h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello Phil

fish and chips, and a couple of bottles of Newky Brown - all here for you. The condiments are on the bar - and yes there's vinegar and tartar. Just let me know as soon as you need more.

You can smoke here - there's a few people sparked up already. Thankfully in Utopia cigs are entirely harmless, and have 'smart-smoke' that drifts cleverly out of the window.

Please make yourself comfortable.

Jen

Hi Phil - nice to have you here

Hello, Phil - don't be too quiet, OK!

Happy, I like the Cyberpunks site. The continued development of internet technology is an important part of achieving utopia or something close to it. I like that article about molecular computers! I'll be talking about technology, its promises and its problems over here. But not now.

I've been a bit busy the last few days, but I promise that this coming week I'll be posting a few interesting thingies on the noticeboard!

Hello. I've come to snigger and be cynical. But I can't be bothered to read the backlog, so if you could fill me in I'd be most appretiative.

~Orrders more coffe~
Those that can be bothered
to read the backlog are
generaly eithr people with
nothing to say or people who
have herd it all before or
are you just v.lasy if it
is the latter (I suspect it is)
I dont blame you I tryed to read
as much of the back log as I could
but amit i quick scaned half of it
have a read of posting 28 on the notice bord
posted up by
The Unmentionable Marauding Pillowcase
I think it say a lot.

I really hope that wasn't a poem

hello all

for those new people, the utopia cafebar is a place to eat and drink, and talk about redirecting the future towards utopia. The plan is to have a think about how to make the world a better place, and then take the necessary action to improve it.

In my idea of utopia, there will be less work, more fun, food and freedom for everyone, and military expenditure will be rediverted into space exploration.

what do you think?

jenny

Intresting that you mentioned Defence expenditure, have you noticed how as a percentage of GDP both the UK & US figures are somewhat higher than those of other developed nations.

Yet every one is moaning
that are army is decrepid.

(if any one thinks my posts are poems
they must be able to apresate them
on a higher level then i can?)

All this mindless optimisim gets me down. It's misplaced. And utopias are bad. Bad. Baaaad. Because they have to be mercilessly policed by happiness operatives or whatever. Have you read 'A Brave New World'?

Anyway. I didn't come to be utopian and karmic and happy. I came to mock and...and stuff.

utopias are bad.
errr..
utopias are good by
definition you
dope!

yes, utopias are really crap aren't they. Imagine everyone being happy and free, treating one another with respect, and more shagging and bouncy castles. (shagging on boucy castles?)

blimey, you are a miserable bunch. Of course, in utopia you are free to be miserable, butwhy would you want to be?

On the other hand, we can just carry on as we are in miserablilty, watching the planet collapse around us, people starving on the city streets, war and opression all over the place, stupidly long working hours in pointless occupations, ignorance, pointless production and consumption, mass idiocy and shite docu-dramas on the telly. Whoopee. more of the same for me please mister. (not)

lottsa love

Jenny

2 RIGHT

NO. Utopias are bad. Humankind being what it is, everything would go wrong. No one could be relentlessly nice and happy and karmic and shagging and all. What about ugly people. They wouldnt shag. They'd be rejected, and be unhappy. No utopia. Unless the government (you'd need one of those - there would be political ill feeling - but otherwise everyone would not do anything that needs to be done to better society, they just want to have fun) unless the government had happiness police, who went around to make sure everyone was happy and sociable and screwing around. They would have to be strict or everyone would not do as they say. Have you read 1984? Have you read A Brave New World? ~One is what a utopia would become, one is a utopia.

See,. We're all too nasty to be utopic. And you will disagree with me here. Which proves that we cannot have a utopia.

I think it all depends on how you define Utopia.
If you define it as a world of Universal Happiness then you have an imossable dream, If you define it as a world of equal opertunity then you might be on to something.

Hello, Uncle Heavy. As far as I know the word that signifies a "bad utopia" is the word "dystopia". The world of "1984" qualifies as being that. Unfortunately I haven't read "Brave New World" because somebody borrowed our copy long ago before I got a chance to read it, and never returned it. But the word "utopia" means a place where things are as good as they can be, according to my dictionary. This doesn't imply perfection unless perfection is actually achievable. It only means a society that is as CLOSE to perfection as possible. A starting point would be ANYTHING that is better than what we have now. It is silly to believe the society and the world we have now is the best one we can possibly have. So why should we not try and make it better?

Consider the idea of a "happiness police". Suppose they succeed in their intended goal. Then everbody would be happy, so why worry? And if they don't succeed - in other words if they only make people unhappy - by the goals of Utopia they would then need to be discarded because they operate against it. But anyways an utopia doesn't need a happiness police. And "happiness" as commonly understood shouldn't even be the primary goal of an utopia - at least not in my opinion. I think primary goals must include the advancement of life and knowledge and harmonic interactions. Those are concrete and valuable kinds of things and it very definitely IS possible to take better care of them than is being done at the moment. If this is done happiness would increase as a by-product.

We can discuss these things. You say "you will disagree with me here. Which proves we cannot have an utopia." Over here one thing I am going to do is to demonstrate people how much more easily conflicts can be resolved given a different way of responding to them. That means we can disagree but still have an utopia. This I am not going to prove, but instead I will demonstrate it, and I hope the others will try and do the same. What we do over here is really going to be a mini-Utopia, and our interactions here will be a model for utopian interactions.

There are interpretations of the word "Utopia" that are bad. It can suggest an impossible dream, something that is totally impractical. It can suggest a world that is kept in an unnatural condition by the use of excessive control. But there are still positive interpretations as well. And an overwhelmingly positive future for mankind is by no means excluded. It is good to know about all the negative interpretations of utopia, because then we can steer clear of them. But the positive possibilities remain open, and if we have the vision to see them we might get to them.

I believe people are not necessarily nasty. I believe society can work extremely well. I believe that a very much greater percentage of humans can be happy and fulfilled than are at this present moment. I believe our current systems of government and business and just about anything else are very, very, very much worse than they ought to (and can) be. I believe the entire setup can change for the better, and that this can and will happen quite rapidly. I can cite many reasons for these beliefs and that I will do over time in this forum. Still there is a need to convince people, not by argument, but by EXAMPLE and DEMONSTRATION. So I ask those who believe in and dream of Utopia to make their dreams visible here, so we can try and see if they're desirable or not, whether they're achievable or not. Even if they aren't achievable, if they are desirable they can act as motivational factors in the quest for a better future, whatever form it might take on in the end.

Uncle Heavy, please read posting 28 on the Noticeboard. I consider that a vision of utopia that is desirable and achievable. There might be one or two impractical bits in it, but that's minor. And that needn't be the only kind of utopia we consider. I will look for many more different visions like that one, because what is important is the general flavour, not the details. Getting hung up on details is a recipe for NOT achieving utopia. The failures of so many utopian schemes were caused by their rigidity. So we already know that any future effort must be very flexible and open.

Jenny, I have this idea: I want to open an "Utopia Wildlife Park/Garden" just outside the Cafébar. There I will try to set up an example of a beautiful, healthy, diverse, balanced and stable natural environment. I also want to present an example of humans living in harmony with nature. Anyways I have lots and lots of animals on my user page right now, and I need a place where they can roam free and where people can come and visit them. From now on I am going to add animal entries at a very rapid rate and the Edited Guide is simply not big and fast enough to accommodate all of them. What do you say?

Pillow please keep posting your stuff for peer review - I know it takes ime but it is worth the effort.

I'm sorry, Pillowcase, but I cannot agree with you. No one is naturally good. They have to force themselves, against their own selfish nature, to be good. Did you here about those experiments where people were asked to pass electric currents through other people if they did a certain thing? Well, most of the people who took the experiment would have killed their targets with huge voltage being repeatedly used. Look at the world now. No one can agree on anything. Harmless debate turns into anger which turns into fear which turns into hatred etc.

The human race is a lost cause. We have few natural morals. Even those who are enlightened, or think they are, who think theyt can or want to effect social change, even they have flashes of anger. No one is perfect. What we have now is just a balance. Not a good one, but the best of a bad job. If people could make things better, they would. But no one wants to, because they are all too selfish. I know I'm selfish and I try to combat this, but there are times when I cannot help myself.

The happiness police would be necessary just to keep order. Society would be draconian. And thank you, I do know what dystopia means.

Communism was meant as a utopia. Look what violence, selfishness and paranoia did to that...

And do read brave new world. Thast is only what a utopia could be.

"Umm. Umm, garaulph, gaump, umlk. Urp. God, I needed that fish. Newkie 3, please?

"I've been listening to some of this and, however shallow this might seem, I feel you are talking of two different things. You know you are speaking of different things yet you are still using the same word to describe them: utopia. Uncle Heavy, I don't know where you're from, but it seems you share an American viewpoint: every project begun on purpose as some sort of "utopia" has been a failure. Here in the states we're almost falling over all the failed utopias turned into national sites. Then again, that's what America was all about to a certain turn of mind up to the 1870s. Still, we have two (and probably more) that had some measure of success. The Unida Community is still functioning, although more as a unique business model than as a utopia, and, this may be a stretch, we have the Mormons, who established what was by their terms a utopia in the desert of Utah and lived on to become a formidible missionary force throughout the Americas and even the world. The Mormons have certainly got more than their share of happiness police.

"Still, I think we Americans define "utopia" as a quaint attempt to solve problems without bashing heads, ultimately destined for failure because even the best of us seem not to have found a way to solve problems without bashing heads. In the end, the problems of a utopia are political, not social. Ideally, communism was a utopian attempt, but the control assumed neccessary to ensure that utopia merged all too easily into Stalin's totalitarianism. Hitler convinced the German nation that he was attempting a utopia, defined in racist and class terms, and we all know where that led. Both Stalin and Hitler established deviant utopias that were not afriad to bash heads, and thus their political success, however long or short.

"In American history, most movements that searched for a utopia found that the extent of their political control was to award selective membership, which was a basic denial of their first premise, that they should welcome everyone.

"But I don't think Jenny or Pillow are intending the traditonal utopia. Can it not be a state of mind shared with like minded poeple who will probably never meet each other in person? All of us here live inside their nations and governments and we realize that there's not much we can do as individuals to make the world more like what we want, whatever our wants are. What makes sense to us just doesn't make sense to most people, and we're never going to get "our" way, so why not just live as we would, as we should by our lights? "

And with that he lights another smoke and nods appreciatively as Jen hands him Newkie 4.

"Oh, bye-the-bye, anyone who tries to write poetry should first learn to spell, or at least type..."