but minimal acknowledgment of friction between, say, the tech-heavy Da Vinci crowd and the hunter-gatherer types...lack of concern about educational inequalities
The Friction _is_ minimal because th H-Gs realize that it's the DaVinci crowd which _enables_ them to live the way they do. And it's not as if the DaVincis are strip mining and logging, what-have-you. They are relatively _low_impact_ (when not constructing moholes and the like). Also, given the extreme social flexibility and long lifespan, I imagine quite a few martians cycle back and forth between tech and no-tech.
As for education, to call the system distributed and wireless would be a gross understatement. IIRC there is no mandated or formal schooling (at least not until you hit higher education), so its all student-directed learning, which lessens the advantage of the city kids. And then there's the fact that I really _doubt_ that the H-G lifestyle is 100% luddite. There's probably some sort of interactive link at the various huts and waystations for kids to use. Nothing fancy, perhaps and limited access to media entertainment, but quite good enough for learning.
I may be fitting things just a tad to my own preconceptions, but if you're going to have a _utopia_, you might as well rationalize it so that it really _is_ a utopia. And KSR certainly sets things up in a such a way as to make the justifications easier than they might be.
It's called a utopia for a reason.
The Friction _is_ minimal because th H-Gs realize that it's the DaVinci crowd which _enables_ them to live the way they do. And it's not as if the DaVincis are strip mining and logging, what-have-you. They are relatively _low_impact_ (when not constructing moholes and the like). Also, given the extreme social flexibility and long lifespan, I imagine quite a few martians cycle back and forth between tech and no-tech.
As for education, to call the system distributed and wireless would be a gross understatement. IIRC there is no mandated or formal schooling (at least not until you hit higher education), so its all student-directed learning, which lessens the advantage of the city kids. And then there's the fact that I really _doubt_ that the H-G lifestyle is 100% luddite. There's probably some sort of interactive link at the various huts and waystations for kids to use. Nothing fancy, perhaps and limited access to media entertainment, but quite good enough for learning.
I may be fitting things just a tad to my own preconceptions, but if you're going to have a _utopia_, you might as well rationalize it so that it really _is_ a utopia. And KSR certainly sets things up in a such a way as to make the justifications easier than they might be.