We Should Still Dream Of The Stars

We've re-entered the semi-annual cycle of trend pieces about Silicon Valley freaks trying to make their own city - this time, with Esmeralda, a planned walkable small town for "creative, high-agency people". Sidebar here that I really do not like the term "high-agency". I assume this is manager speak for rich people since as far as I can tell the primary driver of how much agency you have in America is how much money you have. Agency is not a property that is intrinsically available in greater or lesser quantities based on the type of person you are, it is something largely determined by extrinsic structures. This is just John Galt bullshit wrapped in a package that sounds less offensive than "ubermenschen". But I digress.

Every year or so some tech freak with too much money and the belief they can build a better society with the power of the blockchain or AI or smart devices or whatever pulls together some suckers to invest in one of these projects that never comes to fruition. There's Praxis, California Forever, Peter Thiel's insane Seasteading Institute, and presumably plenty of others I have been blessed not to have to learn about. So far none of them have ended up going anywhere because the startup mentality tends to break down when confronted with the enormous complexity of governing an actual municipality.

These initiatives are usually met with derision from people who share my general set of political and social beliefs. And they should be! The bizarre arrogance of tech people never ceases to amaze me: there seems to be no other field where people are so ready to assume their expertise in one thing equips them to address all other problems. Experience as a product manager at a B2B SaaS firm does not equip you to design a city from scratch. The ability to write a compiler does not give you the bona fides to solve the hard problem of consciousness. And the common background thread of wanting to create bubbles to protect the rich from the masses and/or the consequences of their own actions is reprehensible. I'm not sure how many of these people have read Margaret Atwood but it certainly seems like a case of reading the Maddaddam series and saying "hey this sounds like a great idea".

Still, I think something gets lost in these critiques, which tend to fall along the lines of "fix the cities you already have you dipshits". I don't think fixing the world we already have is mutually exclusive of dreaming of a better one. Who among us hasn't dreamed of starting a commune with our friends? Sure, Esmeralda seems like a disaster in the making, but there are worse things than dreaming of small, walkable, intentional communities. People have been making intentional communities since there were larger communities for them to leave. Some of them have been cool, most have been failures, a few have turned into cults. Still, nothing wrong with trying! There is enough money, space, and manpower in the world for us to both improve the cities we live in and for people to try weird experiments.

There is a broader trend here of a reactionary response to good dreams that are embraced by bad people. Since he became Trump's court eunuch people have talked less about Elon Musk's dreams of colonizing space, but for a long time the ongoing critique of SpaceX and similar endeavors was "we should focus on fixing the planet we have instead of dreaming of colonizing others". The way Musk, Bezos, and other billionaires funding private space exploration think of these things is alarming to say the least: a philosophy of escaping our own planet before it burns, looking for another chance to build an Elysium for the rich while the rest of us revert to feudalism.

But I don't think this is an either/or question. I think dreaming of the stars, of discovery and exploration, is one of the most human things you can do. I don't think funding NASA means we can't fund basic income, or fight climate change, or any of the other myriad problems we're facing. Arguments to the contrary feel like a waste of time more than anything else to me: why bother getting up in arms about funding spaceflight when there are more pressing targets like the military, or the fact that billionaires exist?

You can have your feet on the ground and still look up. A world without those dreams is a smaller one. Bread is important, but roses are too.