Utopia

Full Title or Meme

Utopia or Erewhon, are fictional places where humans have created a peaceful community where cooperation has become a way of life.

Context

• As always for this wiki the context revolves around the support of human individuals on the World Wide Web.
• Lyman Tower Sargent, a professor of political science whose main academic interests are in utopian studies, argues that utopia's nature is inherently contradictory, because societies are not homogeneous and have desires which conflict and therefore cannot simultaneously be satisfied. If any two desires cannot be simultaneously satisfied, true utopia cannot be attained because in utopia all desires are satisfied.
• So too for identity utopias, they cannot be attained because not all needs can be met by any one system.
• But there have always been visionaries that have promised that humans are capabile of living both in harmony and with minimal contraints on their own personal freedom.
• The internet started as a network with the minimum number of constraints so as to avoid destruction of anyone one part of the network. It has

Problems

• The primary problem is human nature; it seems that too many people in any one society are unwilling to compromise their own desires for the Common Good of society.
• Conformity to social norms has always been a prerequisite of comity of society. Since the enlightened think offing the mid 1800's, like John Stuart Mill, and Nietzsche, the emphasis of human empowerment and eclipsed the emphasis of Common Good. Thus, Utopias have been displaced in literature with the Dystopias in books by William Gibson and many others.
• In his book "Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation Andrew Marantz informs us that a significant number of the technical visionaries that founded financially successful companies based on the Web worked earnestly at world domination to enable the utopias of their dreams where everyone was brought closer together by disintermediation of any intervening organization that would censor anyone's thoughts. This would make the world a better place. There very success was the production of tools that had the impact of reducing Friction, as they desired, but the thoughts communicated have evolved into the worst expressions of human sadism and pedophilia.
• The Front-Page Headline of the New York Times screams out that "Child Sex Abusers Elude Flimsy Digital Safeguards" We are told of horrific child sex abuse videos that continue to circulate in spite of the real harm that are caused to the victims. It seems that pictures are forever, at least those that appeal to our prurient interests.
• In keeping with the principles of anarchy that continue to pervade the web, we are told that we can have pseudonyms that protect our privacy, and yet still allow us to express Verified Information about ourselves. The exposure of the fiction in the ability to express our attributes and behaviors without exposing our identities has not stopped partisans of Decentralized Identifiers based on Blockchain from continued repetition of this utter nonsense.