Rubber Souls
[author's note - awful essay, only keep it published because some people linked to it, please don't bother reading it]
We are animals trapped in a very strange game. What is this game? It's a game of status claims and enforcement. Shunning and humiliation is the punishment for the worst players. Companionship is the reward. As with all things human, it is backstopped by natural and sexual selection.
One important question Utopia must ask itself is: are the losers necessary to give the winners a good time? There is a certain joy in being cruel to low status people. We do this all the time. If you think you don't, you almost certainly do, unless you are a kind of rare saint. And this saintliness likely makes you an object of ridicule. And now we have losers on an internet-scale. An early example of this phenomenon is the Star Wars Kid.
If you have not seen it, it is a video of a fat, graceless teenager pretending to be a Jedi by swinging a broom like a lightsaber, an act most of us have been guilty of in our life. His high-school bullies uploaded it to some pre-YouTube video site. They invited the world to join them in their sadism and the world was happier for it. On balance, the utilitarian is forced to argue this act of collective bullying was a positive. So much pleasure his humiliation created, uncountable hours of gleeful predatory joy vastly exceeding the almost unbearable pain it must have caused him, which must continue to some degree even to this day. Had he killed himself, the world would have indulged in a sort of performative remorse, which is its own kind of pleasure. Like the Hollywood cliche of the native American hunter, we should thank him for his sacrifice for our collective welfare. This paragraph horrified Claude, so I will note it is written as a critique of humanity.
Our instincts here, though pathological in the internet scale due to the disproportionate harm to the victim, are functional in the small. The game, existing, must be played, at least by those who desire its rewards. It even incentivizes the bullied in positive ways, forcing them to learn how to change their behavior so they fit in better - which is an important skill, though there is a sort of cruel self-bootstrapping nature to this of course.
The functionality of these instincts is fragile. They are helpful only because of contingent facts about humans and our psychology. They are helpful, because we are what we are. Genetic technologies obsolete sexual selection. The type of species that will "meta-evolve" out of that will not have our weird status games, as status games are downstream of asymmetric information and sexual selection. Once you're "meta-evolving," you can just "do the thing" and design what you want your progeny to be. And AI obsoletes genetic engineering, anyway. The space of minds is vast and human-like things, unlike crabs, are ridiculous creatures unlikely to reemerge from from selective pressures of the future.
So any arguments for preserving human status games cannot lie in the functional, at least if functional is defined as 'adaptive' in a selective environment of posthuman agents. If we care only about evolutionary and meta-evolutionary success in the Landian way, one needs to do nothing. There is no good reason to keep humans around at all, and agents with power will not do so. There is no need for Utopia if this is true. Thus if Utopia preserves human status games, it will do it for aesthetic reasons.
And there are aesthetic reasons to keep our cruel status games. There is a reading of the human story in which they are everything we are. Removing them, do we find ourselves in an eternal future of MDMA-soaked cuddle-puddling? With no art or striving or drama. I find something grotesque in that. But I am sure I wouldn't if I took enough MDMA. Can the edges be dulled while keeping the form? Probably, I guess. But there is a way to eliminate the pain while keeping humans and their societies vaguely human-shaped: a complementary race of insentient people-shaped things that can lose status games and we can bully and shun.
This might sound as bad as any other form of wireheading, but it is important to note, humans feel great disgust towards the loser. There is almost an element of disease and contamination. There is pity, too, sometimes. But we may overestimate the value of these games because of this and underestimate substitutes. When losing, we hate ourselves. When others lose, we feel superior; pity is a positive emotion to a degree people don't admit. When winning, the world is just and fair. And our past loser self? We shouldn't think about them too much, as remembering feels almost like associating with them. Because of this when we imagine status games in far mode (and nothing is so far as Utopia), we may imagine ourselves the winners, and this may bias us against solutions that remove these dynamics or soften them in ways that strike us as unsatisfying or grotesque.
Regarding the grovelers, it's important that they appear to us (though not being so in actuality) indistinguishable from normal humans, as we likely won't enjoy it enough if we don't feel we are causing real pain - or have the potential to cause real pain. A gossip might feel bad when their friend learns of their mocking revelations, but the frisson the gossip feels while gossiping, the emotion that powers their jokes, is a sort of sadism. So Utopia lies to its humans to give them their sadistic joys.
And in this way we can preserve the form and dynamics of our status games, and even the motivations. Everyone gets the great pleasure of being superior to a vast array of others. If you want a vision of this future, imagine a boot on the foot of humanity, forever, stomping on rubber souls. Like a cat with his artificial mouse, we can have our artificial social victims. And in this way, we can be happy while remaining ourselves. Bully for us!