The story itself has been posted here.

Tomorrow, to celebrate a certain well-known event, I'll be posting another story of a Utopia. Unlike the previous attempt, this is utopia on hard mode.

What does that mean? Well, utopias are pretty hard to write anyway. Writing needs challenges for the characters, and that's trivially easy in a dystopia (everything is a challenge), a fake utopia (the challenge is to to look beneath the facade, and fight the secret enemy), or even imperfect utopias (the challenge is to solve the remaining problems). Iain M. Bank's Culture illustrates another way you can write about utopias and keep them interesting: by having an external foe as a challenge.

I avoided all those tricks. The challenge then was to write about a genuine utopia, one that people would enjoy living in, without any hidden flaws or enemies, internal or external. And these had to be real people doing things they wanted to do, rather than idealised people doing things they should do. Basically a real utopia has to contain internet trolls and various fanatics, and still be a great place for everyone.

The setting is a future Earth that is full-fledged techno-utopia, full of powerful artificial intelligences (with human-friendly goals, of course), uploads (human minds run on computers), massive technological developments, and the beginning of universal space colonisation.

In one sense, this made the story easier to write - nobody argues over the last leg of lamb needed to prevent starvation. In another sense, it made it much harder. Any human could desire to purge themselves of sinful thoughts, upgrade themselves to superintelligence, or copy themselves ten trillion times. And the AIs could perfectly grant them their wish - but should they? If so, do they let arbitrarily bad consequences happen? And if not, how do they go about forbidding things in a utopia? And what happens to disputes between humans - like when one person wants to join a group and the members of the group don't want to let them in? Can you prevent social nastiness - but then what about those people who want to be nasty?

You can read the story to see how well or badly I've answered these challenges. The Utopia was inspired a lot by Eliezer's fun sequence, Scott Alexander's Archipelago, and LARP. The general principles are that there has to be a functioning society behind everything, that people can bec...

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