Holden K's been writing a great series exploring why depictions of non-ironic utopias are so rare / unappealing.
I really love this suggestion in his latest post—that you can get a feel for a "moderate" utopia thru media centered on sports or performing arts.
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Earnest depictions of utopias often seem dreary because everything's too perfect—no telos!—but of course in these shows struggle for material scarcity is broadly replaced by struggle for creative expression, excellence, actualization, etc. Quite a beautiful vision, in some sense!
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(Of course, in practice much of the conflict and struggle in these shows is "really" about material scarcity—the paucity of scholarships, the practical zero-sum-ness of being an athlete or musician in the world, etc. But I can subtract that away and still get an intuition…)
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Would a post-scarcity world also reduce everyday inter-personal conflict? Because jealousy and anger could be downstream from other factors that are eliminated.
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Yes, I think so. I think the petty conflict which often dominates these shows would be supplanted to some degree by "competition with oneself" for higher creative expression.
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This reminds me of "Too Like The Lightning" in the #terraignota series. One of the governments (the Humanists) resulted from the transportation & insurance systems of Olympics & concerts. The novels showed a post-scarcity utopia collapse into civil war. You'd like it.
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