This is a fun piece on Strange Horizons, a fantastic, award-winning online sf magazine: The Ten Stupidest Utopias! In this essay, author Jeremy Adam Smith runs down ten misbegotten utopias from Plato’s Republic to the Internet itself, making fast and funny work of each.
The Radiant City
The Industrial Revolution gave the world a new idea of the ideal society. “Try sniffing the abominable stench behind the piles of books,” wrote Japanese Futurist Hirato Renkichi in 1921. “How many times superior is the fresh scent of gasoline!” This is a line that Beatty, fire chief of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, would have loved. In the first three decades of the 20th century, an architectural aesthetic emerged that demanded absolute mastery over nature and necessity. Movements like Futurism and Constructivism worshipped machines, fetishized war (“war–the world’s only hygiene,” wrote Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti), rejected the burdens of history, and embraced totalitarian governments like Fascist Italy or Soviet Russia. Their modernist allegiance to technology concealed a cavernous, angry irrationalism.
(via Waxy)