Rob the Protopian Punk, here. I’m a writer, novelist, musician, late starter, restarter, tech skeptic and the Count of Monte Cristo.
Netspiel is a project and community dedicated to celebrating, understanding and reclaiming our shared humanity. Designed as an antidote to doomerism and corporate, ad-driven driven media, it’s a space where I will engage my curiosity and explore whatever peaks my interest, letting the branches of the tree grow where they may. I’ll deep-dive into a range of ideas and topics, old and new, from music and film to technology and history to professional wrestling and theme park design.
Think of it as a journal, not as content. Netspiel is personal in scope and I have no aims of growing it beyond what opens my eyes and stirs my heart. I’m slapping down the clay and letting myself see what I can sculpt it into. No metrics, minimal SEO, this is my attempt at escaping the rigid categorization and algorithmic curation of social media. This is my experiment in re-humanization.
Welcome. Pull up a chair. Let’s see what this becomes.
Why do you call yourself a Protopian Punk?
It’s downright dystopian out there. Sometimes I feel like I’ve woken up in a cyberpunk novel: mega-corporations battling for my attention, technology that infiltrates our minds and bodies, climate disasters, artificial intelligence. It’s all rather bleak…and we don’t even get the cool trench coats.
The counter-point to dystopia is typically considered to be utopia: an ideal, even perfect world, where human beings live in absolute happiness and fulfillment. However, utopian thinking can be just as bleak as dystopian thinking. Perfection is impossible and the “ideal” is a subjective metric. One man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia.
That’s why, when envisioning a better future than our present, I prefer the term protopia. Created by the futurist Kevin Kelly, a protopia describes a society that improves incrementally over time, sometimes backsliding, but always with an eye toward progress…and not just technological, but natural, moral and societal progress as well. Protopians believe that even if things can never be perfect, they can get better, they can improve.
It can be easy to give into despair or hopelessness when looking at all the problems that face us, especially if you feel like you’re already behind in life. That’s why protopian thinking is so essential. To forge a better future, both as a society and as an individual, you must first accept that things can actually improve. That progress is still possible. This isn’t blind optimism, but rather, the raw determination that one can grow without needing to “hustle” or “optimize”.
So instead of a cyberpunk, call me a Protopian Punk.