to the many ways that artists and intellectuals have picked apart the modern behemoth since the 19th century, and Protopia to what I call the metamodern synthesis (of modern and postmodern thinking) - and thus to the cultural currents that are growing in today’s digitized world.
to the growth of rationalism since the fifteenth century, Eutopia to the postmodern critique thereof, i.e. Utopia: Modern // Eutopia: Postmodern // Protopia: Metamodern.Ĭonceptually, we can connect Utopia to the “modern project”, i.e. Simply stated, one could say that a Protopian society is one that has the capacity to become incrementally better as a result of the freedom of its members. It’s a more carefully stated form of a dream of societal transformation: It doesn’t say that “everything will be good for everyone” it focuses not on the state-of-things-at-a-given-moment, but on the possibility - the shared capacity - to move in mutually desirable directions.
#Define utopia free#
A Protopian society, then, is one where people are free from such gridlocks and can thus work actively to improve life. In Dystopia, people are stuck in some kind of recurring pattern of suffering (like George Orwell’s “foot trampling a human face - for ever”, as in 1984). “Protopia” is another recent term, coined by futurist Kevin Kelly and it is defined as the opposite of a “Dystopia”. Arguably, it suffers from similar problems as Utopia: it’s ultimately impossible, it’s static, and what you deem as “good” I might find “bad”. “Eutopia” (if you read this article out loud to your kids, you’ll have to say “utopia-with-an-E” every time you pronounce it) is an increasingly popular neologism that seeks to replace Utopia it means “the good place” (there’s even a Netflix comedy show with philosophical themes titled The Good Place, which arguably reflects this shift in our ways of dreaming up better worlds). tunnel-visioned according to a scheme of good and evil (today’s grim capitalism, tomorrow’s humane socialism today’s cold, extractive materialism, tomorrow’s ecological coziness…) It’s ideological in the negative sense of the word, i.e. As such, there is the “bad” now and the “good” future - and the path from darkness into light.
As nebulous and dreamy as Utopia might seem, it always implies a certain attained perfection of society. “Utopia” means “nowhere” and denotes a static state of cultural and political perfection: society when it has become as good as it possibly can get. And strangely enough, Protopia is much closer to our reality than we think. But the journey continues farther afield - into what we may call Protopia. Our first stop on this journey of the mind we can call Eutopia. What, then, can be “better than Utopia?” It turns out that vast landscapes do indeed open up to us if we allow ourselves to ask that question. Or rather, we may need a term that gathers bold dreamers, thinkers, and doers into an energized force for the necessary and timely transformation of societies around the world - but still avoids the pitfalls of 20th-century utopianism. Is it appropriate to be a Utopian these days?
“Protopia constitutes what I hold to be the best term for the massive set of interlinked projects of activists, thinkers, and practitioners around the world who seek to contribute to the necessary and desirable transformations of societies around the world.” Intro: Utopia, Eutopia, and Protopia If you want to know the difference and discover what’s behind the hype, and if you want to know how we may finally manage to venture beyond the modern mirage of utopia, this Hanzi article is for you.
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