> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.
Utopias used to be the most common scifi futures. This is what the so called Cyberpunks (Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, ...) rebelled against.
It used to be all about what wonders technology will bring us. By the time of the 70s it became clear that technology doesn't necessarily make everything better, but can be a burden in itself, or even widen the gap between the haves and haves not. And that is what they wrote about. It turned out to be the most popular scifi with audiences deeming it more believable.
They used to be more common maybe, but even the titular "Utopia" by Thomas More had slavery. Sometimes the "perfect" settings were imperfect due to the times they were written, often they were intentionally imperfect, and that was the point.
E.g. consider HG Wells The Time Machine, where the future start out seeming quite like an utopia but then we meet the Morlocks.
But lots of books were downright dystopian much earlier. Heck, several of the "standards bearers" for dystopias pre-date cyberpunk by a lot, like Brave New World, This Perfect Day, 1984.
Particularly stories like The Time Machine where the setting as a whole very much was revealed not to be an utopia were among the most common "utopian" settings pre-cyberpunk.
Pure utopias were very rare for a reason: They're really hard to set compelling in stories in, and so most of the ones that do exist tend to set stories on their edges and fault lines.
What changed with cyberpunk wasn't that (surface) utopias went away, or even that we get to see the imperfect underside, but that the script is flipped so that the protagonist isn't a tourist on the underside, but belongs there, and is often alienated from any seemingly perfect parts of the world they inhabit.
Compare settings that do show both sides, like The Time Machine, and a cyberpunk version of The Time Machine would probably have a protagonist that was a Morlock. The world itself wouldn't change, but we'd get to see it from the opposite POV.
Technology makes a lot of things better. Like eliminating symptoms of 95% of cystic fibrosis victims.
> even widen the gap between the haves and haves not
America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
> America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
So, by this logic, a homeless person with a used iPhone is better off than Louis XIV (who literally owned all of France) just because the king couldnt play Candy Crush?
This statement confuses global technological progress across centuries with an individuals actual financial security, social power, and quality of life within their own modern society.
I simply just cant understand why would someone repeat such a statement (and I have seen it everywhere).
> > America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
> False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
There's a lot of reasonable arguments to unpack here.
But no, it's not that Louis XIV didn't have an iPhone, it's that the vast middle class in developed countries has central heating and access to penicillin and don't die from giving birth as much.
Also, America's poor are definitely worse off than medieval kings. They don't have access to those basic things that keep most modern people wealthier than medieval kings, like food, shelter and health care.
Some of the older (pre-medieval) king's ruins in Denmark are (by our standards) small stone houses with a moat, and what makes them remarkable is that they're made of stone, and the moat is rather big, so it keeps people out. Like metal doors in apartment buildings, sort of. (Correction for the historians: The oldest king's ruins are of course just holes in the ground where wooden beams used to stand.)
s/America's poor/Europe's lower middle class/ and you're there.
> it's not that Louis XIV didn't have an iPhone,
probably more that Louis XIV was not a medieval king.
If you could trade your current life with Louis XIV's, would you?
Assuming I had the autonomy to build more toilets at Versailles and we're stretching "medieval king" to include "Baroque kings" then sure, why not?
(French isn't that bad a language)
* https://thisisversaillesmadame.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-lack...
Would Louis XIV trade with you?
Is there a definition of standard of living? A king would be entertaining, socialising, and strategising most of the time (along with a lot more pursuits of hunting, etc for leisure). While I understand they had less access to healthcare and variety of food, travel, etc...id still argue they had a better standard of living than someone that works 8-10h/day and then comes home to cook and clean?
America's poor today have clean water, health care, washing machines, central heating and air conditioning, flush toilets, hot and cold running water, electric lights, hot showers, fresh vegetables and fruit year round, glass windows, cotton undies, ice cream, TVs with 24/7 entertainment, talk to anyone in the world at the push of a button, need I go on?
The poor have those things because they still have some amount of power. They're still needed for work, and if you make too many of them too desperate, they can threaten the people at the top. But if you let the wealth (and power) gap get too large this will no longer be the case, and the poor might lose access to those things. If the wealth gap becomes such that the rich can afford automated production and protection but the poor can not, the current economic and political systems will no longer have a reason to give access to any of those things to the poor.
I think you want to replace fresh vegetables and fruits with processed ready meals.
Being available is not equal to a person being able to afford it.
Maybe you were writing about middle class and not the poor?
You don't need to be a middle class to be able to afford electric lights, mobile phones, apples, oranges and grapes all year round.
On the other hand kings had free-range organic grown meat prepared by personal cook anytime they wanted which is a true luxury even today.
No they didn't. In castles meat wasn't very fresh at all, and food poisoning was both common and a common cause of death especially in medieval times. Which is why we have so many traditional dishes that are effectively just ways to keep food fresh and especially safe for longer. How many stew recipes did people invent worldwide, for example? Slow cooking will keep food edible for a week if you do it right. And if you really push it, for months (ie. add animal gelatin as a last step and keep cooking for 2 hours after that, at some point it will solidify and you get something that can be considered "instant soup" by extremely flexible interpretation). If you look back 100 years there are books with year-round menus, and bits of that survive. Why? To give you specific dishes when the ingredients are available according to the "agricultural calendar" as it's called in France. Christmas is great. October sucks.
The very oldest book in the bible contains the basic recipe for keeping meat fresh for ~week, and that's what Kosher, Halal, ... are really about.
And yeah, it depends. Roman emperors, for example, would have had fresh meat available whenever. Medieval kings, no way. Renaissance kings ... probably not constant fresh meat, and certainly not constant fresh fish, but a lot better than medieval kings.
Kings has dozens or hundreds of people who did all those things for them, and more, at their command.
And none of these give them the freedom, agency, a past noble or a king had.
My parents had access to cheaper housing, less red-tape and fixed working hours, more job security than my generation, when I was born.
So now insert BUT THEY DIDN'T HAVE FLAT PANEL TV AND IPHONE in retarded Sponge Bob chicken meme here.
I'm not to certain about the healthcare and aircon.
I think it’s disingenuous to imply that there isn’t an inequality issue because the basic standard of living has advanced since the Middle Ages. Even if we compare the standard of living for say, Mississippi lower third and Uganda lower third, it’s obvious that you’re better off in Mississippi. However, the fact that the wealth and means to uplift the poor actually exists in the US but is not exercised is itself an issue - Uganda does not have that possibility.
> Even if we compare the standard of living for say, Mississippi lower third and Uganda lower third, it’s obvious that you’re better off in Mississippi.
I mean, it’s no wonder people move from uganda to mississipi (or other places in the us) and not rhe other way around.
Uganda's a popular destination with US evangelical bible belt Christians.
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/25/us-evang...
> America's poor today have clean water, health care
Clean water depends on how you define "clean" e.g. from https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/united-states-water-poll...
> Current EPA data reveals that nearly half of all tap water in the United States contains detectable levels of PFAS chemicals
There's also plenty of contamination violations (apart from maybe Hawaii with only 2) of the water supply.
As far as health care goes, I thought that most people in the USA will refuse to get an ambulance due to the expense. I've also heard of plenty of reports that poor people will not visit a doctor for minor health issues even though they may be early signs of much more serious issues.
A medieval king had a better life than a medieval peasant. A medieval king, most of them, arguably did not have a better life than most of America's poor in 2026.
My memory might be faulty but I remember watching "The Lion in Winter" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqz3gkrmBbo) and feeling really happy I was not alive then, even as royalty. (hope that's the movie)
> id still argue they had a better standard of living than someone that works 8-10h/day and then comes home to cook and clean?
You're somehow succumbing to the fallacy of the edilic life of old.
The same life where you had to have a dozen of kids to overcome infant mortality, and each time a woman gave birth it was like a Russian roulette.
And the average life expectancy was what? 40 years? You didn't had a midlife crisis because you'd be dead by then.
Life expectancy was low mainly due to childhood diseases
If you lived to 20 you had a pretty good chance of naming it to 70
> And the average life expectancy was what? 40 years?
The answer to this riddle lies in the previous paragraph
Oh, great, then there is nothing to fix. We just apply medieval standards and everything is hunky dory.
a lot of people unironically believe this or even worse, many of the same people seem to be arguing for a new monarchy lately lol.
i keep telling them they’re free to have their own personal monarchy in their own family as long as people are free to leave and also to leave the rest of us out of it. but for some reason they don’t seem to like the idea as much then.
Medieval poor likely had a higher standard of living than ancient kings, should they have complained?
I don't think that's actually true lol
Not even close. Foragers 10K years ago had better longevity and nutrition than medieval peasants.
Is that the bar? Who looks at medieval kings and goes "their standard of living should be our baseline"? Living in a cold stone building with no medical care questionable food, etc?
But also, no they don't. Standard of living includes one's agency over their environment. An medieval king could say things and the kingdom would bend to their will. No one making $18,000 is having hundreds or thousands of people bending over to serve them.
Utter nonsense.
> Standard of living includes one's agency over their environment.
No, it doesn't.
it certainly does when i think of quality of life.
> An medieval king could say things and the kingdom would bend to their will.
Lol nope? This is utter ignorance. Medieval kings were constantly balancing power with people directly underneath them.
Whole dynasties have been eradicated in the continuous power struggles, particularly from rich families.
Not only that: medieval kings had to bow to religious authorities as well (something ee don’t do anymore). In 1077 kind henry iv had to stand three days bare headed in the snow to convince pope gregory vii to reverse his excommunication (an excommunication would effectively invalidate him as a king, btw).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa
You comment shows your utter general ignorance and complete misunderstanding of medieval times.
I'm not sure a medieval king would take that swap. Maybe for EU poor.
> America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
Do America’s poor have a standard thing like a roof on top of their heads? Nevermind a castle, just a basic house which has already been paid for.
They also work longer hours than medieval serfs, are more precarious in housing and food security and more separated from their family. Also slaves work the farms. Read tomatoland or the lives and deaths of the American workers.
I am not making a statement about the quality of life of poor people in the modern world. I do not think however that from a food security standpoint they are more precarious. I am fairly confident that the longer hours thing is false. Unless we are assuming like 70+ hours of work a week.
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an... You can read https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an... which is by a working historian.
I also want to add that, none of this is relevant to the point of whether or not the current system is "just" or reasonable given and I think overall that argument is mostly a red herring.
> Technology makes a lot of things better. Like eliminating symptoms of 95% of cystic fibrosis victims.
Counterpoint: any leaking abandoned oil well. Check out YouTube videos documenting the abandoned oil wells in West Texas, which are dumping industrial volumes of water into abandoned land.
That is a silly comparison.
Perspective is useful.
This isn’t perspective it’s trolling.
But it gets the masses going!
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I’m of two minds on utopias. On the one hand it seems we need a positive vision for the future, where technology is used to solve our greatest problems and improve the planet. On the other hand it seems that perhaps technology is incapable of making us happier, because it isn’t clear to me that we are happier now than in past decades, despite having more advanced technology.
I believe the more accurate statement is that technology can reduce the burdens of survival (better access to food, medicine, information) but cannot provide longterm happiness, and in some ways impair it (social media, mass surveillance, reliance on technology).
We are social beings, and technology in the last decade especially has been gearing itself towards reducing communities both physically and digitally. Less people spend time together, more people feel lonely and isolated, and divisions between people are at all time highs with glorification of death to the “enemy”. Forums are almost entirely dead, the feed of information is both nonstop while being useless, and we have few outlets to feel true connection.
Harvard’s happiness studies finds that standard of living only impacts happiness to a point before facing a sharp plateau and socialization takes over as a dominant factor in longterm happiness, according to my memory at least. And, while I don’t entirely agree with Kojima’s predictions in MGS2, the AI seeking to provide “context” for the feeble human mind as rate of information on the Internet increases was prescient, though humans have adapted to this (albeit suffering shorter attention spans as a consequence).
IMO a true utopia would be similar to the Enterprise: people socialize and enjoy a life with comfort by technology, not at the behest of social media or the collective consciousness of others. Unplugged and connected in a more meaningful way.
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