Often utopias are broad visions of society, planed on paper with little regard for how to transition into the new world. This can be good for inspiration, but to build stuff I prefer what I call a "modular utopia" - small individual measures that are easy to implement, work well and have little to no known downsides. This is similar to the idea of real utopias.

A prime example is approval voting. In public elections, instead of voting for only one candidate, you are allowed to vote for multiple candidates. It works well in theory and has been tested in the cities of St. Louis and Fargo. There is practically no cost in implementing it. Compared to plurality voting ("choose one voting") there are only upsides in using approval. The only reason it isn't more wide spread is, just that it is new and people are suspicious of new ideas.

Each measure should be:

• simple and modular
• an unambiguous improvement
• successfully tested in the real world
• cost efficient (there are many nice things we could do if we had infinite money)
• have long term effects (the "teaching a man to fish and not just give him a fish" thing)

My current list includes:

• approval voting
• proportional representation (e.g. open lists)
• land value tax
• taxing externalities
• distributing the the tax on externalities back to the people as citizens dividend
• just about everything not just bikes says
• sortition (although I think there is room for improvement of the format)
• legalizing the possession of weed and psychedelics

I'm writing this here because I am looking for similar ideas. Ideally one could compile them together in one list and show how they work together to produce a better society. Each individual measure may seem like a small step, but when each measure is an obvious improvement then it will be easy for people to follow along. It also doesn't depend on all measure being adapted, that's why it is modular. As the improvements compound we will be able to create a real utopian society, but also have a practical path in reaching it.

Which ideas am I missing?

In a resource based utopia where money doesnt exist and ai is able to do majority of jobs, what would be some jobs that people would be most likely to volunteer for and enjoy doing?

What preset selected works would be recommended for learning more about Utopia and Utopian Ideology? I'm speaking in regard to understanding the foundations of Utopia beyond Sir Thomas Moore. An historical line of progression of Utopian thought. Economic-political history of Utopian thinking, being capitalist, socialist, communist, etc. What even solidifies Utopianism as an ideology and or worldview?

Let's say that you have the opportunity to create your own little utopia somewhere in the world. Your utopia in your vision, what would it look like? What kind of people would it consist of? How would you maintain the Utopian Society that you are in control of?

I was looking through game recommendations on the website Itch.io and came across a game called The Transition Year by Affinity Games Collective. Here is an opening blurb:

What This Is

This is a map-drawing game. This is also a story-telling game and a world-building game. You collectively explore the struggles of a community trying to transition from a life dependent on extraction and domination and build a new way of living. It is a game about community, difficult choices, solarpunk dreams and anti-capitalist futures. When you play, you make decisions about the community. Those decisions get recorded on a map that is constantly evolving and on the provided Community Record Sheets. Parts of the map are literal cartography, while others are symbolic. You will name and describe the various groups that make up the larger community, narrate the projects they embark on, the challenges they face, and roleplay them in community gatherings.

Will you be able to work together, thrive, and make substantive changes through The Transition Year? What will this community look like after a year of working toward transition? This game encourages you to consider these questions, and to play to find out what happens. Players collaborate to create and steer this community, but they will also introduce conflict and tension along the way.

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The Transition Year is a version of the popular storytelling game The Quiet Year.

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I also saw that this game was part of the Applied Hope: The Solarpunk & Utopias Jam in 2021, but I haven't had a chance to look through the other submissions.

Just passing it along to see if anyone is interested.

In the year 2525, the Earth thrived in ways once thought impossible. The air was pure, the oceans glistened untainted, and cities had become vibrant sanctuaries where nature and technology intertwined seamlessly. Humanity, now living for centuries, had settled into a new rhythm, one shaped by artificial intelligence and the boundless potential it had unlocked. Cancer, dementia, heart disease—once scourges of civilization—had been conquered by the collective minds of AI-assisted scientists. Human bodies had become finely tuned vessels, not impervious to time, but slow to age, with a life expectancy of three hundred years becoming the norm.

Yet, as health and longevity improved, the population paradoxically diminished. People had fewer children, guided by wisdom imparted by AI-driven governance, which carefully balanced resources, sustainability, and personal fulfillment. Families had shrunk, but so had the need for them to grow. The world was vast, yet no longer crowded, its inhabitants choosing their lives with deliberation, embracing the richness of time, and no longer feeling the rush to pass on their legacy.

For most, work had become a hobby. Those who still chose employment did so for two hours a day, three days a week—an act of purpose rather than necessity. The rest of life was spent on personal passions. On any given day, the mountain trails were alive with the energy of hikers and athletes, their bodies more capable than ever, pushing their limits in ways only the new longevity allowed. At the farmers’ markets, the air was fragrant with the scent of hand-grown produce, not from need, but from joy—hobbyist farmers cultivating the earth simply for the love of it.

Life was not rushed, nor was it idle. It was a world where the fear of death had loosened its grip, where the urgency of survival had been replaced by a quiet exploration of what it meant to truly live. Here, humanity found itself not in conquest or consumption, but in the steady, deliberate pursuit of contentment.

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(Had to add the word "Utopia" to post on this sub, so here's this weird line of text. 🙃)

I am doing a research I want to ask which are the most influential people creating utopias or referents. I think this is the best subreddit to ask, so: Which are those referents that individually has had an impact to you in some way and why?

Are they alive or are from the past.

I start:

One for me is Peter Cook, not only by the concepts he expreses but by complexity and detail of the drawings he develops.

Another one would be Oxman, who is actually bringing to live those ideas and complex utopian concepts to live.

I read you!

Thank yo so much!

This passage takes on utopia in terms of developmental psychology (from "Rickmansworth" by Fen Bell). Would greatly appreciate the community's thoughts and reactions...

"Science fiction has long tempted us with the possibility of a peaceful, equitable, and sustainable future, but rarely ventures any kind of road-map. If there were such thorough solutions to the world's problems, they would need to be more comprehensive and adaptive than the usual reactionary piecemeal patchworks that have already proven insufficient toward these greater goals. As such, any solutions would require a more intentional accounting of the problematic context, namely the context of us.

From early childhood, we actively seek patterns, categories, essences, causality, and intentionality in the world, and develop intuitive expectations of reality such as order and purpose, because these trajectories of learning are how we come to understand the world in the first place. These intuitive expectations become as familiar and precious to us as family, and just as closely guarded. Though we outgrow many of our childhood beliefs, the underlying intuitions are often preserved and reinforced culturally, and we nod along in validation of shared expectations for the world. Thus we become adults who would rather blame ourselves, others, conspiracies - anything - than accept a world that might be indifferent, unintentional, and more chaotic than our intuitions expect, even as we suffer from these realities.

While not actual chaos, the world rarely resembles the fair, intentional, purposeful, and comprehensible order that we intuit it should because we are victims of our own evolutionary success. Human learning and its expectations proved so successful that we took over the world and eagerly filled it with our own order, purpose, and intentionality. We have become everything unto ourselves, creators of our own environments, and are born into human-made systems that serve as the main sources of our joys and suffering.

Yet still we avoid the obvious diagnosis of universally flawed human decision-making, specifically because of those same flaws. Some biases of our learning include an outward focus and negativity toward differences, so we tend to blame our problems on specific people or groups (or even ourselves) for being different in some way, rather than recognizing that systemic problems emerge from the over-reaching intuitions we all share. Our blaming of differences may also feel more practical and controllable than blaming all human decision-making because if the problem is inside all of us, then what can we do about it?

This question represents a singular and potentially fleeting opportunity for contemporary humanity: do we cling tighter to our intuitive expectations for the world or turn to confront the universal problems of human decision-making. Moreover, if we do accept this confrontation as the only way to save us from ourselves, then to what extent are we actually able to confront our own decision-making? What are the external and internal limits of our ability to explore, understand, and account for the intuitions of our learning?

After all, if our intuitive expectations are inevitably bound to our learning, then we can only hope to become more intentional about accounting for their over-reach. To layer counterintuitive thinking across particular domains in this way can heighten dissonance, along with any other form of suffering philosophers predict in confrontation with counterintuitive realities. Yet necessity may parent invention here, as carrying blindly forward with unexamined intuition preservation would continue to deepen all manner of contemporary catastrophe, including poverty and inequality, corruption and oppression, large-scale and systemic violence, and environmental destruction. Thankfully, human creativity and invention are the very premise that got us here; we have a powerful ability to innovate when confronted with a clear problem, even when we are the problem.

This change first requires some consensus in diagnosis, which becomes exponentially more challenging when a problem is counterintuitive, because culture is saturated with intuition-preserving beliefs, which are then parroted by leaders in exchange for influence. In the same way that political corruption can only be addressed when enough are willing to prioritize reform over their own particular agendas, it is hard to tackle the problem of human decision-making until everyone who can is willing to set aside their own intuition preservation. This is quite possibly the exact cost of saving the world.

For those who are willing, the problem looks like this: the development of human learning includes useful but over-reaching intuitive expectations for the world (alongside cognitive biases) which misguide our beliefs and decisions. Bad-faith leaders exploit and reinforce these expectations and biases through culture and community, but even well-intentioned privilege encourages harmful intuitions. The most subversive and pervasive change needs to happen inside of us. We must rebel against the intuitive expectations of our own learning and routinely riot against the ideas and beliefs that serve to reinforce them. The more we recognize the vulnerabilities of our over-reaching intuitions, the more clearly we see manipulations of culture and power. Only this internal growth can ever begin to account for the foundational flaws in human decision-making that accompany learning, which consequently sustain the systemic problems of contemporary humanity."

So, lets imagine you wake up in utopia tomorrow. What does it look like? How do you feel? What do you do? What are things you don’t need to do? How do you spend next 24 hours?

Labor movement utopian proposals usually put producers' democracy first and center. That's all fine and well if we are to move beyond capitalist production. But what about neighborhoods and consumers? The folks around Participatory Economy have given it some thought:

https://participatoryeconomy.org/the-model/participatory-neighbourhood/

A utopian sketch that mixes markets and planning, co-ops and social ownership

https://libcom.org/article/another-world-phony-case-syndicalist-vision

Seems fairly nuanced...or?

When we reach a post-scarcity utopian stage, I believe there will be a movement aimed at playing the human game. Once freed from work, and faced with dizzying transformations in the world, and the loss of life's meaning, some people will turn to human activities and will organize themselves into small communities, with marriages, rituals, war games between communities, and a great emphasis on kinship. They will have their own laws, which can be of the most diverse types. Some will be patrilineal, others matrilineal. They may seek inspiration from forager societies or traditional communities from various parts of the world. They may or may not accept other races or sexual orientations.

Some may also try new types of social organization. There could be communities composed only of lesbians, who would fertilize themselves through biotechnology, or communities of dominatrixes, in which men would be slaves with no rights, or any other crazy thing they decide to try. The stable communities will endure, while the unstable ones will disappear.

Article https://monthlyreview.org/2017/07/01/bertrand-russell-and-the-socialism-that-wasnt/

I think the guild socialist utopia is a nice effort to balance the interests of producers, consumers and citizens. But often it is unclear if they want a society with or without a state apparatus.

Utopia

Is there somewhere people can talk like in a chat?

Utopia on the Tabletop, exploring the relationship between utopianism and tabletop roleplaying games.

Available for free download here: https://ping-press.com/2024/02/23/utopia-on-the-tabletop/

If anyone would like a physical review copy, let me know.

I was reading a discussion about Veganism and it occurred to me that there hasn't been any society that was 100% environmentally-friendly. Hunter-gatherers have caused major extinctions of plants and animals before. Agrarian societies have still generated lots of waste and pollution. Even a pure vegetarian society would still likely have a large carbon footprint (if nothing else changes).

So today, let's brainstorm a specific type of utopia. A green utopia. Using modern technology (instead of solarpunk futurism), what type of society would be the most ecologically-friendly in terms of carbon footprint, resource usage, pollution/waste, and biodiversity impact?

One major aspect is that it would be some type of confederation of agricultural communes and villages instead of a large, centralized nation. This would cut down on pollution and resources used in transporting goods and services. People in this society would predominately eat plants, but domesticated animals would be kept in relatively close proximity and their animal products would be harvested to sustainable amounts. I'm still figuring out how manufacturing would work in this type of society.

Hi all! In about one month I will organise a move night about utopia's and dystopia's in our visual movie culture. But to be honest I'm struggling to find good utopian movies. I was wondering if some of u had any tips for me?

Greetings

Ok so here it is I am pasionate af about helping others and the planet in big and small ways. Encouraging sustainability, utopian living, and wishing I could find a mass amount of people who feel the same to start our own community and or start making noise together in our own communities to get things to change for the better of all. Balanced work life, non toxic foods, affordable health care and housing yanno basic human rights? I know there are more people like me out there but no one seems to want to work together to proactivly make a change. I’m not saying burn down the capital but I am saying let’s use our brain and work together there’s more of us than them we could boycott the big companies push petitions make noise together yanno? Idk if I don’t have a platform with tons of followers and the algorithm refuses to push my content and my family thinks I’m crazy for caring so much how do I find my tribe. How do I find the people who care about living things and peace within families. We need to do better.

I've been writing about and drawing my own private utopia since I was 9 years old (1967). I would like to share some info about it on this group, if I may.

It's called Alphistia. It's a small country in the near future, after catastrophes of one kind or another have caused a kind of new Dark Ages. The people in Alphistia have managed to get there to be able to live a bit like monks in a monastery did more than a thousand years ago...to preserve what was worth keeping from the collapsed societies, while creating a place that would be worth living in.

I spend my years in retirement these days imagining Alphistia, little by little. The reality of life in the USA now and in the months to come gives me incentive to "be" in Alphistia. I need it...

In any case, there is some documentation on the web about Alphistia. You can simply google "Alphistia" or take a look at http://www.alphistia.com, which has links to my blog with a lot of the drawings I've made. I've written a lot of pamphlets about Alphistia, and I can share a list of them for anyone who is interested in taking a look. Last year my website got hacked and at the moment they're not easily looked at...but I can forward pdfs to people's emails easily...

I've looked through some of the posts here and as a subreddit, I've been struck by the kindness and support people generally show in the comments. That has not been my experience in general with Reddit!

Real or utopia?

1. Absence of a Single Leader:

Power is divided among independent branches, and artificial intelligence serves as a link between citizens and the government, without directly managing it.

2. Local Elections, Global Progress:

Decisions are made at the local level to increase the proximity of candidates to citizens and the efficiency of governance, while career advancement is based on the efficiency of work measured by artificial intelligence algorithms.

3. Transparency and Accessibility:

Artificial intelligence helps control financial decisions and government actions, as well as provides citizens with access to data and decisions without the need for specialized knowledge.

4. Citizen Participation:

Artificial intelligence takes into account citizens' feedback in government decision-making, including electronic voting systems and referendums to ensure broad participation. Decisions at all levels of government are made based on the number of citizens affected by a particular issue, from the local to the national level.

5. Preservation of Values:

Artificial intelligence helps ensure adherence to the principles and values of society in decision-making.

6. Open Source Code:

The use of open-source code ensures transparency in the operation of artificial intelligence and prevents possible abuses.

Hello everyone,
This question might seem ignorant or surreal, but I was wondering whether the island of Utopia, as originally described in Thomas More's little orange book, actually exists.

Does anyone have any hint for it being a real island?

Hi guys, I'm a 21-year old student in the US and thinking about applying to a research thing after graduating. I'm really interested in the human curiosity of "the beyond": religion, psychedelics, aliens, even radically different societies, i.e. utopias. I was wondering if there are any prominent (or niche) groups in Australia or NZ that focus on bringing about a utopian society.

Hello,

My name is Jesse Benn, I’m a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on my dissertation about imagining a socialist utopia.

One of my questions is just what would a day look like for you in your imagined utopia.

My research is focused on socialists, but I use the term broadly and inclusive of anti-capitalists of all stripes so please don’t hesitate to respond just because you don’t identify with the label socialist.

If you respond please know let me know if you don’t want your response directly quoted (I won’t use any identifying info unless requested).

You can DM me or email me at jbenn2@wisc.edu with any questions or if you’d like to hear about other ways to participate in this research.

Thanks.

In solidarity,

Jesse Benn

Hello, I am in the early stages of putting together an anthology of utopian (and dystopian) readings. Certainly short stories, but also essays and poetry with "utopian" flavor. Any suggestions for me? I want to include a diverse array of voices (Project Gutenberg is great, but soooo old). Thank you for your time.

I've been thinking for a while about what is required to create a Utopia, and I've come to the conclusion that people need to have the will to make a society that is Happy and Healthy. As I see it currently a large part of the reason society is in a suboptimal state is because people aren't Happy and Healthy (spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically and socially) - or what you might call enlightened. So I'm wondering what type of people, what characteristics do people at large think are required to create, sustain and thrive in a Utopia?