Ozy Brennan once wrote about a day in "Ozy's utopia which is designed for Ozy". I thought maybe I should write something about Jo's utopia.
Unusually for Utopia, I am writing this under many constraints. Well, actually, that's pretty usual for Utopia. Unusually for Utopia, I am knowingly and deliberately writing this under many constraints. To begin with, this utopia is located in a universe that allows moderately hard SF and no fantasy; if you would like to see what my utopia might look like in a fantasy world, several options are in various works of my fiction. Second, this utopia is located in a near future – culturally near, if not necessarily chronologically near: human nature is basically as we Americans know it, and the world is pretty recognisable as a development of our own, and it isn't completely alien or bizarre to our eyes; realistically, this utopia world would develop into something totally alien and bizarre pretty quickly (from their perspective), but we're looking in at a point where things are still kind of normal. Because of that, this Utopia actually still contains great suffering, and the residents of its Utopia would look at it as a terrible place where few of them would want to live.
I will refer to the world you live in as Earth-2, and this new imaginary world as Utopia-13.
In Utopia-13, all basic material subsistence needs, such as food and water, can be provided by cheap, small gadgets that can last tens of thousands of years without maintenance. They are made by a very complicated global supply chain, because that's the cheapest way of making them, but bright minds have figured out how to manufacture them in the event of an apocalypse, and such instructions have been carefully written in countless formats in countless places. The number of persons who die deaths of malnutrition each year is measured and printed as just that: a number, rather than a percentage point; it's in the double-digits, and even then it's usually due to the rare person who has an incurably fatal mental illness.
Medical science has advanced to the point that any bodily infirmity you've ever heard of can be cured at some point. With any ordinary illness, you can be put in the Coffin, and some nanobots later emerge cured within the hour; med students grumble that they have to learn how all that works even though a computer is doing it, but it's important groundwork for solving problems that aren't as easily cured. More complicated illnesses might require consultation with anatomical and nanoscience experts, but those are very rare. Mental illness is much more difficult, but we've made enormous progress; the field is to Earth-2's version of it as the Moon Landing is to Aristotle. Coffins also (unless you opt out for Christ knows what reason) install a bunch of small improvements, so you never get random headaches and you can fence without needing PT for your knees. We have strong cultural norms that we should go to the effort to make special accommodations for disabled people even though they're super rare these days (which is probably for the best, given that our standards for disability are slowly growing to include, inter alia, 'needing eyeglasses'); nearly all of us have successfully trained ourselves to see disabled people as normal folks just like us even though they're rare. It's really rare to be conventionally ugly; usually it's because you belong to some strange religion.
Artificial wombs are provided to everyone for free (most governments guarantee it, and nonprofits and foreign aid provide the rest), although there are constant arguments among mothers as to whether a natural gestation is slightly healthier.
Any kind of incentive to reproduce is stigmatized, although there is moderate social pressure to not reproduce in the unlikely event that you don't think you can provide your child with a happy life. Practically everyone uses some sort of genetech to make sure their kids won't have any terrible diseases, though of course this leads to a perpetual increase in our standards of a healthy child; eventually it will be seen as crazy to allow your child to be born with an IQ below what Earth-2 would measure as 165. Rich people, of course, are more able to make their kids super gifted, but nobody really minds, since that just means that there are more gifted kids; of course, if any one group started to actively prevent other people from using genetech, there would be a lot of yelling at legislators.
The governments do require all minors to submit to temporary sterilization. It does not feel like a big deal at all, not least because Coffins do it automatically unless you (illegally, or for some incredibly rare medical reason) opt out. The governments say that if reproduction truly is a right, then even then it still isn't one kids have.
Cool futuristic body modification is commonplace. Many mods are cheap and easy to get: you pay a very small (almost nominal) amount of money, and ask the cosmeticist's Coffin for it. However, designing new mods costs a significant amount of money, because you have to commission a designer and then commission a nanoscientist; designers love their jobs, but labor is expensive in Utopia-13 for obvious reasons. It is nearly always illegal to attempt to design your own body mods without a license, for the same reason that cigarettes would be illegal if this culture still had any respect for cigarettes. Because of this, tons of people go around with fangs or cosmetic wings or whatever, and people who want to show off great wealth or refined taste commission all sorts of weirder or more elegant designs. Since the only thing that makes a body mod expensive is whether it's difficult to design, many extremely complicated mods are super cheap simply because hordes of people want them; for this reason, it costs five bucks to gain the ability to switch sexes at will, but a week's wages if you wanted to grow the feathers of some random bird species on the backs of your arms.
People get largely cured of sleep around age thirteen (and school hours before that age account for children's natural circadian rhythms), requiring only a nightly forty-five minutes for optimal mental functioning. "Curing" a child of sleep when they're under the age of thirteen is against medical ethics, because there's no way to do that without messing up their brain development, but this works very well for parents.
Exercise is way less necessary than in Earth-2, although it's really best if you move around on occasion, and you will notice some small problems if you don't run on the treadmill occasionally; human bodies have been improved sufficiently that you are rarely naturally lethargic and rarely need to bathe, so usually this isn't much of an issue for people.
The world is culturally homogenous enough that some basic tenets have been utterly inculcated in practically everyone; the average human in Utopia-13 has the same spirit of kindheartedness as the average Quaker in the eighteenth century. For the sake of ideological diversity, many reservations and cloisters are maintained so people can grow up with outside perspectives; there is constant debate over how much we can get ethically them to believe horrible things, as well as constant debate over the fine details of forcibly allowing them entry into larger society, but so far none of the groups have gone entirely into Sparta-level dystopia. Even within the world at large, however, there's immense cultural diversity, with all kinds of weird foods, customs, religious rituals, and so on spreading out in pockets. The same, of course, applies with law. Governments try to maintain some sort of child-education program so people can have exit rights, and most areas have subpolities so specific that people always complain about how communities schism over every little thing.
While I'm drawing on Scott Alexander enough to talk about Archipelagos: Raikoth-style Third Eyes are slowly gaining traction among the ordinary populace, and are required for, inter alia, the people in charge of making sure that nuclear weapons are no longer manufactured, police officers, referees, and teachers. Three organizations are in charge of surveying the data when requested, they all audit each other (and are financially incentivized to do so), and random citizens can – with a massive pile of NDAs – audit them.
Factory farms are totally outlawed, but it's a nonissue because it's simply cheaper to grow pure meat artificially. Gourmets and conspicuously rich people eat meat from the wild or from ordinary farms. Hunting most animals is allowed, but only if you kill humanely (normally with an instakill rifle, which does not work on anything with the DNA of a prohibited species).
Taxes are low, but most citizens find themselves obliged to, grumbling, perform a few weeks of labor each year in order to pay them, in addition to the part-time seasonal job they usually work in order to afford the luxuries they want. Most countries are rich enough to, with these taxes, guarantee everyone a standard of living approximately equivalent to that of a monk in Earth-2. Medical science has advanced to the point where there are basically no free-rider problems: if you can't work, we know it; if you can work, we know it.
Institutes of higher education are surprisingly like on Earth-2, except not designed by Satan. Labor is expensive, even though many people like to teach, but the governments usually pay for everyone to get at least one degree in something unmarketable. If a profession has a shortage, its degrees are usually subsidized; especially pro-social degrees, such as medicine, are always free regardless of oversupply. Research, development, and humanities innovation are far less tied to institutional education than on Earth-2, so while colleges are natural nuclei of intellectual production, there are also countless unrelated nonprofits, comparable to the Huntington Library or Smithsonian Institution, that are as much so.
I work a part-time job as a librarian. I used to be a judge, but alas, got outcompeted by genetically modified upstarts: unfortunate for me, but certainly good for the justice system – certainly it's good for the Supreme Court to have people smarter than me, since just one of their duties is recommending the legislature modify the Justice Algorithms. I could totally get by working much less, but I work six hundred hours a year so I can afford to commission artists. I do like my job: I get to listen to classical music when I catalog books, and I get to help people directly and immediately, every day.
Artists' labor is usually pretty cheap: the government pays for their first degree, they can spend almost all their time practicing since subsistence is guaranteed, and many people love to do it, so there's tons of supply. But I really like the stuff, so I'm always commissioning my favorite painters and sculptors and novelists. I usually don't bother with having sculptors handcarve anything, or authors handwrite their manuscripts – I just want the art to exist, I don't need its creating to be needlessly painstaking – but I do always, for the sake of avarice, have the author autograph my personal copy, just so I can have a little piece of it that's mine alone. (Utopia-13's culture stigmatizes taking satisfaction in exclusivity of ownership, but only for really big or important things; little things like well-designed body mods or autographs are seen as relatively harmless, economy-stimulating, methods of conspicuous consumption. In the long term, we hope to stop seeing conspicuous consumption as high-status.)
I spend a huge amount of my time reading books. For nearly any book published in the last century, I can read it instantly on my ultra-high-tech ereader, since I'm a member of one of the big subscription libraries. (You can also read practically all of those books for free if you don't mind the occasional waiting list. IP laws exist, but the only reason everyone actually obeys the honor system is that the restrictions are pretty limited.) I can easily take notes with my holographic desk. Of course, free nonprofit libraries have lots of recent books in hardcopy, for people who like that sort of thing (everyone can afford an ereader), and my subscription library also has an enormous collection of recent hardcopy books. For old books that haven't been digitized, I can use high-speed transportation to arrive at one of the stupendous research libraries in a matter of minutes.
Unsurprisingly, I also write a bunch of my own books. Printing a hardcopy, or uploading a digital copy forever, is so cheap as to be free for all practical purposes. Naturally, sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a bit difficult, and dozens of ingenious crowdsourced ranking systems, evaluation services, and reviewing boards inform libraries and readers what books to prioritise. A few institutional libraries collect virtually any coherent print you send them, and they have vast catacombs of books retrieved by Mansueto-Library-style robots. AO3, if printed out, would fill a library the size of eighty Pentagons. I usually don't bother with seeking actual publishers for my fiction, instead simply uploading them to AO3-style sites and sending hardcopies to libraries once I get enough positive feedback to meet their benchmarks, but for my nonfiction works I naturally do submit to publishers known for stringency. After two hundred years in the business, I've filled three shelves.
Suicide is safe, legal, mildly stigmatised, and incredibly rare.
Inspirations for this: Terra Ignota, Terry Pratchett's Strata, various proposals for real life.
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