Searching for Charles Fourier in the ruins of a socialist utopia outside LA

Summary

“Charles Fourier was the first to show the qualitative difference between a free society and an unfree society.” –Herbert Marcuse, The End of Utopia All that remains of the lodge at Llano del Rio. The ruins of Llano del Rio, the largest and most important secular utopian colony in California’s history, sit scattered and forgotten just off of Pearblossom Highway between the desert gateway towns of Palmdale and Victorville, an hour’s drive northeast from Los Angeles. Palmdale is home to United States Air Force Plant 42, a sprawling complex where some of the most advanced aircraft in the US arsenal are built and tested, including the recently notable B-2 nuclear bomber. Victorville boasts the Southern California Logistics airport, a former Air Force base and now boneyard for hundreds of retired jetliners. It’s also a popular filming location. Chris Nolan crashed a 747 into a hanger here for Tenet – I crashed an FPV drone into derelict former base housing while filming a VR project a few years before that (hard to resist, the impulse to crash things out here). In the stretch of empty desert between the two cities, straight-out-of-Fallout General Atomics (“Global Progress Through Technology”) operates private airfields where they develop Predator, Reaper, and other cheerfully-named combat drones. So, all in all, a strange place to be visiting with utopian ghosts. And in this context, being attacked by a pack of menacing black dogs patrolling the ruins of a forgotten utopian experiment seems, in hindsight, all but inevitable. But we’ll get to that. This is Pirate Utopia, a newsletter about stories, systems, and hidden worlds (and sometimes utopia) by Stefan Kubicki. I’d driven this section of highway many times over my years in Southern California, including when I moved to LA back in 2012, obliviously passing the ruins at the end of a long cross-country drive. It was only years later that I came across the name Llano del Rio in another forgotten artifact: Robert V. Hine’...