They have deployed what Vaclav Havel has called "the armory of holistic social engineering."' Utopian aspirations per se are not dangerous. As Oscar Wilde remarked, "A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing."° Where the utopian vision goes

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Idealized conditions of maximally collectivized security, material abundance, aesthetic experience, sentimental experience, and emotional experience are imagined as utopias. But idealized conditions of maximally collectivized intelligence, true hive-minds, are generally imagined as dystopias, as in the Borg in Star Trek, or the Cyber-Men in Doctor... See more

In Chalmers’s vision, we would, as Arendt feared, be trapped in a situation wherein we would encounter nothing but ourselves and those things some of us have made. And it would be altogether likely that we would do so while swaths of our common world increasingly became inhospitable to human life. If so, the burden will fall, as it always does, on... See more