I just listened to a conversation with Mr. Bregman, and as he explained the premise for his book I was struck: times like these are exactly when the seeds for utopian thinking are in the most fertile soil. The book itself is not likely my cup of tea, but I am impressed by this man’s effort to bring us this, now.

Cory Doctorow’s essay, over at Wired, is a perfect read to continue the thoughts on choices we make related to utopia versus dystopia:

…The difference between utopia and dystopia isn’t how well everything runs. It’s about what happens when everything fails. Here in the nonfictional, disastrous world, we’re about to find out which one we live in.

Since Thomas More, utopian projects have focused on describing the perfect state and mapping the route to it. But that’s not an ideology, that’s a daydream. The most perfect society will exist in an imperfect universe, one where the second law of thermodynamics means that everything needs constant winding up and fixing and adjusting.

Even if your utopia has tight-as-hell service routines, it’s at risk of being smashed by less-well-maintained hazards: passing aster­oids, feckless neighboring states, mutating pathogens. If your utopia works well in theory but degenerates into an orgy of cannibalistic violence the first time the lights go out, it is not actually a utopia.

I took inspiration from some of science fiction’s most daring utopias. In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge—easily the most uplifting book in my collection—a seemingly petty squabble over zoning for an office park is a microcosm for all the challenges that go into creating and maintaining a peaceful, cooperative society. Ada Palmer’s 2016 fiction debut, Too Like the Lightning, is a utopia only a historian could have written: a multi­polar, authoritarian society where the quality of life is assured by a mix of rigid social convention, high tech federalism, and something almost like feudalism.

The great problem in Walkaway (as in those novels) isn’t the exogenous shocks but rather humanity itself. It’s the challenge of getting walkaways—the 99 percent who’ve taken their leave of society and thrive by cleverly harvesting its exhaust stream—to help one another despite the prepper instincts that whisper, “The disaster will only spare so many of its victims, so you’d better save space on any handy lifeboats, just in case you get a chance to rescue one of your own.” That whispering voice is the background hum of a society where my gain is your loss and everything I have is something you don’t—a world where material abundance is perverted by ungainly and unstable wealth distribution, so everyone has to worry about coming up short.

(Recall that half the seats on many of the Titanic’s lifeboats were empty. Some toxic combination of panic and unco­operativeness drove those who made it to safety to leave those benches half-filled, even as more than 1,500 passen­gers drowned around them.)

Here’s how you can recognize a dystopia: It’s a science fiction story in which disaster is followed by brutal, mindless violence. Here’s how you make a dystopia: Convince people that when disaster strikes, their neighbors are their enemies, not their mutual saviors and responsibilities…

Read the whole essay here.