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kleinbl00  ·  3236 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is the Internet a failed utopia?

"Utopianism" is indeed a powerful argument. I think it was b_b who pointed out that Moore's Utopia was far more of a thought experiment/social satire than it was a goal (although Marx and others didn't get the joke). It certainly didn't mean "place where everything is perfect." Nonetheless, that's what it's come to mean.

Rhetorically, throwing "utopia" out there is akin to saying "would you like things to be perfect?" which is low-hanging fruit at best. Calling the Internet a "failed utopia" argues that there was an attempt at perfection that failed, though, which is false by inspection.

Engineers are builders of tools. Petroski makes a compelling argument that necessity isn't the mother of invention, luxury is; when you're under the gun you do what works but when you've got the time to contemplate efficiencies and improvements you make incremental progress. Nobody invented the fork because they were starving and couldn't eat, for example; they invented the fork because eating with knives was functional but ungainly.

The Internet is pretty obviously a giant ad-hoc assemblage of incremental improvements. Almost none of it was idealistically planned; the whole thing is a big fat unwieldy bundle of utilitarianism. That's pretty much the polar opposite of utopian regardless of how one specifically chooses to define the term.