By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 04/06/2026There's another analogy here, to utopianism. A "utopia" can't just be a place where everything works perfectly. Even the most well-functioning, orderly and prosperous system is beset on all sides by exogenous shocks: belligerent neighbors, tsunamis, zoonotic plagues, even asteroid strikes. 12/ 1312
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 04/06/2026You don't perfect your society just by making it *work* well. You have to make it *fail* well. A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong - it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them: www.wired.com/2017/04/cory... 13/wired.comDisasters Don’t Have to End in DystopiasThe difference between utopia and dystopia isn't how well everything runs. It's about what happens when everything fails. 110737
By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 04/06/2026The point being that things that work fine may still fail badly when they are exposed to unanticipated external stimuli, and the one thing we can absolutely anticipate is that the future will have many unanticipated stimuli in it. 14/ 1394