Personal utopia vs. Immanentizing the eschaton

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My mind was a little bit prepared this time. I love how Ethan Mollick shares his thoughts. And I love Bruce Sterling (the Sci Fi author who asked me a question about heuristocrats at etech 2006, a proud moment).

So while lazily browsing Mollickland yesterday, I came across his "immanentizing the eschaton as a business model". Taken literally, which I know is hard, it is really about making the world heavenly (for whom?) by means of a technological singularity. Or accelerating the End of Days by means of complete destruction. Pick your favorite.

But then, with my mind freshly imprinted, I found a link in my inbox this morning to a lecture by Bruce Sterling at the Technology Biennial in Turin in April 2024. It is an ode to Torino as a kind of personal utopia. Utopia is a version of eschaton (the one that National Review founder William F. Buckley railed against in "don't immanentize the eschaton"). Referring to the headless end of Sir Thomas More, Sterling writes "If somebody says the word “Utopia” to you, you should think of an adult woman smuggling the severed head of her father away from an execution." But then there is a distinction between public or political utopia, the one that decoupled Sir Thomas from his head (that, or his opposition to Henry VIII's decoupling from the Catholic Church) and personal or private utopia. He brings up the delightful example of Alexander Calder, who built his own personal utopia by creating his own brain extensions, including his own forks or bread toaster.

I am not sure that "personal eschaton" is an expression we want to add to our lexicon. But as a business model, immanentizing personal utopias by empowering individuals to discover and design, that makes a lot more sense.