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The Utopia Experiment
Apr. 4th, 2007 03:12 amVia The Register, I found out about this experiment. It looks like a cross between communal hippy living, sociology, extreme camping, and near-future LARP.
This chap has given up his professorship at the University of the West of England to run this experiment, and wants volunteers with suitable skills to go there for two weeks to three months during the project's eighteen-month overall duration. He's an Intelligent Autonomous Systems guy, so I have no idea whether they're actually going to be gathering psych/soc data about how well it worked, but the idea of a time-limited commune with no permanent members (except presumably the project director and some core staff) is an interesting one.
On the other hand, he may very well be a complete fruitloop - looking at his suggested-reading list is instructive. Jared Diamond, Kim Stanley Robinson, Theodore Kaczynski, Aldous Huxley, William Morris, Butler, Thoreau, Swift, More, and Plato.
Spot the odd one out?
This chap has given up his professorship at the University of the West of England to run this experiment, and wants volunteers with suitable skills to go there for two weeks to three months during the project's eighteen-month overall duration. He's an Intelligent Autonomous Systems guy, so I have no idea whether they're actually going to be gathering psych/soc data about how well it worked, but the idea of a time-limited commune with no permanent members (except presumably the project director and some core staff) is an interesting one.
On the other hand, he may very well be a complete fruitloop - looking at his suggested-reading list is instructive. Jared Diamond, Kim Stanley Robinson, Theodore Kaczynski, Aldous Huxley, William Morris, Butler, Thoreau, Swift, More, and Plato.
Spot the odd one out?
