Forget Utopia. Ignore Dystopia. Embrace Protopia!
Some proponents of protopian thinking believe that it can lead us to a better future. Others maintain we’re already living in a protopia.
In 2009, Kevin Kelly, the white-bearded futurist and co-founder of Wired magazine, was searching his brain for a word that did not yet exist.
“Either we’re headed for a dystopia or we’re headed for a utopia,” Mr. Kelly, 70, recalled in a recent interview, describing the prevailing attitudes about the future at the time. “Neither of those seemed to be feasible, or even desirable.”
So Mr. Kelly coined a term to describe a third option, meant to represent the reality in which he believed we already lived: protopia.
The concept, which Mr. Kelly debuted in his 2010 book, “What Technology Wants,” refers to a society that, rather than solving all its problems (as in a utopia) or falling into dire dysfunction (as in a dystopia), makes incremental progress over a long period of time — thanks to the ways in which technological advancement is enhancing the natural evolutionary process.
(The root of the word has many derivations, Mr. Kelly said. “Pro as in progress. As in progression. As in prototype, early. As in pro versus con, meaning yes versus no. Pro as in professional. All the positives of pro going forward.”)
