Utopian retreats fail because real human plurality cannot be engineered or designed away.

Evidence

As Arendt observes, part of what these escapes from politics are specifically avoiding is the “unpredictability” of “a plurality of agents.” It’s this ineradicable plurality of real people that spells the downfall of the Platonic city. She writes that the all-seeing plan is unable to withstand the weight of reality, “not so much the reality of exterior circumstances as of the real human relationships they could not control.” Writing about Walden Two, psychology professor Susan X. Day observes an unrealistic absence of friend groups or pairs among the people in the novel, even though this phenomenon is so natural that it occurs in other animals and “proceeds inevitably from the differentiation of individuals.” … There is no such thing as a clean break or a blank slate in this world. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 204

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what Arendt’s ‘plurality of agents’ means and why it defeats any all-seeing design — core to Odell’s argument that retreat to a blank slate is impossible.
• XREF: Connects to her earlier chapter material on manifest destiny and the rhetoric of new beginnings; also resonates with the reader’s existing knowledge of techno-utopianism (Thiel) as product design.
• ADDENDUM: The claim that engineered communities fail at human plurality is adjacent to ‘On Sacrifice’ — both concern the failure of total, designable social orders and the irreducible human element that destroys them.