utopia
great insight from Michael and Roberto (and Astra and …):
hardt revolution law: revolution – instigating utopia every day – michael hardt
aka: equity – everyone getting a go everyday (it’s a simple message).
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david on utopia – huge.. let’s do that
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below found from following Rob’s twitter flow.. starting with this nugget:
where he’s gathered/gathering similar ..
Olafur Eliasson in 2010:
“For me, utopia is linked to the now, the moment between one second and the next. It constitutes a possibility that is actualized and converted into reality, an opening where concepts like subject and object, inside and outside, proximity and distance are tossed into the air and redefined. Our sense of orientation is challenged and the coordinates of our spaces, collective and personal, have to be renegotiated. Changeability and mobility are at the core of utopia.“
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putting the criticism and blowing off ness of utopia into perspective..
at ted2013 Lawrence about 10 min in… starts talking about skepticism and hopelessness:
10 min in –
this is what love means – the odds be damned
a republic dependent upon the people alone
14 min in – i get the skepticism.. but i don’t buy it. this is solvable.. by being citizens
15 min in – even if you think this is impossible...
imagine a dr telling me that my 6 yr old son has terminal brain cancer & there’s nothing we can do. would i do nothing..? of course not… i would do everything i could, because this is what love means. you do whatever you can.. the odds be damned. impossible is irrelevant.
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oct 2014 –Steve add a bit on utopia to Keri‘s the imaginary world of _________:
http://visitsteve.com/made/on-utopia-for-keri-smiths-the-imaginary-world-of/
pdf: http://visitsteve.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/utopia.pdf
Utopia is a combination of three greek words; Eu (good), Ou (not), and Topos (place). Utopia translated is “good not place”. It is important to remember, as a “not place,” it is impossible to arrive at utopia. The reason we imagine utopias is to provide a point on the compass that orients us on our travels. Without utopia, we’re lost – we are traveling without direction, guessing and hoping that we are moving forward. The purpose of utopia is not a destination, it is to give us direction so we can progress.
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ginormous small ness
having the bravery to change your mind (ie: reask – what is democracy, what is utopia, what matters) – every day.
microtopia ness
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more on utopia ness:
A utopia /juːˈtoʊpiə/ is a community or society possessing highly desirable or near perfect qualities. The word was coined by Sir Thomas More in Greek for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt to create an ideal society, and imagined societies portrayed in fiction. It has spawned other concepts, most prominently dystopia.
The word utopia was coined in Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean. The word comes from the Greek: οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”) and means “no place”. The English homophone eutopia, derived from the Greek εὖ (“good” or “well”) andτόπος (“place”), means “good place”. This, because of the identical pronunciation of “utopia” and “eutopia”, gives rise to a double meaning.
eudaimonia as utopia
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perhaps a reason we think the concept (of a utopian society) is so impossible.. is because we’ve never played the game with everyone. perhaps that’s the only way it will work..
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Michel’s interview – answer to #2 is about utopia:
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instigating utopia (aka: rat park) everyday.. via chasing the scream – Johann Hari
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A quote from Utopia, the novel for adults that I’m working on http://t.co/WlkLzTkpNe //cc @davidgraeber
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/588731722705010688
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a map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing.. – oscar wilde
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Céline (@krustelkram) tweeted at 3:46 AM on Mon, Aug 21, 2017:
“Utopia is not a place we will ever reach; it is a space that helps us think about where we want to go.” https://t.co/69PA9sNVI8 @theC4AA https://t.co/TWKAqOFNZO
(https://twitter.com/krustelkram/status/899568379115208704?s=03)This article explains how Thomas More’s Utopia was designed not as a plan of an ideal society, but as a prompt to stimulate the reader’s own political imagination.
Our interest in Utopia is far from naive – it is based in a serious, grounded and realistic assessment of how power works, and why change happens. We will share our theory of power with you now:
the dominant system does not dominate because most people agree with it; it dominates because we cannot imagine an alternative.
Many activists and artists operate under a different premise that the biggest problem we face is that most people do not understand The Problem
ie: vinay saying – food, energy, water as problem.. when perhaps it’s much deeper than f e & w.. maté basic needs: a & a
perhaps trust that energy to take care of f e & w et al
let’s try this.. ie: hlb via 2 convos that io dance.. as the day..[aka: not part\ial.. for (blank)’s sake…].. a nother way
To keep people down you need to apply constant pressure.
Even if capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy are doomed, it does not really matter if we cannot imagine an alternative. We believe that the job of artistic activists is to examine the present with a critical eye, but also to imagine and create a new world, and help others do the same. To conjure up Utopia or utopias.
The grandest and best-known paradox is the title itself. ‘Utopia’ is a made-up word, created by More from the Greek words ou, meaning ‘not’, and topos, meaning ‘place’. Utopia is a place, which is literally, no-place. The power of Utopia lies in its ability to be possible and impossible, real and unreal, all at the same time.
And then he takes it away by calling the whole thing No-Place. Why? More wants us to imagine our own Utopias. The problem with most Utopias, be they prophesied by holy men, imposed by political dictators, or envisioned by scientists on the pages of Popular Mechanics, is that the Utopias they propose are presented as The Answer. All the imagining and planning is done by the enlightened few and the job of the rest of us is to get used to it.
More solves this problem by refusing to allow us to believe in the possibility of his Utopia. He takes us there – lets us see it and feel it – but then reminds us that this place is just imaginary. He does not want us to simply swap our world for his alternative, so he makes his alternative impossible for us to inhabit. But it is too late for us to go home; we have been exposed to the idea of an alternative. We have been to Utopia, and once we can imagine someplace else, then we know that the world we live in today is not the only one possible. We can imagine another world.
To catch a glimpse of a different way of living and being can free us from this prison house of the imagination.
let’s model a nother way.. so that 7 bn can leap to – instigating utopia everyday..
Oftentimes protests or socially engaged art exhibits are attended as an obligation, the political equivalent of eating spinach.
spinach or rock ness
Utopia works differently. If well constructed, Utopia is something that people are attracted to
our goal was to help create a community that would organize themselves to realize their own dreams
and to re create everyday..
As the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams once wrote, ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’.
@srduncombe
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Pam Palmater: it is utopic.. but it’s not myth/legend
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from Howard Thurman’s search for common ground:
4 – the search in the prophet’s dream
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utopia’s most pronounced characteristic is a limited and contained community in which the potential of the individual as well as that of the society can be actualized
utopia ness
every element is defined in a manner that makes its presence identical w its function..in other words, utopias are custom made..
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the dream of what life could be if.. what the collective life of man would be like if it functioned in keeping w man’s high destiny
having been released from the binding stricutre of the present circumstance, they can build whole new worlds full of all that is lacking in their present experience…
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point way to a fresh possibility for mankind in the arduous struggle to actualize its own potential..
lewis mumford makes the interesting distinction between utopias that are places of refuge for the spirit and those that undertake to project a place of release as tome point in the future the former he calls utopias of escape, the latter utopias of reconstruction ‘the first leave the external world the way it is; the second seeks to change it so that one may have intercourse w it in one’s own terms. in one we build impossible castles in the air in the other we consult a surveyor and an architect and a mason and proceed to build a house which meets our essential needs; as well as houses made of stone and mortar are capable of meeting them’
utopias are rooted in the very structure of man’s conscious life.. there is a spirit that hovers over all the generations of man that rejects the contradiction of his private and social life as being either ultimate or final.. it refuses to accept the idea that life as it is being lived is meaningless..
what the utopian literary form reps in human experience is essentially the quality of hope about the human situation and about the future. i belabor this point because it is critical. it is so easy to dismiss utopias as the aberration of distorted minds or as expression of emotional instability..
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no experience, no event at an particular moment in time exhausts the meaning and the ‘intent’ of life as reflected in the way life lives itself out. this is why so very often men aren’t unwilling to scale down the horizon of their hopes, dreams, and yearnings to the level of the events of their lives.. so long as there is a conviction that a potential has not been actualized..either in the individual/society/world.. the rational necessity and possibility of a realized future must be honored..
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another kind of utopia.. plato’s republic..
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he proposes to correct present evils by projecting a state in which these evils do not appear.. moral virtue is identical w political virtue in his state..
the fundamental goal before him is the search for justice, since it seems easier to understand the meaning of justice when considering the state than when trying to separate the motives in the life of the solitary individual..
whoa.. this seems huge.. as it goes against.. ie: thurman alive law.. and has us spending our days playing defense/justice.. unless in justice.. as in fairness.. we mean equity: everyone getting a go everyday.. can see how state ness went all out of wack
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social justice, then, is defined as a condition in which every person has and does peacefully what it is his right to have and to do; he fills the place for which he is fitted..
equity ..everyone getting a go everyday .. at eudaimonia..
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once it is assumed that men are born w the basic equipment that defines their place and function in society, then each is fulfilled when this potential is realized.. from this pov even the notion of justice is derived..
already .. on each heart.. no train
if only we believed this last two statements..
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there is something exclusive about all utopias and this is ever their tragic flaw
not all of them (but that is why we haven’t yet gotten to global equity) .. ie: 3 ships
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(while describing a utopia): their main responsibility is to see that no one lives in idleness..
? that’s utopia..?
everyone is sure that he shall always be supplied so he does not have to hoard.. there is no fear of want..
except for want of still ness.. if there’s an idleness police.. no..?
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mumford: ‘to cultivate the soil rather than simply to get away w a job; to take food and drink rather than to earn money; to think and dream and invent, rath er than to increase one’s reputation; in short, to grasp the living reality and spurn the shadow. this is the substance of the utopian way of life. in the is utopia of the new world, every man has the opportunity to be a man because no one ahs the opportunity to be a monster
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CityLab (@CityLab) tweeted at 5:30 AM – 6 Nov 2019 :
“Despite science fiction’s failure at imagining a future worth living for, the city remains the starting point and the contested terrain of today’s utopia,” writes @trekonomics. https://t.co/QQ963YJWrg (http://twitter.com/CityLab/status/1192056712485687296?s=17)Today’s utopias draw from that wellspring, but with new materials and new buzzwords. They are surface utopias. You encounter them in the glossy renderings of architectural competitions, smart and radiant cities on paper, sustainable business districts built on reclaimed polders, floating neighborhoods, orbiting space habitats, settlements on Mars or the Moon.
All these share the same motif. They aim to provide the comforts and amenities of modern life but under extreme conditions. They are tabula rasa cities built on sand—the sand dredged and hauled from the bottom of the sea, or the sand of the burning deserts. They follow Dubai’s model of detached, pelagic luxury chimeras, dug out from seemingly nowhere in the most inhospitable of locales, by the combined miracle of financial leverage and the marshaling of cheap migrant labor.
In intent, these are non-cities, nowhere-cities—the original meaning of utopia—without any of the roots, any of the challenges, or any of the rewards of actual cities. They are climate-controlled and Instagram-ready. They are safe and they are clean. They could be located on another planet, on Mars even, because in a way they are, ringed and covered by invisible and yet very tangible protective domes. They erase all the frictions, the institutions and the worldly powers that will them into existence.
Despite science fiction’s failure at imagining a future worth living for, the city remains the starting point and the contested terrain of today’s utopia.
ie: cure ios city – instigating utopia everyday
Copenhagen’s anarchist commune, Freetown Christiania, offers a possible alternative. It started out as a squat in the early 1970s, when the so-called “Provos”—countercultural provocateurs—occupied vacant military barracks. It quickly became a focal point for the local art scene, attracting freaks and hippies eager to experiment with new ways of urban life.
This was not so much adaptive reuse as creative reuse. Christiania banned cars and built its own school, bakery, and cafes. Although it had to contend with some of the blight and difficulties of modernity (such as drug trafficking and tourism), it remained a self-governing, intentional community until the 2000s, when it was gradually “normalized” under Danish law. It has had a lasting and broad influence. Christianian ideals of low-impact sustainability and playful, recycled urban spaces—the “slow city,” as in “slow food”—are now mainstream.
In Freetown Christiania, at least for a few decades, utopia was not a place or a glossy plan but an everyday, egalitarian praxis. It was free from the yoke of traditional land and building ownership: The old barracks were abandoned public infrastructure, a disused, liminal space, a terrain vague as we call it in French..t
The terrain vague delineates urban spaces that have been emptied not so much of people but of their original, intended function and semantic weight. It is made up of what has been rendered obsolete. Abandoned, it can thus can be reinvented and reinvested with new meaning. .t.. The terrain vague is up for grabs, up for recycling. Urban growth and social dislocations constantly generate new terrains vagues, almost like skin peeling off.
I believe that the terrain vague is the point of departure for today’s utopia, both as a work of imagination and as a practical, lived, political process, as a deliberation. The experiment of Christiania demonstrated that it is where the future is invented, much more surely than in the autocratic, climate-controlled towers of surface utopias. Any prologue to a re-enchantment of the future requires that we re-occupy and re-adapt disused spaces—both the concrete spaces and the imaginary, intellectual ones.
iwaan baan et al
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Chris Harris (@hellokozmo) tweeted at 5:04 AM – 14 Nov 2019 :
What’s in your Utopia? Anything missing here?
( co authored with @cdlariviere and @aaron_gillett inspired by the #SciFiEconomicsLab ) https://t.co/LG2C49BiEI(http://twitter.com/hellokozmo/status/1194949096299065346?s=17)
simplicity..
all the words leave us with not enough space to instigate utopia everyday
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@davidgraeber : I think this is a great moment for a reinvention of utopianism. The lesson I think we’ve learned about utopianism is not that utopianism is bad; it’s that when you just have one utopia it’s bad. No, what we need is lots & lots of utopias. The more the merrier!
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Original Tweet:https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1358785269986709513
‘revolution: instigating utopia everyday’ – Michael Hardt
let’s listen for/to that
imagine if we just focused on listening to the itch-in-8b-souls.. first thing.. everyday.. and used that data to augment our interconnectedness..
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from david graeber in freedom and anarchy:
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David: The line I always use is that I’m not interested in coming up with an economic model for how exactly we would distribute goods and services in a free society, but I am interested in coming up with something of the process for how we could actually make that decision collectively.
It’s not so much a matter of how much detail, but where should we put the detail. *So I’ve been concentrating on thinking of the processes of decision-making because that kind of has to come first. We could come up with different utopias. **All the criticisms of utopianism are entirely premised on there just being one … Multiple utopias are not a problem. But how to integrate these multiple utopias is another matter..t
*yeah.. i don’t know.. to me.. not about dm.. about curiosity over decision making
**huge.. like this..
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
hardt revolution law: revolution – instigating utopia everyday – michael hardt
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be you. 