Technological Utopians
of the World, Unite!

by Rean Rhyne

No arguing with that. Not much anyway.

In the two centuries of its growing hegemony, the United States, good idealist that it is (or tries to be), has repeatedly reminded (well, all right, sometimes the reminding slops over into outright browbeating) the world that you gotta have human rights before you can expect a lot of American foreign aid.

A lot of arguing with that, but for now let's just say that usually, well, sometimes, America means well. Sort of.

Such examples can be multiplied almost endlessly, drawing on the beliefs of this ism or that. Human beings love to create ideologies and then announce to the world that they’ve found the solution to all the world’s woes. Some are political, some religious, some artistic, some philosophical.

Applied, some of these systems work well for a short time, some are disastrous, and some, with makeshift modifications, go one working shakily for quite a while.

Bedrock beneath and behind them all is always the gut reality that Brecht was talking about. Fill the stomachs first and then you can worry about fine-tuning civilization.

Of course, the way things have worked out—and again this is so typical of human beings—we’ve tried to do everything all at the same time: fill the stomachs, create a rule of law not men to ensure freedom, make a lot of great art, and so on. Trying to do it all, we do none of it really well, at least not for long.

You get a little freedom going and pretty soon greed sets in and the successfully greedy start yapping for more "freedom" so they can be more successfully greedy.

You get a little art going and pretty soon here come the successfully frightened warning that such free thinking is undermining the stability of their flock and could we please have just a little censorship.

Result: the on-going ever-changing-but-always-the-same carnival we call human history with its baffling mix of creativity and carnage.

Where, then, lies hope?

Are we doomed to more centuries like the twentieth, with its unprecedented efflorescence of scientific, technological, and artistic creativity AND its 75 Years’ War (1914-1989), its 200,000,000 war dead?

At the risk of sounding like a flack for the world’s Silicon Valleys (not to mention Wired Magazine, slash.com, and—God forbid—Microsoft itself), I have to say that I see most hope in technology.

We gotta get those billions of stomachs filled and keep them filled. Only then can we hope for the kind of long-term, adequately affluent stability in which the whole range of human creativity can flourish.

At the moment we’re living in this "free market" dream which, while it does fill some stomachs mainly gives the successfully greedy a good chance to become a lot greedier, which is basically what the whole globalization argument comes down to.

Simplifying like crazy, the problem continues to be that there’s still not enough stuff to go around. Not enough food, not enough shelter, not enough education, not enough health care (and certainly not enough Diet Dr Pepper, but that’s just a minor detail that we don’t need to go into here).

Not enough stuff. And those in control of producing and distributing the stuff there is are about as trustworthy as a fox guarding the henhouse.

Solution? More stuff, of course. A lot more stuff. More stuff than that world has ever dreamed of. And cheaper too.

And where’s that stuff gonna come from?

Surely by now we know it’s not coming from the philanthropic largesse of billionaire individuals, or multi-billionaire corporations, or trillionaire national economies.

Haven’t we learned that the old "trickle-down" effect is just that, a true and very very tiny TRICKLE?

The only place the huge amount of stuff we need to become a better race and to make the foundation for a better planet is, yes, technology. We gotta keep those patents coming, those breakthroughs into undreamt-of technological productivity. Only then can we hope to have a firm foundation, as Brecht saw, on which we can begin to build better places for children—and adults.

Not that we can, or can afford to, throw out baby, bathwater, rubber duckies and all. Politics, art, religion, philosophy, all those complex behaviors that make up culture turn out to be necessary, critically essential... but not sufficient.

In one of his late novels, Imperial Earth, Arthur C. Clarke imagines a world where all basic needs are at last met. Viewed from here, it seems pretty radical. For example, he suggests that a couple of centuries from now technology has enabled us to produce and more or less fairly distribute enough stuff so that politics as we know it is a thing of the primitive past.

On Clarke’s future earth, there is of course a government but, because there’s now enough stuff, government itself has become purely a MANAGEMENT problem. No more vicious political in-fighting about how to spread inadequate stuff around. The president of that earth, the global CEO if you will, is someone with excellent management skills, NOT a demagogue who reads fiery, biased rhetoric off 3 x 5 cards supplied by ignorant if enthusiastic lackeys.