Category Archives: In the News

Memoranda

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A few quick notes and links:

  1. Bill sent along the news that Fox has cancelled its utopian reality show. As Bill put it on Twitter, "I wonder how Kanter would explain this."
  2. Last week in class, I mentioned an interesting essay I had read on bias in historical sources and what it means to say that a source is "biased." I highly recommend that you read it, especially as you begin writing your papers.
  3. Speaking of your papers, and memoranda in general, don’t forget to bring three to seven pages of your paper to class next week in hard copy form. These do not need to be the first three to seven pages; you can choose a different part of your outline to begin writing from. You should give thought to citation style and the kinds of questions posed on the rubric distributed in class, but the most important thing here is to BEGIN WRITING!

Utopia: Viewer Discretion Advised?

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Fox's Utopia

One of you alerted me to the fact that Fox apparently premiered a new reality show called Utopia last night. They claim it is a social experiment about how to create a society from scratch. I didn’t see the premiere, but initial reviews appear skeptical.

If the show has any relevance to our class, though, perhaps it does raise the question of whether utopian communities are always "reality shows" to some extent—that is, performances designed to be "watched" by the outside world. Gardner suggested as much about Drop City in last week’s readings, when he argued that the Droppers were artists in search of publicity above all.

If one question raised last week is whether utopias always become dystopian, maybe this new show raises the question of whether utopians are not unlike publicity-hungry reality show cast members.

Or maybe those are the same question …

Growing Up on The Farm

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As you complete the readings for Wednesday (and post your required comment there), you may also be interested in an article published last Thursday in Vanity Fair. In "What Life is Like When You’re Born on a Commune," Erika Anderson tells the story of growing up on The Farm, the commune founded by Stephen Gaskin and featured in one of the assigned videos for our next meeting.

Anderson raises some questions that will likely come up in other readings this semester, including one about whether utopian communes are doomed to failure—especially when they are controlled by the vision of a single leader:

Are all utopias truly dystopias? Are elements of a dream also the seeds of its destruction: hubris, the overwhelming belief that this has never been done before, an utter lack of checks and balances? Before 1983, when The Farm essentially disbanded, and the population fell to its current 200, becoming an intentional community—far more autonomous than a commune, where everyone pays dues, lives in their own homes, drives their own cars, makes their own money—Gaskin could do no wrong in the eyes of his followers.

Yet despite her criticisms of The Farm, Anderson also claims that its influence was wide-ranging:

The legacy of The Farm reaches far beyond the guru who built it: the thousands who lived there, were born there, its visitors, its neighbors, the relatives, and the communities that received those who left, the midwives and mothers who followed Ina May, and anyone whose read a Farm book or watched a Farm documentary. I am one of many.

Feel free to post your reactions to the article in the comments below.