where is "utopia" again?

Dave Snowden weighs in with some criticisms of Dave Pollard's Model Intentional Communities.

I find the least convincing element of Dave P's proposition to be the polyamory stuff - mostly because I think it goes against a key Dave P requirement - sustainability. I am unconvinced that polyamorous relationship networks last over time (but please prove me wrong on this).

The Second Life stuff leaves me cold - mostly because I don't get "SL".

The key issue for me is: to what extent are MICs integrated with the non-MIC ("fallen" perhaps) world? Dave P writes: To be self-sufficient, responsible and sustainable, the MIC needs to have everything (the capacities, the space, the time, and the resources) to be independent.

For Dave P, separation is the key to MIC success. For me, it guarantees their failure. My question would be: what aspects of everyday life can be made more sustainable? For Dave P, this probably smacks of appeasement. But he himself talks about complex networks - and the MICs of his dreams cannot stand outside these. You cannot save the world by disappearing from it. As the estate agents say, it's all about location, location, location.

Dave P says: Each MIC would be a circle within a circle, the larger circle being Gaia, the community of all-life-on-Earth. Apart from disliking the term Gaia (which to me is just a scientific gloss on animism), this model sidesteps a reality in which most of the world is not part of an MIC.

As with Dave S, I think that Dave P is taking on tremendously important issues - but I'm also concerned with the separatism.

utopia

Please don't let me down this time

I've come a long way just to fall back in line

The sun hits my skin, triggering vitamin D creation and (probably) melanoma production as well.

Dave Pollard's utopian urges hit my RSS feed and reminds me of a film and of my own, ambiguous experiences with utopian communities.

I look at Dave's adjectives: exemplary, egalitarian, replicable, educational, responsible, respectful, self-sufficient, sustainable, diverse. I hear echoes of a million pious political plans (illustrated with a multi-ethnic cast grinning around an iMac or a yogurt-making aga or some such techno-artisanal ikon).

Part of me admires the purity of Dave's vision.

And part of me wants to find Dave's MIC and spray graffiti on the walls, burn down the buildings and glory in its destruction. That's not very nice but sadly very human. Dave's vision seems a model of liberal, humanist rationality. But where is the place in utopia for the irrational, the destructive, the parts of us that aren't nice but are ever present (although very much controlled in most societies)?

We find ways of channelling these dark energies - some useful (sport, art, capitalism), others less (violence, drink/drugs). Where are the dark spaces in an MIC? What does it do with its shadows?

Dave visions a polyamorous world but my god is a jealous god. And he was made in my image.