<p>Kristen Ghodsee, author of “Everyday Utopia,” on what we can learn from experiments in alternative ways of organizing private life.</p>
ROBINSON: …But there’s what is sometimes called the “techno-utopianism” of Silicon Valley, which often you posit as totally unrealistic—we’re going to merge with machines and upload our consciousness and do things we don’t know how to do.
But these other things you cover, which we do know how to do, are utopian, crazy, and unrealistic.
GHODSEE: Exactly. It’s like the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, these people out in Silicon Valley who are basically trying to be immortal.
If you’re talking about universal health care, that’s totally utopian, but immortality is totally feasible. It’s a really weird double standard that tech bros and billionaires and Saudi princes get to dream up cities in the desert or like this new plan for a utopian city in Solano County in Northern California, but the rest of us are just going to be stuck with a housing crisis and homelessness. Why can’t ordinary people dream in a way that imagines a better future, rather than just constantly ceding this territory of blue sky thinking to the tech bros and the billionaires and the Saudi princes who have the means, at least theoretically, to realize those dreams?
