Against Deep Utopia: Why the Future Will Still Be Petty, Jealous & Full of Weird Status Games / Review of Nick Bostrom’s deep utopia

Imagine a future where no one wants for anything. Disease? Cured. Death? Optional. Labor? Automated. Inequality? Abolished. Everyone lives forever in serene, soy-lit luxury, trading crypto-karma tokens and writing epic poems about sunsets on Saturn. This is Nick Bostrom’s deep utopia: the techno-eschatological fantasy of a world where all the big problems are solved, and we finally get to relax.

Because the truth is, even if you gave every human a perfect body, a UBI mansion, and an AI therapist who actually listens, they’d still find ways to ruin everything. Why? Because people are weird. And conflicted. And wired for tension, envy, imitation, and self-sabotage. Deep utopia doesn’t solve the human condition. It just gentrifies it.

At its core, Bostrom’s vision is one of convergence. We all eventually agree, on values, goals, priorities, alignments. Friction is optimized away. Conflict is a bug to patch.

But history (and X/Twitter) suggest otherwise. The need to centralize is irresistible, but duality is indestructible. Humans are not smooth-edged lego blocks waiting to click into a benevolent system. We are jagged, neurotic, mimetic primates who define ourselves against others.

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