BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-03-22 Tu: Utopian aspirations, many of them based on ideas of how to organize society's division of labor, have been the source of much misery in the 20th century when people attempt to put them into practice—to force people to become a straight thing. "We need to replace the anarchy of the market with a society that takes direction from a Leader" was one such, and the worst such when the Leader's directions were to exterminate Jews, kill Slavs and herd those whosurvived into concentration camps, all so that German farmers could be fruitful, multiplying, and flourishing on large farms with black earth. But only slightly behind was the idea that we need to replace the anarchy of the market with one particular leader's idea of how Imperial German had run its WWI-era war economy. Third—and not nearly as deadly as the first two—was the idea that the most we could ask for was the market's "stark utopia", in Karl Polanyi's words, and that societies needed "Lykourgan moments".after which all else—even (especially?) democracy—would be subordinate to the creed: "the market giveth, the market taketh away; blessed be the name of the market". And, yet, the engine of technological advance has given humanity at least 21 times the technological power we had in 1870, and 300 times the prowess of the age of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, two-thirds god and one-third man, who sought deathlessness and learned wisdom. For those of us lucky enough to take substantial advantage of that technological prowess—which is by now more than half of us—there are vines and fig trees galor! Taco trucks on every corner! But also surveillance systems, and thermobaric and nuclear weapons.