‘Utopia’ by Julius Wiedemann
This is a transcript of the opening speech of IAM Weekend 17: The Renaissance of Utopias given by TASCHEN’s Executive Editor Julius Wiedemann on April 28th, 2017 in the Mercat de les Flors of Barcelona.

Good morning everyone. It is a pleasure to be here, and it is going to be a challenge to this keynote, to try to replace the irreplaceable Zygmunt Bauman. In his posthumous texts, just released and launched yesterday in Spain, Bauman paints a picture of caution, where the death of utopian ideas are at the center of the crisis we live through.
Is his view, the new world we live in, what he called “Liquid World”, does not offer that comforting predictability and solid visualization of the past. So from progressiveness, we turned to our past to regain hope. He seems even to feel sorry about it.
For a man of his altitude, it must have been hard to leave this world not knowing the outcome of the fragile times we live, specially because that was the concern of his writing for his entire productive life. But maybe, he new the answer, and was sharing the clues we needed to move forward, and not backwards.
One of the greatest differences between we humans and all the other animals is the capacity we have to reinvent ourselves or to say, to dream. That is based in great part, I would say, upon our collective acceptance of abstract thoughts and subjective experiences. Certainly other animals have those to some degree, but nothing like humans, to the extent that it has enabled us to completely reinvent ourselves over and over.
One of the speculations both scientists and philosophers make is to define consciousness, and with that, to try to understand what we are, how we feel, why we act, and also, why we dream. Are we pre-programed? Can we be reprogramed? Are we programed most of the times? Is intelligence the byproduct of consciousness? Do we have free will? I believe we have four modes of expression: we feel, we think, we say, and we do. We are constantly revising the realities offered by these four different modes. And they retrofeed and ignite an infinite cycle of change.
Abstraction enables us to respond to the world including variables and results that are off limits to the urgency and immediacy of our daily lives. They are like commentaries, ideas, and more often than not, the “what if” question.
However, most of the dreams we’ve had since the early 19th century to the mid 20th century have now been accomplished. The Jetsons, Dick Tracy, Space Travel, AI, video games, virtual reality, mobile phones, Viagra, Thrinder, and so many other tangible accomplishments, are there already one way or another. They are not dreams anymore. They are what we breathe, how we work, how we cure diseases, how we eat, how we form relationships, how we travel, how we let adrenalin kick-in, etc.
The 60s represent maybe the last generation of Utopians. Our evolution is a testimony to our capacity to defy reality, and therefore to reject fate. It is not intuition that brought us here. It is thoughtful and “rational compassion”, Paul Bloom would say. Intuition is great, but it has so many flaws, being one of them the mechanism to make us run in circles. And we do not like that forever. We do not accept that as a destination. I would say we cannot accept that as our destination.
We do not like the reality brought by intuition for a long time. We need utopia to evolve. We love to reimagine our world from scratch. Utopia exists for me because we are constantly dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction is maybe the greatest ally to creativity. Utopia is not about imagining something difficult or impossible, it is about desiring it so badly that only a completely different world, completely counter-intuitive, would be able to take it. And yet, we did it so many times.
Think of democracy, think of illuminist values, think of the revolution of science, think only of electricity. I love our obsession with non-reality more than anything else I think. It is the fuel of our evolution. We do not want to conform. Think for a moment only about Humanism, maybe our greatest creation.
The idea that because we are born equal, we all deserve the same opportunities because we share the same values. Completely utopic. And yet, fundamental to our evolution, and a fundamental part of our literature, political debate, tolerance, policies, and so many other things that separate us from our past.
My claim is that one of the greatest features of the human mind is that we despise reality. Not in a sense of being constantly and willingly dysfunctional, but in a sense that the world we live is not enough for us, and delusion is part of our nature. If Descartes said, “I think, therefore I exist,” I prefer to use the words of Swedish poet and novelist August Strindberg, “I dream, therefore I exist.”
I believe we evolve in three ways: biologically, socially, and technologically. But we have a feedback loop that changes the velocity with which these things interact and accelerate change. What ignites this wonderful web of interaction is randomness and creativity. Not believing in our capacity of abstraction would be the greatest human disaster.
As my friend Luli Radfahrer says, we were not supposed to have been named Homo Sapiens, but instead, “Homo Disatisfactens”. We were not satisfied with calories, so we invented gastronomy, we were not satisfied with our eyes, so we made glasses and contact lenses, and then laser surgery, we were not satisfied with cars, so we made airplanes, and then spaceships.
We always want more. That is our obsession. It is so unique to us, for the good and for the bad. I would dare to say, mostly for good. When we have the intellect, the financial and the material means to the change our reality for better and we do no do it, our social issues become a moral debt.
Today, within some of the most utopic things I would wish for myself, I would list having time, being anonymous, and accepting not knowing. And like John Lennon, “imagine no religion.” One of the challenges utopians have, is how to represent utopia, how to make it attainable, how to make it tangible for a wider audience to understand and to dream about it. That is what literature, popular science, science fiction, film, and others did before. I feel we are lacking an effective vehicle now. VR is maybe trying to fill that void as a persuasive technology. We will see.
So many people in history said we had already accomplished everything. Is it wrong to say it now? Is happiness maybe the only remaining utopia? As we face the 21st century, and the world becomes more complex, we will require the help of philosophers to speculate on some hard questions, from AI to our incapacity to act collectively to solve problems we have long discovered the solutions for, like hunger. What we need again are these big “what ifs” again. As author and philosopher Sam Harris said, “We have entered an era when our very humanness, in genetic terms, is no longer a necessary condition of our existence.”
There is a lot to do, and a lot to be invented. They all start very often with a Utopian thought. So we need a vision, or even delusion. In the land of Dali, we need more surrealism, and I ask you to imagine Utopia as a collective project. Let’s dream and let’s be utopians before we get to work. I wish you an incredible time here, and also that you take the time to digest what you are going to experience here. You will need that. To dream small, is to have a nightmare. Let us reimagine and reinvent our world all over again.
I would like to finish with a poem I wrote about five years ago.
Revolution
The world doesn’t care
It is up to you to dare
And throw out of the window
What angers your soul
The past of bitter and cold
So depart from thinking,
accept your heart is sinking
And dare to swear,
To break apart
And forever restart
The neglected hope
When patience is not in the scope
Go spit in the face of common,
Act gladly as a moron
Make no sense of reality
And reject the old formality
Start from intuition,
It is creative destruction
And build whatever brings,
What we have long forgotten,
to separate what is rotten
So leave the comfort zone,
to live the peace once known
THANK YOU.


