Where did Utopia come from?

Many self-described Utopians I know come from something that might be called the LessWrong Diaspora or the rationalist-adjacent culture. These two groups in turn come from a specific chunk of the Bay-Area Rationalism culture, which has its roots in earlier and contemporary cultures. But do these cultures seem like something that would become Utopian?

First, let’s lay out what’s known of the history of the Hives.

Masons

Sometime after the Church War, the first Emperor revealed themself and claimed all pre-Empire Masons as part of the Masonic Empire. The first Emperor's efforts formed the Empire known today.

Cousins

Before or during the Church War, the various international aid organizations operating as a loose coalition were forged into something akin to the Cousins of 2454.

Gordian

Gordian started out as the transit country that cut the metaphorical knot of geography. I assume it grew out of private transit operators like Hyperloop, Lyft, Uber, and SpaceX. After the Church War, Thomas Carlyle left the running of Gordian to Brill's Institute, which has held the Hive ever since.

Greenpeace Mitsubishi

21st-century readers will be familiar with the environmental activism organization Greenpeace. It acquired vast tracts of wilderness and parkland, and leverated this land-ownership when it merged with the landholding Mitsubishi Hive in 2390. (TWTB ch. 10.)

The European Union

During the Church War, the King of Spain led the EU in a transformation from a metanation of nations into a Hive which anyone could join at will. The EU still holds much of Europe; what lands and enclaves it holds outside of its 21st-Century bounds are yet to be known.

Humanists

The 21st-Century Olympics grew into the Olympic Hive, and merged with Hollywood and One Big Party to form the Humanists. Less certain is where One Big Party came from.

Romanova

Probably formed during the Church War, the Romanovan Alliance as it is called in 2454 is the clearinghouse and inter-Hive treaty organization. This is the clearest candidate for the One World Government of 2454, as it governs everything save the Reservations.

The Utopian Hive isn’t mentioned in Mycroft’s histories of the pre-Church-War period, the Church War itself, or even really in the interwar period before the events of the transformation of 2454. Utopia, in Mycroft’s histories, simply exists.

Where might Utopia have come from?

Utopia celebrates some values that other Hives hold. Some, like the aid missions and disaster-response initiatives, overlap clearly with the Cousins’ charitable progenitors. But there are other values that seem uniquely Utopian. I’ll build upon Julia Galef’s Map of Bay Area Memespace in this chart, in a way that will hopefully make sense.

Julia Galef’s map identifies the following memes:

• Distrust of authority
• Respect people for what they create, not for their age or educational prestige
• Information should be free
• Expect free market to effectively measure and create value
• Think big, be ambitious
• Try things, iterate, learn from the real world
• Life-hacking
• Heuristics and biases research
• Utilitarianism
• Bayesian epistemology
• Focus on optimization
• Attempt to do forecasting
• Focus on meaning and purpose within a secular worldview
• View of technology as the main determinant of humanity’s future welfare
• Focus on improving human nature
• Focus on personal development
• Exploration and de-stigmatization of non-traditional lifestyles
• With Cleverness, we can do better than establishment institutions
• Moore’s Law
• Alternative spiritualities

Let’s throw that into a tangled, interactive, reader-manipulable network chart:

But now let’s go one step further: dissociate those memes from the present-day cultures they influence, and instead tie them to Hives that implement them.

I’ll also add in these memes and cultures:

• Social pressure to give back, a meme that Julia Galet identifies as common to many aspects of Bay Area cultures.
• Aid others’ plausible deniability, from the Tor/dark-web cultures, because what is a Utopian’s coat but a disguise for its contents?
• The self can be quantified, from the Bay-Area Quantified Self culture, because what do Brillists do better?
• Alternative approaches to wellness, converting that community to a meme, because I’ve removed its subcultures from the graph.
• AI safety, from the Rationalist culture, because of U-beasts.
• Anti-Deathism, from Transhumanism.
• Commercial Space as a subculture of Startup Culture, because I wouldn’t want to leave out the Moon Bus.
• Set-sets, as a distinct culture.
• The Hive System itself, as it encourages certain cultural practices among all Hives.
• The Romanovan Alliance, because its offices host a culture distinct from any Hive.

Cultures from the Bay Area network that I dropped from the following 2454 map include:

• Kink culture: Not discussed in Terra Ignota outside of the poly-Hive institution owned by Madame F____.
• LGBTQ culture: With the insidious gender banned, these cultures seem obsolete.
• Organic/locavore, paleo, and veganism: All Hives have access to kitchen trees and meat printers, so these cultures seem obsolete?
• Yoga and meditation, along with their parent meme of “alternative spiritualities” and its parent “New Age culture”: With religion’s dangers pushed out of public life, these cultures would have died or been relegated to Reservations, out of the daily life in 2454. They may continue under the watchful eye of sensayers, but that’s not addressed by Mycroft.
• Alt-wellness: this culture isn’t discussed in any part of Terra Ignota that I can recall.

This map also drops connections from memes to cultures not identified in 2454, for simplicity of drawing arrows.

Ada Palmer, author of Terra Ignota, has often said that Utopia is basically the inheritor of the science-fiction and fantasy fandoms. But I think it’s more than just that. Poke around the graph above and you’ll see that Utopia inherits memes from cultures as broad as computer science, the counterculture of the 1960s-1970s, startups including commercial rocketry, hackers, rationalists and Effective Altruists, transhumanists and the dark-web crowds.

Why do I select these cultures from the Bay Area network, and not other cultures? It’s because of the memes they propagate and centralize.

It’s easy to point to bash’es and Campuses, and say that all Hives are complicit in the “exploration and de-stigmatization of non-traditional lifestyles,” but Utopia stands out among the hives in how distinct their lifestyles are from other Hives. Utopia is a Hive entirely composed of vokers, vocateurs who find their calling and call it back. They dedicate their lives to The Great Project, to beating back Death. Permissiveness regarding non-traditional lifestyles came from the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but oh, what a strange culture these Utopians are to their contemporaries!

The goal of defeating Death is big. Ambitious. That ideas of such scope are seriously considered may be attributed to Startup Culture, where any lone developer with resources plots to change the world, but the anti-Deathism comes from transhumanism, and Utopia’s technological approach to it definitely finds roots in Hacker Culture’s “view of technology as the main determinant of humanity's future welfare.” The iterative approach to solving the problems of Humanity is from Startup culture, but the focus on optimizing these things comes from compsci. The Six-Hive Transit System operated by the Humanists iterates and optimizes, but not too far. Utopia will optimize a thing until it is done.

But let’s consider the approach that Utopia takes in its interaction with other Hives. Every Utopian wears a long, hooded coat. Within the coat may lurk many things: shields, weapons, Swisssnakes, Saladin. The outsides of of a Utopian’s coat shows to passers-by the Utopian’s “nowhere,” a personal artistic interpretation of reality, given freely to all to see. Information wants to be free. But Utopia also enforces a rule that seems to oppose the freedom of information: if you kill a Utopian, you are subject to modo mundo, where you are cut off from all fiction. I’m not sure where such a rule might have come from. Any suggestions?

I bring up the idea of plausible deniability as a Utopian trait because of how they interact with other Hives. Plausible deniability in my graph comes from the Tor/dark-web culture, where if you do things right, people can’t point fingers at you for breaking the law or the taboo. Tor provides a way of routing packets such that it’s impossible very hard to say where the traffic originated. It’s useful for techno-libertarians, and it’s useful for the Intelligence Community that originally designed and developed The Onion Router. When you look at a Utopian, because of the ubiquitous Utopian coat and visor, the untrained eye sees an instance of Utopia, not a particular Utopian. The visor provides augmented reality that allows Utopians to represent each other and their Hive, and the coat can be literally used as active camouflage to hide its wearer. To point fingers at a Utopian is to point fingers at the Hive, not the single Utopian. Unknowingly, Utopia provides a guise for Saladin, but knowingly the Hive provides a uniform abstraction that cloaks all instances. Members of no other Hive can shed their individuality as quickly as a Utopian’s coat can flash to static or to invisibility.

Returning to the Intelligence Community for a moment: Utopia owns space. Or at the very least, no one else is mentioned by Mycroft as being meaningfully present in Space. When the War is announced in 2454, Utopia is the Hive who gives the others the tools for spying on each other and for finding Harbingers. Utopia had the capabilities. Utopia is the one who knew where the Harbingers and Harbinger-adepts were. Utopia, alone among the Hives, appears to be acting as overwatch.

And that brings us to the long view: Utopia is attempting to forecast the future. Perhaps more so than any other Hive, and more so than Romanova. The Mardi bash’ was not Utopian, but their calculations predicted something that Utopia was long working for: Humanity becoming a multiplanetary species, and the Hives on Earth losing relevance. The Romanovan Censor predicted these numbers, as did Mycroft who studied with both the Censor and the Mardis, but Utopia was working towards that goal long before anyone else predicted it was possible, or achievable.

There are two other things I’d like to touch on, which come respectively from the Human Potential Movement and hacker culture: a focus on improving human nature and . I'm not sure how they apply to Utopia, but I'm pretty sure they fit?

Memetic Overlaps

Where does Utopia overlap with other hives?

Cousins

A social pressure to give back.

Focus on improving human nature.

Gordian

Lifehacking.

Blacklaws

With cleverness, we can do better than establishment institutions.

Romanova

Forecasting the future and the present.

Shared ancestor cultures

What cultures have memes that have an ancestor culture that provided a meme to Utopian culture?

Cousins

Human Potential Movement

Gordian

Hacker Culture

Human Potential Movement

Humanists

Human Potential Movement

Hacker Culture

Blacklaws

Hacker Culture

Libertarians

Romanova

Forecasting the future and the present.

Set-sets

Computer scientists