The Utopia Experiment
“We live in strange times, caught between two opposing views of the future. On the one hand, the believers in technology and progress promise a world of ever increasing prosperity, a science-fiction scenario in which huge advances in technology have made material abundance and long healthy lives possible for people all over the world. On the other hand, the doomsayers warn us that climate change and the end of cheap oil will put an end to the stupendous economic growth we have seen in the past hundred years, and usher in a new dark age of poverty, disease and war. There are some middle positions, it is true, but they seem less convincing than the two extremes.” This article is written by Dylan Evans, and outlines his Utopia Experiment.
Recently, the doomsayers have been gaining the upper hand. Curious to find out more about their worldview, I decided to set up an experiment in post-apocalyptic living, to learn what it might be like to live in the dark future they were foretelling. This article gives a brief outline of that experiment.
The utopia experiment, as I called it, started when I put an announcement on my website in January 2006 calling for volunteers to come and help me set up a temporary community in the Scottish Highlands. We would live as if modern civilisation had collapsed, growing our own food, generating our own power, and salvaging what technology we could from the wreckage. Within a few months, I had received hundreds of applications to join the experimental community. And they weren’t all hippies in their twenties either, as one of my friends had predicted. With ages ranging from 18 to 67, and a roughly equal mix of men and women, they came from a wide range of backgrounds; an ex royal marine turned shoemaker, a computer programmer passionate about vegetables, a retired schoolteacher who had spent time with the Inuit.
It started in Mexico, while I was touring the Yucatan Peninsula. I had long dreamed of visiting this part of the world, famous for the ruined cities of the Maya civilisation, which flourished in the first millennium, before collapsing rather suddenly around the tenth century. And when I visited these lost cities, they did not disappoint.
I can still remember vividly the impact that the ruins of Uxmal had on me. As I surveyed the majestic temples and stone colonnades from the top of a steep pyramid, a feeling of melancholy overcame me. I pictured the bustling crowds who must have once thronged the streets and squares, over a thousand years before. In the distance, where once there would have been fields full of maize and beans, all that could be seen now was the green canopy of the jungle, which stretched in all directions, punctuated only here and there by the peeks of distant pyramids, marking the sites of other lost cities.
Nobody who visits these ruined cities can fail to wonder what happened to their original inhabitants, or why they were abandoned. Fortunately, archaeologists have pieced together the answer. The Maya collapse, it turns out, was not triggered by invasion, or any outside force; it was entirely self-caused. It seems the Maya depleted one of their principal resources – trees – and this led to a series of other problems, including soil erosion, decrease of usable farmland, and drought. The growing population that drove this overexploitation was then faced with a diminishing amount of food, which led to increasing migration and, eventually, bloody civil war.
As I sat atop that pyramid in Uxmal, a question began to form in my mind. If a great civilisation like that of the Mayas can implode, I wondered, might not the same happen to us? There are, of course, some big differences between the civilisation we live in today and that of the Mayas. For one thing, our civilisation is global. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, it can appeal to the rest of the world for help. The Mayas did not have this luxury, because they were in effect isolated from the rest of the world. But on the negative side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, the trouble could quickly be exported and cascade throughout the tightly-integrated international system. If modern civilisation collapses, it will do so everywhere. Everyone now stands or falls together.
If the idea of our great global industrial civilisation crashing seems outlandish, no doubt the idea of their own civilisation collapsing would have seemed equally crazy to the Maya at their heyday. To the crowds who once thronged the now deserted streets of Tikal and Chichen-Itza, the idea that within a few years these streets would be deserted would have been hard to entertain. So perhaps those who refuse to contemplate the possibility of global collapse are simply suffering from a failure of imagination.
That’s when the idea for the utopia experiment came to me. I would appeal for volunteers to live as if civilisation had recently collapsed. It would be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn into a plausible narrative of life after the crash. By acting it out in real life, I hoped our thoughts about such an existence would be more realistic than if we just sat around and made it up.
I returned to England from Mexico full of enthusiasm for my new project. The first task was to find a suitable location. My scenario called for somewhere rural, so the volunteers could grow their own food. Climate would be important too – and if climate change was one of the major contributors to the collapse of the old civilisation, the places favoured by the old climate might be too hot or too dry for new settlements. I began to peruse the scientific models forecasting the climate of different parts of the UK, and one area seemed to stand out as more favourable than most – the Highlands of Scotland. While the south of England would become increasingly dry with global warming, all the models predicted that rainfall would still be plentiful in the Highlands, while the rising temperatures would mean that average snowfalls there would reduce by up to ninety per cent.
Having secured a suitable location, the next step was to recruit volunteers for the experiment. In January 2006, I put up a new page on my website, with the following announcement:
“Volunteers needed for a visionary experiment – from March 2007
From March 2007, I’ll be inviting volunteers to join me in an experiment in utopia in the Scottish highlands. We will live together in a novel kind of community based on three main ideas:
1. It will be a LEARNING COMMUNITY – each member must have a distinctive skill or area of knowledge that they can teach to the others.
2. It will be a WORKING COMMUNITY – no money is required from the members, but all must contribute by working.
3. It will be strictly TIME-LIMITED. This is not an attempt to found an ongoing community. Members may stay for up to three months, but may also come for as little as two weeks.“
To make it clear that this was not just another commune, I made it clear that the aim of the experiment would be to simulate life after the collapse of modern civilisation:
“The main objective of this experiment,” I wrote, “is to simulate life in the aftermath of a collapse of global civilisation and to prepare for such an eventuality.” The announcement finished by asking potential volunteers to email me a short (200 word) description of themselves and what they could offer the community.
At first I made no attempt to promote the project or tell anyone the announcement was there. I didn’t know if anyone would see the website, or respond. But, the wonders of the internet being what they are, somehow people found their way to this page, and within a few days I received the first application. It was from a 51 year old man who called himself Agric.
When I eventually met him in person, he turned out to be a softly spoken man with shocks of white hair and irrepressible energy (a “hobbit on speed”, as another volunteer once remarked), . He lived in Slough and worked in computers – but he was planning to sell his house and become a nomad. It didn’t take me long to realise that Agric was a committed “doomer” – a believer in the coming apocalypse. For him, the scenario we were playing out at the utopia experiment was not just a collaborative fiction. It was preparation for the real thing. He could always back up his gloomy prognostications with lengthy discourses on the stock exchange, the global economy and, of course, peak oil.
One of the main lessons from my experiment was how easy it was for people to make the same ideological transition that Agric had already made – from imagining what it might be like if civilisation really did collapse, to firmly believing that it would collapse. The experiment was originally meant to be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn it into a plausible narrative of life after the crash. The problem, as it turned out, was that our thoughts became too realistic. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen this coming. A similar thing, after all, happened in the famous Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971 by Phillip Zimbardo, when the undergraduates who he selected to live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building started taking their roles far too seriously. Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment early, and in the end I also decided to curtail the experiment after a year.
For me, one of the final straws came when some of the volunteers started talking about justice. Without any police force, surely we would have to enact our own – inevitably rough – kind of justice? That sort of thing is ok to write about in fiction, but it could get very dangerous if you begin to start acting it out in reality.
Besides the transition from taking the scenario as an interesting fiction and an accurate prediction, I also witnessed another strange mutation; the volunteers began to think of the future collapse as something good. It’s the opposite to sour grapes – Jon Elster has called it “sweet lemons”. This strain of thought has many names. Luddism. Anti-technologism. Anti-transhumanism. Primitivism. Bioconservatism. But they all amount to the same thing.
Part of the appeal of this current of thought is that it provides an easy explanation for a sense of anomie. Boredom, frustration, anxiety, depression? According to the Luddites, we can blame them all on industrial civilisation. If we were hunter-gatherers, living in small bands consisting mostly of family members, in contact with nature, directly satisfying our own biological needs each day, then we’d be happy, right? Well, maybe. But that was the past, and we can’t go back there now. Or maybe we can – if society collapses…. That’s one reason why Luddism is so dangerous: it encourages people to imagine social collapse as something desirable.
Thinking about the future can be done in a sensible way, but only when one is aware of the many pitfalls that we tend to fall into when trying to do futurology. The utopia experiment taught me about many of these pitfalls. Besides the tendency to take fiction as truth, and the sweet-lemons phenomenon, I also witnessed what the security expert Bruce Schneier refers as the tendency to focus on “movie plot threats”. People worry about dramatic threats of the sort that make good movies – and convince themselves that these are probable just because they are dramatic. As Schneier says:
“We all do it. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats. We imagine anthrax spread from crop dusters. Or a contaminated milk supply. Or terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared”
Psychologically, this all makes sense. Evolution has endowed us with good imaginations. But these imaginations are often seduced by dramatic images and pay little attention to good probabilistic reasoning.
When I did eventually call an end to the experiment, most of the volunteers returned happily to their former lives, but some of them wanted to carry on. Indeed, they were shocked that I did not want to carry on with them. When I explained that the experiment had always been just that – an experiment, a kind of collaborative fiction – they didn’t believe me, even though I had clearly stated that at the outset. A few of them are, I believe, still thinking about trying to buy some land of their own in a remote part of Scotland so they can live there permanently and prepare for the coming apocalypse for real. And they are convinced that someday, I’ll see the light, and come and join them.”
June 17th, 2009 at 11:35 am
I was one of the volunteers at TUE. I joined a few months in. I find a number of points that Evans brings up here odd, and some of them blatantly untrue.
1- Evans says this was meant to be a collaborative fiction. Of course it was a fiction. No one arriving at TUE thought they had suddenly entered a collapse situation. But this fiction, experiment, whatever term you use, was predicated on the notion that it COULD become reality. Different people will assign different probabilities to that possibility, and yes, you should have had the foresight to realise that something like this would attract more than an average representation of doomsayers, but claiming that using TUE as preparation for reality was wrong is hypocritical. It suggests you were misleading in your initial communications to volunteers.
2- Evans says he got cold feet when volunteers started seeing a collapse as something good. Wrong. Evans himself suggested before the experiment started that a return to simple, localised living would lead to happier people with more leisure time and less stress and other problems associated with techno-cluttered 21st Century life.
3- Evans says volunteers were taking things too far when they started talking about justice. Fine, perhaps that is true, but had Evans been present he would have been able to manage the experiment far better, and would have been able to keep the rats from building their own maze.
Saying that the volunteers got carried away with ‘movie plot threats’ is simplistic and dramatic. In reality it was Evans’ woeful management and shortsightedness that resulted in the collapse of his ‘experiment’.
June 18th, 2009 at 7:32 am
An interesting, but not entirely unpredictable response. I have no idea which one of the volunteers “Jimmy D” was, as this is clearly a pseudonym. A surprising number of the volunteers, in fact, used false names.
“Jimmy D” rightly points out that I myself suggested before the experiment that a return to simple, localised living would lead to happier people with more leisure time and less stress and other problems associated with techno-cluttered 21st Century life. That is true, but it doesn’t contradict what I say in the article above about getting cold feet when volunteers started seeing a collapse as something good. It was the fact that some of the volunteers started taking a perverse satisfaction in thinking about the social chaos and human misery that would inevitably occur *during* a collapse that spooked me, not the more healthy anticipation of a more relaxed way of life that might emerge long after the crisis was over. This struck me as a kind of secular apocalypticism, a secular version of the pious faithful looking forward to the punishment of sinners. It was frankly disturbing and was a major reason for my wish to end the project early.
Due to the sinister machinations of groupthink, my refusal to join in this collective gloating was increasingly interpreted by the volunteers as evidence of mental disturbance. I was marginalised by the hard core of volunteers who adopted an increasingly evangelical tone. “Jimmy D” appears to have softened somewhat since those heady days, but clearly retains some of that lingering hostility to me.
This is clear from his wish to shift the blame for the failures of the experiment from the volunteers on to my own “woeful management” of the experiment. Actually, the whole point of the experiment was that the volunteers should manage it themselves. I made it very clear from the beginning that I was not that of leader, but that of a participant-observer. I wanted to see what kind of “maze” these “rats” would build (to use “Jimmy D’s” own metaphor) when left to their own devices.
Yes, perhaps it was inevitable that they would build something as nightmarish as they did. But that, I’m afraid, is something “Jimmy D” must take responsibility for, instead of foisting the blame on me.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Dylan, I don’t know who you think I am; you probably wouldn’t remember me even if I gave my name.
But I hold no lingering hostility against you and actually, if events happened as you describe :
(”some of the volunteers started taking a perverse satisfaction in thinking about the social chaos and human misery that would inevitably occur *during* a collapse – a secular version of the pious faithful looking forward to the punishment of sinners”)
then I agree, that is disturbing.
I was not a part of nor privy to any of that.
I simply observed a group of volunteers who had put a lot of time, effort, and in some cases money, into the project, who inevitably felt let down when the founder would only appear apparition-like, fleetingly and uselessly, before disappearing again without notice.
Your presence actually demoralized people. You say you were a participant-observer; you were neither. You say you were marginalised; I saw none of that. We wanted you to be an active, engaged and productive member of the group, but you appeared incapable.
I will withdraw my comment that your “woeful management” was to blame for the project’s failure. If the kind of evangelical secularism was emerging that you describe, then I don’t blame you for ending it. But some kind of management should have come from your side to ensure that volunteers were forced into developing the skills and tools to survive, rather than allowed to develop the social and philosophical themes that you say were emerging.
So why then did the experiment fail? Were an opinionated few too influential? Was there not enough interest? Or will you simply blame ‘human nature’?
I myself think the lack of any singular organising figurehead played the biggest role. Without an experimental coordinator to ensure the volunteers had to innovate to get their necessities (food, warmth, shelter etc) nor a leader within the group to push things along, things very quickly grew stale, and the place became more of a budget eco-holiday camp than a survivalist experiment.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I think I know who you are. If I’m right, you were present for only a few weeks, during which time I was indeed away from the experiment more than I would have wanted, for reasons that you seem to be unaware of.
However, that was quite unusual. For most of the project, from July 2006 on, I was there 24/7. Who do you think put up the yurts that you slept in? Who do you think planted the first crop of vegetables you ate? Who do you think installed the Rayburn you cooked on, and the hot water tank? I did, with help from Adam and other volunteers who lived on site with me from July 2006 on. You arrived almost a year later, and stayed for a few weeks. By that time, I had been living on site for almost a year.
Your apparent yearning for a strong leader to take control is interesting. But that was never my plan. Sorry.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
You also wrote a rather nasty piece about the experiment for a newspaper. So, even if you “hold no lingering hostility” me, as you claim, you certainly seemed to be hostile in 2007, when you wrote that piece!
June 18th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
You’re right I was one of the journos who took part. But I actually wrote a rather nice piece! Even if I did allude to your ineffectiveness.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/the-utopia-experiment-a-radical-crash-course-in-selfsufficient-living-457876.html
I think you’re thinking of the Daily Mail girl who came up for half a day and decided we were all a bunch of lazy slobs making an excuse for ourselves.
The point is I actually cared about this project, was very excited to be taking part, and unlike the other journos who visited, was not doing it purely for professional reasons.
Granted, 4 weeks out of a year is hardly going to give an expansive picture, and yes you set everything up for the start (shouldn’t that be expected though?) but I am also basing my assumptions on conversation had with others who knew you for longer.
The truth is, while I was there, you were a ghost. I know you had some personal issues to deal with, but while that may excuse your behaviour it doesn’t negate its effects. And I’m pretty sure your issues didn’t appear the day I arrived, and disappear the day I left.
Regarding my “yearning for a strong leader”, yes! I personally am no leader of men, just the opposite in fact. So I guess I was overly sensitive to what I perceived as a distinct lack of direction, focus and any semblance of following some kind of experimental method.
If TUE was to mirror real life events, then some kind of leader would have to have emerged soon, and he didn’t. Perhaps that was because the transitory nature of volunteering didn’t allow it. Perhaps the kind of people attracted to TUE are generally not leadership material. I know Agric was also adamant he was not going to step into that role.
But for those of us who were there to learn about living off-grid and sans-supermarket, it was a frustrating experience.
To be honest, I don’t want to sound too critical. TUE was an experience I will never forget, and many volunteers (myself included) are very grateful to you for having sacrificed so much to set it all up. But it is still frustrating that such a good idea didn’t really come close to reaching its potential, for the simple lack of a bit of project management.
June 18th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
No, I wasn’t thinking of the Daily Mail journo. I was thinking of the nasty piece you wrote, in which you were particularly rude about me. You are repeating the same nonsense now that you stated in your silly article. Look, I wasn’t there 24/7 while you were there. I was meeting potential donors to raise funds for the project, meeting planners who were threatening to pull the plug on the project there and then (and which worried me sick, though I never let on to you as I didn’t want to spoil your enjoyment), and seeing a doctor about my health which had suffered after almost a year of living on the project. But I was there more often than you imply in your exaggerated descriptions. I know you wanted me there the whole time, and I guess this was something to do with your own powerful longing for a father figure. You even confessed to me that one of your main reasons for being at TUE was to answer some deep personal questions about whether people could live without leaders. You were clearly talking about yourself then.
Don’t be angry with me for failing to be the fantasy leader you dreamed of. That’s not me babe.
June 19th, 2009 at 5:40 am
Oh dear, I thought we were getting on so well!
“Silly article”? Read it again Dylan. 90% of it is about how much I learnt and enjoyed being there. The few lines I spend on you tucked away near the end are just a description of what I saw in front of me, and what others described. A friend of mine, who also stayed at TUE for a few days, met Angus shortly after it was published, and he said it was the only positive article he had seen about the project so far. Don’t be so self-absorbed.
You’re right, I didn’t know what you were doing when you were absent. Perhaps you were wandering the fields staring at the ground. Perhaps you were under your duvet crying. Maybe, just maybe, you were even meeting ‘planners’ and ‘funders’. The point is if you don’t tell anyone, can you blame them for guessing?
As for my comments about leadership being due to a “powerful longing for a father figure” – really Dylan, that is laughable! Does everyone who sees the merit in having a single guiding hand have ‘father issues’? And I never said anything about “deep personal questions about whether people could live without leaders”. Either this IS a case of mistaken identity or you are just making things up now.
I arrived with no preconceptions and no expectations. After a few days it was clear that the lack of direction was affecting progress, morale and potentially the longevity of the project. Hence my thoughts about leadership.
Just answer me this: Do you disagree that you managed TUE poorly?
And don’t call me babe.
June 20th, 2009 at 6:22 am
One point of fact, and I’ll leave the rest to my forthcoming book about the experiment: yes, you did state quite clearly to me that one of the most interesting things about the experiment, from your point of view, was whether people could live without leaders. I say so with certainty as I am reading from notes I made on the very day in which you interviewed me in the barn. So your claim to have “arrived with no preconceptions and no expectations” is not only disingenuous – it is false even by your own lights.
Look, I’m sorry that your brief stay in TUE didn’t give you the journalistic fame you were seeking, and that as a result you are still eking out a living in some hack’s job in India. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again!
June 20th, 2009 at 7:36 am
Wow Dylan, so personal! And a little bitter?
I don’t remember saying anything about leader-less living. If I did, fine, but that’s not why I applied to TUE.
“Journalistic fame”? Give me a break. Some of your assumptions about me are really quite out of line Dylan.
I’m actually starting to rather dislike you. My criticisms have been objective and based on what I saw as real failings at TUE. You’ve hit back with very personal and unjustified jibes.
I won’t post again. Good luck with the book.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Personal? Yes. Bitter? Er, yes! I’m angry at the way you’ve attempted to portray yourself as objective and fair when you weren’t, as is clear both from your original article and your comments here. In your article, for example, your comments about me are not just “a few lines tucked away near the end” but four whole paragraphs in which you make several false and rather nasty allegations. And above you accuse me of “making things up”. So I don’t think you are only “starting to rather dislike” me now – I think you made up your mind about that back at TUE. In which case, the feeling was mutual.