Meeting notice: The 03.Jan.21 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below. Suggested topic: NT and Utopianism (2) All utopias and utopians can be sorted along a single dimension, the opposite ends of which are autonomy and community. In the previous announcement I suggested that while it seems as though NT's contribution to utopianism should consist of enhancing the former, the risks posed by placing really advanced biotech (for instance) in the hands of morons, or worse, teenagers, might force us to develop a much stronger relationship with the latter. A number of members replied but stressed what seems like a different angle to the topic. Richard Schroeppel sums up their common concern; > Given that our personal wealth seems much higher than a century > ago, we should be living a more relaxed, less worried life style. We > should see lots of people working half-time or quarter-time and living > modestly, enjoying the leisure and cultural opportunities. Maybe we > should even be happier. What's wrong with this picture? Here Schroeppel is defining utopia as early retirement, which is certainly plausible. Chris Fry explains -- if I get his point, which I might not -- that the social and cultural overhead imposed on and extracted from the productive cycle grows at least with, and probably faster than, complexity. He gives the cost of marketing as an example. The more babble, the higher the price of being heard, but without any value being added thereby. He calls this "the corruption tax". Both Schroeppel and Fry felt that solution was to cut one's ties to the economic infrastructure. Fry writes: > If I can build my own house and live off-grid in relative comfort, > my need for "money" or most social interaction from a pure > economic standpoint is greatly decreased. This greatly reduces > the "corruption" tax due to our convoluted, inefficient > society. You can see the argument. As one example, if all the members of a reference community drive SUVs, then a member of that community cannot drive a van or for that matter a sports car without 'making a statement' or assuming an identity whether he or she wishes to or not. So the member gives up and buys an SUV. It is an economically inefficient decision, but one that the culture all but compels. This suggests that the utopian content of NT will lie at least in part in allowing people to dilute their relations to each other, thereby weakening the forces that compel us to move in economic lockstep. This is not intuitive but it might be right. Is this a genuinely utopian vision? And even if it is, is it practical, given the moron/teenager problem mentioned earlier? It may be that the only utopia NT permits -- an efflorescence of autonomy -- is the very one that we cannot allow ourselves to enjoy. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon. -- Jules Verne, 1865 <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Legend: "NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group. The Group meets on the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.