From its etymological meaning, Utopia would mean a NON-PLACE. Nothing would seem to be closer to a civilization built on the web from its concept of non- geographical references, the absence of cardinality and the distances, and the affirmation about the futility of the trip in physics terms.

From a sociopolitical point of view, throughout the meaning that Thomas More gave to that Utopia is a construction of the intellectuality of Man. It’s no longer a web kept on by an electrical source and with its own behavior and rules, but a conception placed in the mind of each person who could imagine it.

It is impossible to perform utopia, because when you have just performed it, it’s no longer a Utopia. In the same way, when you “socialize” it fades out. We could try to explain it with the analogy of an irreversible process, e.g. to expose a photographic plate to the light. Utopian models once they are performed are no longer Utopias, and neither can they return to the pure state. In the same way as chemical reactions, the process of Utopia’s transformation (the passing from one state to another) produces energy liberation or consumption that may be revolutionary when it is positive or counter-revolutionary when it is consumed in political terms.

But the web is not a utopian construction itself. It is simply a NON-PLACE from the geographical point of view (or could contain every place at the same time, which is the same).

I agree to the idea of utopia like a state of “potential energy” from the sociopolitical point of view, and from the artistic point of view too. Its real value is as a reference. We can find utopias in this topographical NON-PLACE, which is the mind of each person, taken individually. We cannot affirm that the sublimation of a collective Utopia is the end of the no-end utopias which every mind of every person of Mankind could keep creating.

Both fin-de-siècle showed us two opposite situations: the previous one had collective utopias omnipresent, and the last one with no collective utopias at all. At the same time, anarchists and hackers (both are fin-de-siècle characters) worked and work respectively against status quo making punctual discontinuities.

Will a generation of anarchist-hackers be born, that instead of finding their own satisfaction and the satisfaction of their little clan, have utopian ideas carried out through positive actions on the web in this new century?

 

Ricardo Pons - 2000