There are a lot of people from SF on here. I think that's part of what powers HN's wing of totalitarian utopians. SF is itself a dystopia, an open air psychiatric hospital that is simultaneously unaffordable and smells like piss. People need to realize though that SF is a bubble and that its problems are as strange as its virtues. SF is not only dysfunctional but peculiarly so, and its disease is not common elsewhere. I call it "the world's only six figure slum."

I find utopias scary in general. Not only do they always have a mass grave or a gas chamber hidden away somewhere, but even without considering the underbelly they sort of by definition represent a local maximum.

Studying evolution and AI/ML made me fear the local maximum as an existential danger. It's one of my Fermi paradox speculations. Maybe it's easier to create a utopia than to build a starship. Find a local maximum, get stuck, and wait for a black swan. A utopia is a luxury lounge waiting room for extinction.

I can't see a society like Singapore settling Mars or sending the first probe to Proxima Centauri. I'll take my junkies, batshit crazy politics, and litter on the streets. Just give me good music and spaceships plz. God (and who knows what else... Cthulhu f'tagn!) bless the USA.

I wonder if the local maximum evolutionary dynamics of a utopia isn't the reason they always have a mass grave or two. Evolution has natural mechanisms to escape local maxima (search phrase: evolution of evolvability). The local maximum must therefore be enforced. Life has to be actively held there. "Smile or die."