Review: The Utopia Experiment - Dylan Evans

In The End of The Party, his insider account of the later days of the New Labour government, Andrew Rawnsley tells the story of a city businessman who, fearing the imminent collapse of the banking system in 2007, purchased a flock of sheep to ensure that his family would have something to eat in the event of a complete societal breakdown. Meanwhile, at roughly the same time and prompted by roughly the same fears, the academic Dylan Evans was living in a small commune in the Scottish Highlands, which he had dubbed Utopia.

Utopia was designed as a small, time-limited experiment in post-apocalyptic living. Prompted by his premonitions of impending doom, and his misgivings over his career in researching Artificial Intelligence, Evans quit his job, sold his house, and used the proceeds to fund ‘a kind of collaborative storytelling, a real-life role-play' in which he and a group of volunteers would ‘try to figure out what life might be like if civilization collapsed, by acting as if it already had.’ His vision was simple: volunteers would all contribute their labour to the project, and each would have a distinctive skill which they could teach the others. They would build their own shelters, live off food they could grow or forage themselves, and relearn traditional crafts. Stays in Utopia would last between two weeks and three months. It would be, he imagined, ‘a cross between Plato's Academy and The Beach'.

Unsurprisingly, the reality didn’t quite live up to these lofty ideals: The Utopia Experiment opens with Evans being detained under the Mental Health Act, roughly midway through the commune’s planned lifespan. What follows is an account of the experiment, mixed in with Evans’ reflections on his own work in Artificial Intelligence and what drove him to go off-grid.

The Utopia Experiment has been compared to Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux, and there is that element of exploring outsiderdom within Evans’ writing. He finds that the experiment naturally attracts a selection of conspiracy theorists - 'doomers' - who believe that civilisation will collapse due to financial crises, global warming, or the end of cheap oil. Not least among these is Adam, a wandering mystic, who promotes a 'strange gospel which was a mish-mash of New Age ideas and an idiosyncratic interpretation of Christianity that seemed to draw heavily on Dan Brown'. Adam helps to build yurts, but later comes into conflict with Evans, who perceives that he is trying to become a sort of messianic guiding figure behind Utopia.

Unlike Ronson and Theroux’s work, though, The Utopia Experiment is primarily an introspective piece of writing. Evans looks at what attracted him to the idea of imminent societal collapse, and how his fixation contributed to his own mental breakdown. What began as a rational desire to question the possible outcomes of the work that he and his colleagues were carrying out at the cutting edge of robotics and AI (to quote Jurassic Park, they were more interested in whether something could be done than whether it should) soon escalated out of control. This is amusing at first (Evans is puzzled that his friend Charlotte doesn't immediately agree when he suggests she should buy a horse, so 'she might be able to ride up to Scotland to join me and my fellow survivalists and so escape the nightmarish last days of London'), but the situation deteriorates rapidly, and Evans becomes a ghost-like figure in the commune, unable to contribute in any positive way. The experiment is eating up his savings, and his personal life is similarly fraught: he marries, and divorces, during the course of his stay in Utopia. 

The important question which The Utopia Experiment addresses is why people are drawn towards dystopia, or, as Evans phrases it, 'why are we so bad at imagining positive forms of technological change?' Is, as his friend Mick suggests, pondering the end of the world 'always just a way of wondering about your own mortality,' a grandiose, rather manic way of projecting one's inner turmoil onto the outside world? Evans coins the term ‘Noah Syndrome’ to diagnose several of his volunteers, who he believes are awaiting the collapse with 'the smug anticipation of being able to say 'I told you so' when disaster finally arrives'. In himself, he identifies a tendency to project his own feelings of alienation and dread onto the wider world – he is seeking a rational cause for his depression. 

Are we right to fear for the future of humanity, as robots become increasingly capable of carrying out human tasks? Is going back to nature, as the doomers suggest, the best means of achieving happiness, as a species? Looking deeper into the question of collapse, and the potential dangers which come with technological advancement, Evans examines the contrasting views of Rousseau and Hobbes: were our hunter-gatherer ancestors noble savages, or were their lives simply ‘nasty, brutish and short’? Based on his experiences, and his reading of Stephen Pinker, Evans concludes that while Hobbes was likely the better anthropologist, Rousseau may have been the better philosopher; in fact, we can take elements from both, to understand that while there was never a golden age, technology is a double edged sword, just as capable of working against humanity as in its favour. 

The Utopia Experiment is thought-provoking, funny and poignant. Evans writes with a wry, self-deprecating humour, and an eye for the absurd (on his first night after being sectioned, he finds himself wondering 'what is the etiquette when introducing yourself to a fellow patient in a psychiatric hospital?'), whilst never losing sight of the important issues within his work. During the course of the experiment, Evans appeared at a conference where he predicted that the odds of a total societal collapse within the next decade were roughly 50%. He has since revised this estimate down, but Utopia has taken on a life of its own, and still continues in his absence.