These mostly sound like good things to me. Especially if, as somewhat implied iirc, they are outputs of some high level equilibria defenses.

I'd mentioned the Golden Age novels by Wright before when we'd gone hiking together, so I thought it'd be worth looking at some related flaws in his utopia.

The Sophotechs (the trilogy's equivalent of the minds), are philosophically libertarian. While they do intervene to stop direct violence, they otherwise enforce a system of complete freedom over the self, as well as the maintenance of property rights. This has some interesting consequences, the most detrimental of which is that everyone in the Golden Oecumene lives their otherwise utopian lives with metaphorical handguns on their nightstand. At any point, any citizen can make a decision which would destroy their life, identity, or cause them to suffer for eternity, and the Sophotechs will rigidly prevent anyone else from doing anything about it on the basis that it was their free will to do so. While there are precautions (you can be informed of the consequences of your actions, or enter a contract to be restrained from doing anything that would destroy you) the people with the wrong temperment to use these tools run the risk of what is essentially damnation.

Some examples from the books:

• Permanently destroying your identity by believing yourself to be someone else.
• Falling into uber-hedonism, where you wirehead yourself compulsively.
• Modifying your brain so that your values will never shift.
• Removing your ability to fill pity or empathy.

There's actually entire factions of society which exhibit these faults. There are obsessive hedonists which malicously try to spread the gospel of wireheading, and the Invariants, people whose brains are designed so that they don't have emotional conflicts and always act optimally in their best interests. 

The system of property rights and limited government also has its own knock-on effects. Patents still exist and are permanent, so anyone who has ever developed a technology can maintain a permanent monopoly over it, including humans who are so old that they existed before the Sophotechs came along (~10,000 years old or so). Money still exists, although it's represented by access to the computing time of the Sophotechs instead of by trust in a government. 

Because the role of the government is so limited (it exists to fund the commonwealth military with an extremely low tax, which we'll get to), there's no social safety net either. Everyone has to pay for all of the goods they consume, either from the rent on a patent or property, or from work. Work still exists since, at least in Wright's view, the Sophotechs have limited attention, and so humans can be paid extremely below-market rates for doing very specialized work. Combined with the fact that goods are so cheap and the fact that most people can hope to patent an extremely niche product that even a small slice of the trillions of people in the solar system use, most people enjoy a very comfortable existence (The median income from the books is the budget equivalent of a modern earth military per capita).

If for some reason you can't/don't want to pay for things though, then you do actually starve to death. This happens to one character directly in the novels (he spends all of his compute on maintaining a delusion that he's someone else), and presumably to others. In fact, one of the major motivations of many of the characters is to amass as many resources as possible, so that as the universe approaches inevitable heat death, they will be able to buy out more resources and stay alive longer than everyone else. 

All of this is supposed to be balanced out by public activism. Society is basically organized into large factions which each have their own philosophical viewpoints, and they use their collective boycott power and social influence to try to control what they each see as socially degrading. The factions advocating for wireheading, for instance, are essentially sanctioned by the much wealthier and more powerful Horators, who are traditionalists (still transhumanists by today's standards, but who want to maintain respect for legacy human emotions, history, and the security of the commonwealth). Because wealth is somewhat ossified (all the major breakthroughs were patented thousands of years ago, and most of those people are Horators), this state of affairs is semi-stable. Individual rogue actors and inter-factional disputes still happen though, so there's no permanent solution to ensuring that the Golden Oecumene does actually remain both perfectly free and utopian.

The main conflict of the novels, in fact, is about the protagonist wanting to set up a civilization in another solar system, where the influence of the Horators will be greatly limited. His perspective is that he wants insurance against an alien attack on humanity to ensure that human life will be able to continue in the universe, while the Horators are worried that they won't be able to effectively ensure that their social rules against self torture and illiberalism are maintained light years away. The Sophotechs in the book are still constrained by light speed communication, so cultural drift is another huge problem the civilization is going to have to eventually deal with. Even if the original solar system remains basically utopian, they have no guarantee against the suffering of other galactic polities (since the people who colonized them can set things up of their own free will, similar theming to The Accord's habs). 


All told, the libertarian value lock-in that the Golden Oecumene was created with is mostly extraordinarily utopian for ~everyone, although with the potential for basically arbitrary suffering, even though the Sophotechs are powerful enough to model anyone's mind and understand the actions they'd choose. 


Spoilers for the end of the trilogy below. If you thought the conflicts I was describing above sound interesting, it's really a great series worth reading, and also available for free online on the author's website.


BREAK


At the very end of the final novel, and in the sequel short story The Far End of History, it becomes apparent that Wright's world is actually incredibly dystopian. The reason stems from the lock-in of a military law in the creators of the Sophotechs, which stipulates that they themselves are not allowed to directly use force. Their workaround is to use a man called Atkins for any violent legal or military ends they might need. Atkins is even older than the Sophotechs themselves, and having been a soldier, had voluntarily commited to the removal of his human rights for the purposes of war. In much the same sense that a soldier of the U.S can be compelled to risk their life on the battlefield despite their rights as a citizen, Atkins can basically be used for anything the Sophotechs need him to so long as it has strategic value.

The culmination of this is entire civilizations of just Atkins and his identical clones, which are created over hundreds of thousands of years as distractions from the Golden Oecumene. The citizens of these polities are variously tortured for information and exterminated by the Silent Oecumene (long story, but a divergent extra-solar faction of humanity from before the Sophotechs existed with philosophical differences). While the original Oecumene and its sisters are composed of humans with rights and so are presumably still utopian, 99% of all sentient human life in the universe pretty much ends up being constripted human soldiers, who have no guarantees against suffering. Even if it's all technically the same guy, it's hard to say that this is really the best things could have ended up. 

Marvelous! This makes more sense of the culture than the books do.

I haven't done much oppositional reading, but I enjoy oppositional watching. Movies need a lot more help than most books toward making sense. I'd tell you my theory of Sith ideology, but it's embarrassing to even have theories about a series made mostly for kids.

I was going to comment on the apparant deathism of the culture, which has always bothered me. Their cautious low level of interventions is a bit easier to explain, but the books don't bother to do it.

How about this: Their nonintervention is some remnant of an alignment that didn't allow them to intervene directly to influence humans, as a safety measure? And so special circumstance is only little efforts that are pursued by the very few Culture humans who care, aided by the few Minds that humor them.

hi, yes.

the claim of the novels when taken as a series is that the culture is a reflection of the values of fully developed humans. scarcity creates trauma creates perversion. with material scarcity handled, all but a slim minority of humans are happy to fold themselves into the hedonism and status-gossip. minimal propaganda (though maximal bread and circus) is called for.

nonetheless, some humans still hunger. the books are told from the point of view of these disaffected: imperfect characters who turn away from the culture. the arc of a culture novel shows their return, after their "eccentric" values are trialed.

crucially, these characters are limited. the same individualistic exceptionalism that causes them to swerve does also prevent them from understanding the graceful compassion of the culture as a whole. as the culture wiki summarizes:

Horza boarded Tsealsir after escaping from the Eaters 43 standard hours before the Orbital's demolition. Horza feigned a serious fire and used Tsealsir's reaction to locate its brain.

but rather the ship may have read horza's intent, and pretended at destruction in order that the changer would save himself. at least it may have been self-sacrificing -- horza flatters himself to assume that he outwitted the mind. similarly in player of games: humiliating the azad is a nice side-effect of granting gurgeh some much needed perspective. the purpose of the journey is the character growth; the stakes are high only to capture the subject's attention. (in excession, the sleeper service admits aloud to such meddlesome motivations.)

all of this seems textual, at least at a level 1 reading. the point-of-view is limited, but the reader need not be. banks admires humanity's base drives... salutes them for propelling us forward... but recognizes that they have no outlet among these last men.

will such a society be as empty as some claim? or will there be a spark of life and adventure even there, in which we at present -- shaped by scarcity, and striving, and whatever else -- can recognize ourselves? the claim is the latter. and we are provided with ten studies of such.

Thank you for pointing the flaws of the Culture out! While I haven't read the novels related to the Culture, I can quote my recent comment which likely fully applies to the Culture:

Nick Bostrom's Deep Utopia has the AIs destroy all instrumental goals that humans once had. This arguably means that humans have no way to help each other with anything or to teach anyone anything, they can only somehow form bonds over something and will even have a hard time expressing those bonds.

And what positive visions of the AIs' role does mankind have?