| 1. DISTOPIAS OR THE DIFFICULTIES OF LETTING DREAMS FLOW |
The dreamers' reality, which is lived everyday with each sense, firstly makes us come across everything that doesn't function, that even despite having worked to transform, it remains like a weed in rich soil.
Maybe that's why the younger people are the ones who have seen from the distance or closely what could not function, they are the ones who feel the reality of the technological advances is hot on their heels, they are the ones who have revealed in their dreams enthusiastically and perhaps, just unconsciousness, what we have agreed to call distopias.
Dreaming about "the conception of Wisdom Sharing Societies involves the reconfiguration of the paradigms ruling our society, because the utopia considers what you want vs. what you get. If this division is assumed, we could say that the collaborations7
deal precisely with the theme of our society, whose ideological, economic, social, communicational, educational and ecological bastions are regarded as very difficult to transform. Consequently, these utopias are contaminated by the current paradigms of exclusion and establishment of power, and this is a denial of the utopia itself, a distopia." (Dragones Synthesis)
From the collaborators, "the utopias centered in technology that suggest the ICT will turn us into cyborgs (which is already real due to Kevin Warwick's experiments) are striking, those who think that technology will make teleportation possible, or those who consider multimedia and TV as an invasive and omnipresent space of our daily reality but with much more sophisticated formats ("holograms"). Someone else dreams of turning us into cyborgs logged onto the web, surrounded by ultraprecise, ultrasensitive robotic slaves performing our most tedious tasks. Someone else dreams of "access to the internet from anywhere with such powerful computers we won't need to go out" and 'they will provide cleaning, shopping, video, surveillance and information services at affordable prices'. Someone else dreams of a bank system at home which will carry out all the transactions just by inserting money into a slot. Systems that are able to read our minds and know which banking operation we wish to do." (Mapa, "Collaborators Synthesis: The young people's vision").
"The most famous distopias of literature and films8
display a trashed, poor and gray world with mind-numbed, fearful, self-censored and ideologically defenseless communities. They also show those classic distopias, ruthless and impeccable powerful people wearing opulent outfits and gadgets, depicting images of violence and domination, living together with the magic materials of these forests inhabited by ourselves, the dragons9.
That is the reality the coll@borators fear, and they see it coming closer. Actually, it is here! (Dragones Synthesis).
These distopias filled a great part from the first act of this Utopista, they are the concrete expressions of our difficulties to dream in this age, because deep beneath the sea of crisis pummeling the world and especially our Latin American and Caribbean region (Venezuela, Argentina, Haiti, etc.), it is very difficult for many people to think about their own dream, to go deep into an act starting from a personal ideal and once it is opened it combines and projects along with others' flying in the same direction.
"The reality of the present transcends the former theoretical considerations concerning aspects like social justice, equality, ethics, etc. Today, how can we be responsible for the effects of the choices we make on behalf of other human beings who are close to our daily lives - not conceptual considerations, but people?"
In this context, it is stated that
"Then it is not possible to think of my utopia but of many others' utopia in my country" (IP, 4.12.03).
"Today's human, cultural and cognitive difficulties to dream, related to the objective and structural conditions of our world, as Jimena says, also talk about those objective conditions referred to the communications systems and their uses, the moderators and the egos themselves as 'power devices' that prevent us from dreaming and sharing throughout the web" (Dragones Synthesis).
Among the identified difficulties we can find the fragmentation and the dichotomy in the heart of society, and they interact with fluency in the search and practices of the autonomy.
"Societies have always hesitated between 2 poles that lead to a position facing the becoming: 1) Order and 2) Conflict. Accepting the order will lead us to war / invasion; to submissiveness, etc. Reflecting upon and accepting - the conflicts - on the contrary will allow us to elucidate the social subjects in another way, supporting evolutions". (BA, 4.15.03).
"Today's matter, in the 21st century, is not a dichotomy, you support invasion/war or you support peace. As it could have been proposed throughout the 20th century. Otherwise fluency in autonomies... Fluency refers to subjectivities... The autonomies refer to the structures: economy, politics, law, culture. There is in fact a return to the humanistic, precisely as a result of the harshness derived from the so called technological revolutions: - militarism -, etc... Taking care responsibly implies maintaining a strong position concerning -humanism-... But it also implies -to put people right in the middle-... And this goes beyond the almost disappeared UN". (Confident, 4.6.03).
"On this journey I always find a topic that comes up over and over like a ghost. The shocking tendency to fragmentation, just like a tribal mark forcing us to make a distinction among one another and in order to sustain itself it needs to design strategies of confrontation. Fragmentation, confrontation, prejudice, inability to build universal ways. Great efforts and desires torn to shreds in a matter of seconds. This repeating in the future, on each journey, is what I most fear. Technology becoming as well a terrible divider of humanity and repeating the same fate over and over again." (AR)
The circumstances to avoid dreaming are as varied as the complexity of reality, and it reaches its most dramatic point in
"those who don't dream anymore, those who are disenchanted, those who don't have time, those whose understanding of the world prevents them from dreaming and they have found a way of rescuing the right to dream... or that the complexity of the utopia turns it into a trap leaving us with no dreams" (Dragones Synthesis)
I have dreamed of a more democratic, fairer, freer, happier society, but sometimes reality hits me so hard I get really sad and I don't feel like writing or fighting anymore... (Mapa)
"Life sometimes surpasses utopias and we realize utopias are just processes to our desire and sometimes that desire, as Raisa's son tells us, is a dragon that can be good or bad, or what is shared becomes compulsory as Freire used to say, to be something different to both or the multiple individual choices, something new, not imaginable individually; or as the philosophers or basic scientists of these disciplines say, reflecting upon the universe". (IP)
"I also considered at some time there are stations/utopias that strengthen the desire/journey, make the search meaningful, stabilize the vehicle in which we travel and basically allow us to combine with other travelers a single pace. However I realized there are so complex and far-away stations/utopias that turn the desire/journey into something so hard and troublesome and they end up drawing it to a close, the journey has turned into a no-journey, or a journey into nothingness, individually and collectively speaking" (AR).
That is why, the right to dream in our developing societies (a long and never-ending process) is also fragile and it can convert itself into a longing, a conquest, a battle to win.
"I dream that those that do not dream learn how to dream: whether some think that we do not have time to dream, or that we are too stubborn-rational (like Senaida says), or that we are already living our dreams without realizing it or that we believe that dreaming is not worth anything or that we let dreamers dream for us while we are busy with reality. Or because we confuse everything and we dream reality while we daydream, fractal spaces between cyber reality and concrete dreams..." (YK)
That is because in our daily lives "sharing and discussing about our humanity, how to reach an agreement, building together; our very stories complicate the scenario for shared dreams" (Dragones' Summary).
"And how to share, to discuss the human vision, humanity, human rights, in our society, which is a center of new, multicultural ancestral influences coming together over and over again, how do we build a utopia where we can discuss anything openly, fondly and warmheartedly as it used to be, and other moments in which theories are fragmented wisdom, historical facts affecting human lives, 'perverse'?... Where what is human can just be a concept or a very abstract variable that justifies the application of a callous theory to the living beings of today who help one another charitably, or the human being made of flesh and blood, of dreams and fears, of abilities and inabilities when getting labeled, according to an ethnocentric norm as a condition of being" (IP).
[7] (note) It refers to the collaborators from Utopista (Mexican/s and a Venezuelan), a 10-year-old boy and 11 young students of the UNAM. See participants list.
[8] (note) Examples: La ley del amor" ["The Law of Love"] by Laura Esquivel, the 1st multimedia novel in history, the literature classics "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley and "1984" by George Orwell, as well as films like Matrix, Blade Runner and Terminator, well-known by these youngsters.
[9] (note) It refers to the Utopista Dragones workgroup.
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