despair is an act of intellectual arrogance. If you get really confused it can be very healthy because if you become despairing, you falsely imagine you have everything figured out. And in fact none of us do.
It’s an inspiring rant.
Quick thoughts: Steve wants people to think about Utopia as a direction, a spectrum, not as a permanent destination, and Bruce wants us to rethink our fear of confusion. Both want us to admit that we don’t have the answers, but it’s not a reason to despair. Both see uncertainty as a compass for Eutopias (positiv Utopias).
Utopia as a direction is possible, if based on constant change.
Before I stumbled up on Bruce Sterling today, that was the thought I was trying to write a blog post about. I don’t think I will finish it today.
Since this blog is about sharing thoughts on Utopia, but also me, trying to understand what Utopia means for my life. I decided to start posting links as I encounter them, even if I am not ready to write about them yet. They are resources to come back to. Should be helpful to have them all in one space trying to explore how they might fit together.
Here are two more recommended readings, I came across today while thinking about Utopia:
This was the first time I read about the “Overton window” (Bruce mentions):
I argue that Trump’s rise is a sign of media’s increasing weakness in setting the terms of discussion. In the NYT: https://t.co/IpYGwwoAss
It’s not easy to find people willing to discuss utopian ideas. My experience is that the reaction is often a sarcastic little giggle as if one had asked a rhetoric question to which the answer obviously is: no. Or sometimes I get a “are you serious” frown, followed by a warning: Utopia never led to anything good!
Not so often, I am lucky though and meet somebody, who hears Utopia and says: yes, let’s think about that! When it happens it’s always great fun. Go try dreaming yourself silly with someone. Crazy solutions for small problems are not hard to come up and have fun with. Try starting with small things that annoy you everyday. Like why can’t my cat make coffee, put it on a drinks trolley and roll it right next to my bed, wearing a tiny nurse uniform? (My girlfriend came up with that one).
Expressing imagined solutions, especially if they are completely silly and ridiculous, just feels good and makes me laugh.
That was 15 years ago, and as they created Raum für Projektion those two let me become part of the fun. Werbung für Ideen (commercials for a concept) was the first cycle of projections and it featured me showing my drawings publicly, for the first time ever! Well, not really, the first time was a cd cover for J Neo Marvin, but this was different, because I was there, and experienced peoples reactions to it. Very exciting.
(to get a taste of how exciting that was for me, take a look at some pics from the finisage. That day also happened to be my 25th birthday, so no surprise that’s me on the floor.)
But the most fun was playing how to escalate ideas. Why not? And what if? Many projects followed, in some the two casted me as an actor in front of the camera, another thing I had never done before. We even dreamt up a story for a whole movie together, and in the process I ended up learning animation and making that movie. Later animation somehow became what I do for a living now. A life I would have never imagined before meeting them. They made me want to do things, that were so crazy, that somehow suddenly they seemed worth a try.
So when I saw Steve’s talk, I realized that the biggest gift my friends gave me, was not, as I thought before, that Ursula and Georg helped me fall love with learning. That they helped me find the confidence and courage to become, what the media now calls, a self directed learner. Someone, who not only dreams of doing something, but tries to achieve those dreams learning to use the resources one can find or make work somehow.
The biggest gift was learning that naive questions are indeed important questions.
I also realized how much I missed the feeling of freedom that lies in asking them, and that these questions are best, if one explores them together with others. I want to do those things again. Things about Utopia. But I am not exactly sure yet what and how. I hope that sharing my thoughts and links about it here, will help me figure that out.
Utopian Dreaming 