Brave New World

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution. - Aldous Huxley

 

Utopian Propensity

Decommissioned power-plant. 

Utrecht, The Netherlands

The Utopian propensity is a universal impulse. It’s like thinking or breathing. If we lost our minds and totally stopped thinking, then we would stop dreaming. But as long as we’re conscious, we think, and as long as we think, we’re not totally swallowed up by what’s happening in our everyday lives. We have to think ahead. We have to think of tomorrow. And we not only think about things we hope for ourselves but we also think in terms of society. If we think at all, we think that way. Sometimes we go through periods of discouragement where we don’t see the possibility of evolving to a better society. But those are very black moods and they are not sustained for long. Inevitably, we dream again. - Fritzie P. Manuel

Image source here

Utopia

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzling straight and simple.
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

By Wislawa Szymborska,
(2 July 1923  - 1 February 2012)

Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Genesis

A book review by Patrick Ness

The 21st century hasn't gone well. The Last War has engulfed the world in cataclysmic battles and plagues; only the forward thinking of Plato, a millionaire businessman on the islands of Aotearoa (New Zealand, to you and me), saved his country. He built the Great Sea Fence around the entire Republic (that would be, ahem, Plato's Republic) to keep out a planet full of desperate refugees. Isolated, the republic thrived, and as communications stopped being received from the rest of the world, it became, quite literally, the last outlet of civilization on the face of the Earth.

All was not well, though. The citizens were kept in line mainly out of fear, and as the threat of infection and war seemed to dissipate over the decades, so did the republic's control over the populace. Until one day border guard Adam Forde made a fateful decision when a refugee appeared at a section of the fence he was overseeing, setting off a chain of events culminating in the Great War, the event that irreparably changed not only the republic, but the entire world.

Bernard Beckett's Genesis is set some time later, when young student Anaximander is being interviewed by three examiners for a place in the exclusive academy, which accepts less than 1% of all applicants. With her beloved tutor Pericles, Anax has studied the life of Adam Forde for three solid years. She has a risky theory to propound about Forde's true place in their history, a theory that might clash with the academy's official order of events.

Her interview, all five hours of it, makes up the entirety of Genesis, a daring formal experiment that may not always work dramatically, but has a palate-cleansing purity unusual in most young adult fiction. Unsurprisingly, given the plethora of Greek names - Plato, Pericles, even Anaximander was a real philosopher - the novel takes the form of a Socratic dialogue, with pages of Anax and her examiners exchanging views.

Anax describes the events of Forde's life in great, sometimes improbable, detail, creating holograms to illustrate her points. There are, in fact, times when Genesis feels a bit like sitting in on a doctoral defense, but this also allows Beckett to expound his ideas with admirable economy. "Human spirit," he says, "is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism." It's this spirit which we discard at our great peril. Fear is the killer of our species, he argues, allowing us to be easily manipulated by our leaders and by each other.

When Forde rescued the girl, the government used his show trial as an opportunity to scare the populace once again with threats of incomers and fear of the unknown. This had unexpected consequences, and as a creative punishment he was incarcerated with Art, an artificial intelligence android with the face of an orangutan, ostensibly to let Art learn from the interaction but in the vague hope that Art might kill Forde in an "accident".

Art soon grew far more intelligent than expected, though, drifting into possible real consciousness. As Anax digs deeper and deeper into her interview, she reaches towards information she feels is missing about Art's true place in the republic's history and a secret slowly begins to surface, one that provides a Twilight Zone-style moral twist to the proceedings. Beckett has written a very different young adult novel - assured, cool, almost cold - that will make smart teenagers feel very respected.

Set on a remote island in a post-apocalyptic, plague-ridden world, this electrifying novel is destined to become a modern classic.

In this brilliant novel of dazzling ingenuity, Anax’s examination leads us into a future where we are confronted with unresolved questions raised by science and philosophy. Centuries old, these questions have gained new urgency in the face of rapidly developing technology. What is consciousness? What makes us human? If artificial intelligence were developed to a high enough capability, what special status could humanity still claim?

Article source here
Image source here

Utopian by Nature

It’s very difficult for me to imagine a world without people who dream, who have a vision of what they would like to see. I can’t think of anyone who would say, “We’ve arrived at a perfect existence, so let’s retain it.” There are always things that are distressing and that we think could be bettered, so we imagine improvements. That impulse has not died out, and if it ever does, I don’t think we’ll have human beings on earth any longer. We’ll have some other form of life, which I can’t imagine. - Fritzie P. Manuel

By Jessica Roemischer

Human beings, by nature, are Utopian. We dream and we hope, and since the dawn of civilization, we have conjured notions of an ideal and perfect existence. From the bucolic realms of the Garden of Eden to Plato’s republic of philosopher-kings, from the island paradise of Thomas More’s Utopia to the libertarian collectives of nineteenth-century America to the counterculture communes of the 1960s, the ways in which utopia has been envisioned have changed dramatically over time. But whatever forms they have taken, Utopian ideals have helped drive forward an unfolding process of reinvention, a process whereby humankind has sought, through vision and experimentation, a new and better life. Indeed, Utopian visions, and the social experiments they inspired, are a product of our most freely creative faculty, the human imagination. They are an expression of the universal impulse to create the new - to reshape culture and even consciousness itself.

From an Enlighten Next editorial
Image source unknown but greatly appreciated

Ameritopia

The Liberty Bell

Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology. - Marc Levin

Ameritopia is a new book by the acclaimed author and conservative radio host, Mark Levin.

In his book Levin discusses the Utopian visions of Plato, More, Hobbes and Marx and sketches the historical background of failed societies and their perilous visions of equality.

Each of these thinkers postulated what they believed to be an ideal society. Levin, however, skillfully demonstrates that each one of these ideals was no more than a plain tyranny. In order to achieve the perfect society an individual was stripped of his individual rights and had to submit to the tyrannical rule of a highly centralized government for the sake of the greater good. There hardly was anything noble or romantic about such dehumanizing visions of society.

In the second part of his book Levin discusses John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, and Alexis de Tocqueville and demonstrates how their principles of liberty influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Levin explains that the skillfully revived Utopian ideology is threatening the liberty loving America that was built upon the philosophy of Locke, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville. The various liberal and socialist movements disseminate ideology that is intellectually and morally spent.

The "shining city on the hill" seems to dwindle with every new rule and regulation imposed by the ever growing central government. The shrinking personal liberties and civil rights are the terrifying signs that something is horribly wrong in the land of the free.

In the year of presidential elections, Ameritopia should be a required reading for all American citizens. 

Dominique Teng

Are You Prepared to Design the Future?

By Jacque Fresco

Although many of us feel we can prepare for our future by thinking, acting, and learning using present methods and values, nothing is farther from the truth - especially in today’s rapidly changing world. A newborn child enters a world not of his or her own making. Each succeeding generation inherits the values, accomplishments, hopes, successes, and failings of previous generations. And they inherit the results of the decisions made by those generations.

For the hundreds of thousands of years of human existence when technologies were simple or non-existent, this may have had little impact on human life and the earth that sustains it. Each generation of hunters and gatherers, then plowmen and pioneers, passed on tools to the next generation to help them survive. Change from one generation to the next was slow and hardly noticeable. In those days there was little understanding of science and how things worked, and explanations were not scientific.

This is no longer the case in today’s high-tech world where a change that affects millions may happen in a matter of seconds. A child born today inherits a world vastly different from that of its parent’s generation, let alone that from centuries ago. Previous generations left a legacy of, exploitation, occupation, and irrelevant values that present great challenges, but also opportunities to the people of today.

The application of scientific principles, for better or worse, accounts for every single advance that has improved people’s lives. Important documents and proclamations have been issued granting rights and privileges to members of societies, but at the heart of human progress - or destruction - is the rock-solid foundation of science.

The future does not just happen. Except for natural events like earthquakes, it comes about through the efforts of people and is determined largely by how well informed people are. You can play a role in the shaping of tomorrow’s world by asking yourself questions like, “What kind of world do I want to live in?” and “What does democracy mean to me?” There are many other options of organization for the future than those typically discussed today.

Here is a scenario for you to consider: Suppose you were called upon to redesign planetary civilization without any limitations based on how things are done today. The goal is to help rid the world of war, poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation, and to create the best world for all inhabitants, given the resources at hand, for the longest period of time.

Remember, you are free to rearrange society in any way you think will work. The only limitation is that your social design must factor in the carrying capacity of the planet, which means the resources have to be sufficient to support life on the planet.

You can rearrange the entire civilization to make what you consider the best of all possible worlds, bearing in mind that any unmet need for any segment of the population reduces the standard of living for all. This may include not only environmental protection, but also city design, transportation, interpersonal relationships and the restructuring of education, if you feel it is necessary.

Hopeful in Bad Times

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of present moments, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Howard Zinn

Utopia

By Frantzi P. Manuel

The earliest Utopian visions are that of a paradise that does not exist on earth. It’s a paradise after death. And they don’t just depict a single person. It’s a vision of a whole lot of people wandering through this beautiful garden and talking to one another. It’s not a solitary paradise; it’s a community. But there’s no connection to reality - immortality was a given, for example. These visions are ethereal. The early Utopian thinkers were not social revolutionaries or social activists; they were pure dreamers.

From the very beginning, people thought in terms of realities other than those of everyday life. And that’s apparent in the evolving nature of paradisiacal Utopias over time. You have the Garden of Eden, with the earth’s “earliest inhabitants,” Adam and Eve, and there is a sharp difference between the paradise of Eden and what happens after the serpent enters the garden. Then you have the future paradise, the days when the Messiah arrives. There is the “world to come” as compared with the world as it is.

The visions of paradise found in the paintings of fifteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni di Paolo were of literate people - nuns, priests, monks - who were meeting and talking together in a beautiful garden. There was natural beauty, but there was also lofty discourse. You then have the Age of Exploration. What vision of paradise pushed Columbus, for example, to venture out to the New World, and did he think he had come upon it when he reached South America? Because whole new lands and new societies opened up, as compared with the old lands of Europe. What pushes us? Fame? Money? We cannot create any generalities about notions of paradise. But one thing remains: There is a division or a distinction between paradise and what people are facing in everyday living.

The sense that one could create Utopia here in this world starts with the work of Thomas More in the early sixteenth century. You don’t find this kind of thinking earlier than that. Even a hundred years earlier, Utopia was much more otherworldly. But with Thomas More, man rather than God is now conjuring life on earth. The idea of Utopia is More’s invention, and it’s very much linked to the life he’s actually living in the sixteenth century. It takes off from there. He doesn’t think that his Utopia will take place after you die and get resurrected. It becomes concentrated on this world.

Thomas More thinks in terms of a whole society with nice proper gardens and decent relationships, which he describes in detail. He thinks it through. And he’s laughing; he’s enjoying it, but he’s serious, too, because he is well aware of the faults of the society in which he lives. He is critiquing the Tudor monarchy of King Henry VIII, and it is a very shaky monarchy. All sorts of things are happening, and More is very much a man of ideals, principles, and faith. After all, he gets beheaded because he upholds his allegiance to the Catholic Church and breaks with the king, which is ultimately recognized; and eventually he is canonized as a saint. He was a brilliant man, a very well educated man, a man who not only thinks ahead but acts on it. For example, he has his daughters educated. He stands out in his world. Thomas More was a different kind of dreamer.

People were beginning to explore the life of the mind and the riches that were around them, not in terms of gold and jewelry but the riches of scholarship, of thought. They were interested in whatever they could find in history, and this went along with opening up the New World, with finding out about other races. They were finding civilizations in both North and South America that they didn’t know existed. Columbus discovers the New World at the end of the fifteenth century, and very shortly after that, Thomas More writes "Utopia". So there’s a confluence of a lot of things - the artistic world, the literary world, the geographic world. An enrichment takes place, and that gives birth to a new thinking, a new dreaming. This is the birth of humanism, and of course, the religious world starts getting hacked away.

The seventeenth-century Utopians, such as Sir Francis Bacon, were imbued with a different spirit. Virtually all of them were men of action who believed that their plans could and would be crowned with success within a foreseeable, not a distant, future. "The New Atlantis", which Francis Bacon wrote in 1626, is hardly a popular Utopia of social regeneration, as was Thomas More’s. Its purpose lies elsewhere. In "The New Atlantis" Bacon introduced science into human thinking, and he had a very clear and interesting conception of how science should be employed. Of course, you had scientists before Bacon - Copernicus, for example. But Francis Bacon is the father of scientific thinking. He was setting things forth, using his imagination and then checking on that imagination, measuring, changing, and testing. Bacon wasn’t just dreaming; he was working things out scientifically. He was developing a practical way to arrive at conclusions, so he used "The New Atlantis" to help introduce the scientific method into society, to alter the thinking of the time. And he was obviously an imaginative, brilliant man.

For Utopian visions to take root and influence the course of history, you had to have a population - more than a few philosophers - that could enact them. Utopia had to be more than someone’s reverie. A Utopian thinker in the seventeenth century, for example, had nobody on whom to pin his thinking. He was isolated, not from his fellow philosophers but from the great masses of people who were barely making a living and were thus unaware of what he was envisioning.

That begins to change with the Industrial Revolution and the shifting economic and world systems. You begin to have a population that can think. People begin to find their voices. They begin to become aware of themselves, to know who they are. Working people of the period come closer to philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was articulating Utopian visions. As a result, these thinkers begin to stir things up in a way that hadn’t happened before. The French Revolution led to emancipation and the rise of a middle class. And it was happening in the American colonies as well - the Declaration of Independence is a Utopian document. It wasn’t just somebody’s dream - you have a mass uprising and different classes of people begin to have authority. These people become part of a Utopian vision of the future, and Utopian ideals actually begin to take flesh. That’s when you see a change in the thinking, the wishing, and ultimately the working of Utopian thinkers.

In the nineteenth century, a much broader Utopian thinking emerges that concentrates on creating a whole new society. Important Utopian thinkers from the period included Charles Fourier and Henri Saint-Simon in France and Robert Owen in England. Their visions were not merely dreams of the future. They were meant to be adopted by groups, by cells, by societies - and they were.

Fourier and Owen were the two major early-nineteenth-century apostles of the small-community movement. They had confidence that a single successful experiment based on their principles of organization would provide an example so compelling that it would persuade the rest of humankind to adopt their systems. On the other hand, the main thrust of the Saint-Simon movement was not directed toward establishing small communities but was rather a total reorganization of the whole scientific-technological society. He began to think in much bigger terms and also in very specific terms, down to the kind of roadways he wanted to see. To join the Saint-Simon movement was an act of commitment to the future progress of man - a world of order and limitless progress in the flowering of all capacities, a world virtually without pain, a world of love and cohesiveness. The movement, the religion, was the new world in miniature.

In the twentieth century humanity chose some ruinous and catastrophic directions. Totalitarian regimes set out to create new societies. But in this context, we talk of dystopia rather than utopia.

Immediately after World War II, dystopian novels sold more copies than any literary Utopian works in memory. Dystopia portrays the future as a living hell. You have apocalyptic visions of human beings overpopulating the earth and clawing one another for survival, of nuclear disaster, of escaped pathogenic bodies heedlessly being created by experimental scientists. Yet out of these visions, the Utopian propensity shows signs of stirring again, because at the heart of a dystopia has to be a utopia. You say, “This is awful. This is terrible. We’re going in the wrong direction.” But you’re saying that because you think there’s the possibility that it can change. If you didn’t think there was that possibility, you wouldn’t bother. Aldous Huxley, author of the ironic dystopian "Brave New World" lived to write the Utopian "Island". The impulse behind a dystopia is really Utopian.

Utopians are true realists. They know what would be good for the world. And they know that you have to have an ideal before you can move toward it. So they’re realists in that sense. Those who merely accept what is are really the non realists because they’re denying that the world is going to change, that the world moves. But what direction the world moves in is another story. And if you have no goal toward which you hope it will move, no goal you’re pushing toward, then you’re accepting everything that’s bad and you don’t need to. The Utopian thinkers of the past were often far in advance of their societies, and it’s good to know about them. Of course, sometimes the societies that were founded on their ideas didn’t work out that well. That’s certainly true of Marx, for example. But that, too, gets corrected in time. By new utopias.

If you’re alive and you’re a thinking person, then you have to hope for something, even if you’re not very optimistic that it will be achieved. You still want to work for it. You want to better this world, and you have the feeling not only that it needs to be bettered but that it can be - that its evolutionary fate is ultimately to be better. Therefore you have to align yourself with those who think similarly and not with those who either have given up or think that the world begins and ends with them.

In the twenty first century life is different, and the province of the Utopians is changing. They’re not worried about sexual freedom anymore. Economic ideals still move Utopians, but they are moving other people too. Issues that were once Utopian have become common objectives; they’ve been gobbled up by the Democrats, who are no longer called Utopian! So Utopians are really hard-put today, don’t you think? For instance, would you call the ideal of world peace Utopian thinking? I don’t think so. This has almost become a world ideal, whether you think it’s possible or not. What was once specific to Utopians has now spread to entire populations, linking what used to be Utopian with the life of humanity.

You don’t need a vast number of people to destroy the planet anymore, and that puts Utopians in a different position altogether. There’s talk of the end of humankind. In the nineteenth century, that would have been considered crazy. But people who think in those terms are not considered wild dreamers anymore. Utopian thinking now has to do with the preservation of the human race. Utopians in the twenty-first century are those who think we can preserve the world. And it’s not one class or society; it’s all of humanity. So Utopians are no longer simply isolated in little enclaves of their own. Without the whole world to back them, their ideals can’t move into a practical phase. We all have to become Utopian because we all have to believe we can preserve the world. And if we don’t, we should give up right now and go into a cave, or pray, or just think, or spend our time knitting. The alternative is the end. That sounds gloomy. 

From an interview with Jessica Roemischer for What is Enlightenment, 2007

About the author:

Fritzie P. Manuel is a scholar and art historian. Together with her husband, the late Harvard professor Frank E. Manuel, she coauthored "Utopian Thought in the Western World." This seminal work chronicles the unique nature and progressive history of Western utopian ideas and their influence on the development of civilization, past to present to future. 

P.S. 

Caliphate is one of the latest examples of dystopia that are being offered to the hapless, disenchanted masses. The Muslim socio-religious engineers have no desire to keep this medieval project in their own sandbox. They intend to implement it by force on the "infidels". This fact is widely ignored in the West. Unfortunately...

Dominique Allmon

Image source unknown but greatly appreciated

Wisdom of the Crowds?

"No one is this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." - H. L. Mencken

While our culture generally tends to trust the experts and distrusts the "wisdom" of the masses, a New Yorker magazine business columnist James Surowiecki argues in his book Wisdom of Crowds that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."

To support this almost counter-intuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition - we're all trying to identify a correct answer, coordination - we need to synchronize our individual activities with others, and cooperation - we have to act together despite our self-interest.

The author argues that f four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally.

According to Surowiecki "wise crowds" need

• diversity of opinion
• independence of members from one another
• decentralization
• a good method for aggregating opinions

The diversity brings in different information. Independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion or a leader. People's errors balance each other out. Including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge.

Surowiecki's style is pleasantly informal, a tactical disguise for what might otherwise be rather dense material. He offers a great introduction to applied behavioral economics and game theory.

Surowiecki first developed his ideas for Wisdom of Crowds in his “Financial Page” column of The New Yorker magazine. Many critics found his premise to be an interesting twist on the long held notion that Americans generally question the masses and eschew group or mob mentality.

I am not certain if one can read the current social and political world-wide revolt in the context of Surowiecki's book. Maybe you will have to read Ann Coulter's book Demonic to find the balance.

The Arab Spring succeeded in overthrowing tyrants in Egypt and in Libya.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd is out there to make a revolution, but has yet to make coherent demands. The "diversity" of opinion postulated by Surowiecki is rather counter-productive in this context. The other conditions for a crowd to be a "wise crowd" are not met either. And when you consider who actually is behind the protests on Wall Street and in other American cities, you will come to a conclusion that the crowd is actually a mob led by various interest groups interested in advancing their own ideology. The crowd is only an instrument to achieve the goals of the few who do not wish diversity. The demonstrating crowds seem to be completely oblivious of that fact.

Revolutions have occurred many times through the human history and vary widely as far as the methods and the motivating ideology are concerned. Their results include major changes in culture, economy, and socio-political institutions. Revolutions are always destructive, although the claim of constructing something better and new is always made. The results are often very distinct from the originally envisioned utopia. This fact is quickly disregarded as new order affirms itself in the reality of life.

Ordinary people can typically gain direct power by acting collectively. Because large groups of people have been able to bring about dramatic and sudden social and political change in a manner that normally bypasses established due process, they have also provoked great controversy as the change was, more often than not, a result of mindless violence.

Social scientists have developed several different theories explaining crowd psychology and the ways in which the psychology of the crowd differs significantly from the psychology of those individuals within it. The individuals seem to suspend their own individuality and judgment for the sake of the crowd... at least for as long as the crowd seems to represent their interests. 

In her book Ann Coulter argues that mobs are always destructive. She believes that with the civil rights movement in the sixties, Americans have lost their natural, inherited aversion to mobs. Indeed, most Americans have no idea what they are even dealing with. Only by recognizing the mobs and their demonic nature can America begin to defend itself.

Meanwhile, President Obama supports the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. He claims he understands their pain. Really? 

It may have escaped the collective consciousness of the demonstrating crowd that it was the President Obama himself who bailed out Wall Street in 2009. After receiving generous donations from what he calls "the fat cats", he had to! Goldman Sachs alone contributed one million dollars to Obama's presidential campaign. But no one seems to care...

By Dominique Allmon

Cities of the Future

In the future "it would be far easier and would require less energy to build new, efficient cities than to attempt to update and solve the problems of the old ones. The Venus Project proposes a Research City that would use the most sophisticated available resources and construction techniques. Its geometrically elegant and efficient circular arrangement will be surrounded by, and incorporated into the city design, parks and lovely gardens. This city will be designed to operate with the minimum expenditure of energy using the cleanest technology available, which will be in harmony with nature to obtain the highest possible standard of living for everyone. This system facilitates efficient transportation for city residents, eliminating the need for automobiles...

Skyscrapers would be constructed of reinforced and pre-stressed concrete, steel and glass. They will be stabilized against earthquakes and high winds by three massive, elongated, tapered columns. These support structures will surround the cylindrical central tower, which is 150 feet wide and almost a mile high. This tripod-like structure is reinforced to diminish compression, tension, and torsion stresses. These super-size skyscrapers will assure that more land will be available for parks and wilderness preserves, while concurrently helping to eliminate urban sprawl. Each one of these towers will be a total enclosure system containing a shopping center, as well as childcare, educational, health, and recreational facilities. This will help alleviate the need to travel to outside facilities."

These excerpts come from a longer article published on a wonderfully visionary and futuristic website The Venus Project

Image: Architectural project by Zaha Hadid