Paradox Pair #36: Infinity & Improvement
Utopia is a fallacy. In a perfect world our slate of choices would be reduced to one. There is no reason for optionality, for personal selection, for freedom of thought and expression — there is only the perfect offering. Impossible to achieve and we don't desire the result.
Tomorrow can be better than today. We want to help make it so, not by striving for unobtainable results, but by making small, incremental changes that keep us moving forward.
While we expect high quality, striving for perfection is a fools errand. At a point there are diminishing returns for more improvement. Even if perfection were obtainable (it's isn't), it is not worth the investment. In a perfect world our slate of choices would be reduced to one. There is no reason for optionality, for personal selection, for freedom of thought and expression — there is only the perfect offering. Impossible to achieve and we don't desire the result — utopia is a fallacy.
So too is dystopia (bad-utopia), where thoughts and ideas are too tightly controlled, suppressed, or outlawed. We also take exception to maintaining the status quo — things need to move, evolve, and change, if not they suffer atrophy. Both our physical and mental models require nourishment and stimulation to prosper. Businesses that don't evolve disappear, replaced by those that move.
Our choice, then, is protopia.
Protopia is a state that is better today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize. Because a protopia contains as many new problems as new benefits, this complex interaction of working and broken is very hard to predict. -Kevin Kelly
In the world we are shaping, we shall make progress and find new challenges, an infinitely repeating cycle. Overtime our efforts show marked improvement in our quality of life, our thoughts, and our products. Protopia is the rational choice for making progress.
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