve their wealth".
So you have to answer "better for who" before you can efficiently climb "better" on your graph.
If you care to educate yourself so the rest of us aren't just snickering behind our hands next time you speak. Read Watts, Duncan, and Quan (2018), and Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao about how poverty extracts "self-control". Or even just Webber's theodicy of fortune.
Thank you for so succinctly and promptly demonstrating that point, even knowing my post was an obviously simplified example for the purpose of brevity.
As it is, money makes money, while effort alone makes barely enough to scrape by (or not even that much). There are many, many paths to fix it, and they don't need to simply move the money around. There are assumptions that deserve more consideration, and they can lead to better results.
Citation needed. Humans have never been richer in medicine, tech, social mobility, pick your measurement.
We've been going for literally hundreds of years or multiple thousands depending on how you count, and this isn't obvious at all.
> The author deliberately doesn't [address] wealth inequality/misaligned financial incentives driving misery at a global scale which makes it very hard to take seriously.
Wealth equality is imo a mirage. Most wealth inequality is driven by ownership of corporations. If we move that ownership to the states, and keep corporate controls intact, basically nothing happens except wealth equality goes way down. It's a mathematical magic trick that is utterly irrelevant.
Misaligned financial incentives are a different matter though, and I agree there's a lot of problems there. But "driving misery" seems hyperbolic. What is actually "driving misery" is the lack of economic development of the poorest countries.