045: Utopia With Comrades: Part I

The Future Is A Mixtape

For this special episode, Matt & Jesse venture out of their self-inclosed Build-A-Bear tent thanks to the gracious prodding of their new friend and comrade, Pearson, host of the always excellent Coffee with Comrades podcast, in order to imagine alternatives and discuss the theory of “Anti-Anti-Utopia.” While each of us who’ve seen a Hollywood summer blockbuster, perused Netflix, or owned a dog-eared copy of a Hunger Games novel have sipped from the bitter cup of our Terminal Dystopia Syndrome, few have dared to dream of utopia. As something paradoxically both dangerous and trivial to the tyrants and influencers who police the status quo, utopia remains largely a pejorative signifier for naive and unrealistic visions of the future. Simply by existing as a concept, utopia’s most rude offense is the failure to acquiesce to the myths of our doomed fate built long-ago into the so-called “laws of human nature.” In the era of capitalist realism, the prescribed common sense drives a relentless anti-utopianism, a dangerous ideology that requires a countering through anti-anti-utopianism. So WTF is “Anti-Anti-Utopia” anyways? Coined recently by Kim Stanley Robinson in an essay entitled “Dystopias Now,” the science fiction writer starts by saying, haltingly: “The end of world is over. Now the real work begins.” What would it look like to admit that the world as we know (or knew) it is beyond repair, and that living through the Capitalocene means that we will have to build a better world from within an active apocalypse? In the first half of this two-part conversation, we discuss these terms – Utopia, Dystopia, Anti-Utopia, and Anti-Anti-Utopia – four corners of a semiotic square, a balance of contradictions and counter-forces that together light the way for new beginnings. So whereas Star Trek may have illustrated a far-off future of post-scarcity, it failed to imagine the contours of revolutionary change that would secure – for humanity – a utopia lovingly wrought on Earth. Star Trek instead scripted and drifted toward new but familiar conflicts outside of us, amongst the stars. So perhaps, to boldly go where Utopia might be found, an Anti-Anti-Utopianism is the voyage we must now chart for ourselves, together, here on this fragile planet. Trapped under the dystopian rubble of empire, we deserve all the light that glimmers above us, and so we must reach for it.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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