That's funny. I never considered Culture novels as utopia. For me they were gritty, dark, but logical and prescient vision of the far future. Our or not even necessarily our.

Hopeful only for those of us who are satisfied with a role of beloved pets, fed, housed, medicated, valued and entertained in ways that would be inaccessible to us if we were left alone.

> but we now (rightly) consider modern comforts as only a foundation for higher-level wants, like justice and self-determination

That's a view of a poor person. People who achieved their private post-scarcity at our current tech level are overwhelmingly interested in just enjoying, maintaining and expanding their comforts within the framework available. Justice and self-determination are substitute (ersatz) goals of the poor.

> In any case, the incumbent Minds maintain their rule via physical strength and monitoring, not something more subtle.

It's a combination of both. They achieve high social cohesion through adherence to set of "unwritten" conventions and guidelines (culture), but since the individual Minds have freedom (which was a choice made to provide more resiliency against hacking, and not every civilization at their tech-level chose that, like Morthanveld in "Matter") and Minds are vastly powerful, nobody lies to themselves that anything other than raw physical power can ultimately be used for control. I especially like one scene when one Mind arrives to a remote planetary system occupied by another Mind, unannounced, outside of normal custom, which puts the resident Mind imediately on full alert, ready to fight for its life at any sign of hostility. The fact that both are members of Culture amounts ti almost nothing, when it comes to trust, once one of them did something socially irregular.

> Look, I’m sorry to break it to you, but SC is a sham.

It's not exactly a sham. It's just sometimes it's easier to socially influence your neighbor when you take your dog for a walk when you visit him. It's not that you couldn't achieve the same goals in any other ways, perhaps even simpler. But the dog might just fit, and also the dog has a bit of fun and you have opportunity to learn more about your dogs and about your neighbor, seeing how he reacts to your dog.