Technological utopianism

Technological utopianism (often called techno-utopianism or technoutopianism) refers to any ideology based on the belief that advances in science and technology will eventually bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal.

History

Technological utopianism in the 19th century

Karl Marx believed that science and democracy were the right and left hands of what he called the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. He argued that advances in science helped delegitimize the rule of kings and the power of the Christian Church, and other Theocracies.

19th century socialists, feminists and republicans were generally advocates of reason and science. Techno-utopianism, atheism, and rationalism have been associated with the democratic, revolutionary and utopian Left for most of the last two hundred years. Radicals like Joseph Priestley pursued scientific investigation while advocating democracy and freedom from religious tyranny. Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon in the early 19th century inspired communalists with their visions of a future scientific and technological evolution of humanity using reason as its secular religion. Radicals seized on Darwinian evolution to validate the idea of social progress. Edward Bellamy’s socialist utopia in Looking Backward, which inspired hundreds of socialist clubs in the late 19th century United States and a national political party, was as highly technological as Bellamy’s imagination. For Bellamy and the Fabian Socialists, socialism was to be brought about as a painless corollary of industrial development.

Marx and Engels saw more pain and conflict involved, but agreed about the inevitable end. Marxists argued that the advance of technology laid the groundwork not only for the creation of a new society, with different property relations, but also for the emergence of new human beings reconnected to nature and themselves. At the top of the agenda for empowered proletarians was “to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.” The 19th and early 20th century Left, from social democrats to communists, were focused on industrialization, economic development and the promotion of reason, science and the idea of progress.

(It should be noted however that there were strains of the socialist movement that were sometimes more backward looking, and that were more skeptical or even outright hostile to technological progress. See elements like: The Luddite movement, John Ruskin, the Arts and Crafts Movement, some sections of Anarchists, and some types of Christian Socialists. These elements tended to give voice to workers concerned that technology was overtaking their jobs, small craftsmen, certain sections of the middle-class, some rural elements, and others whose class position was tied more to a pre-industrial revolution society.)

It should also be noted that enthusiasm for technology wasn't entirely confined to the left in this time period. Layers of capitlists and pro-capitalist thinkers lauded capitalism's development of the productive forces, and defended every new, profitable project as another step forward for 'progess'.

One such promotion of science and social progress was the promotion of eugenics. Holding that in studies of families, such as the Jukes and Kallikaks, science had proven that many traits such as criminality and alcoholism were hereditary, many advocated the sterilization of those displaying negative traits. Forcible sterilization programs were implemented in several states in the United States.

After Auschwitz, the optimism of positivist views led to more pessimistic conceptions of science. The Holocaust, as Theodor Adorno underlined, seemed to shatter the ideal of Condorcet and others thinkers of the Enlightenment, which commonly equated scientific progress with social progress.

Technological utopianism in late 20th century United States

A movement of techno-utopianism began to flourish again in the dot-com culture of the 1990s, particularly in the West Coast of the United States, especially based around Silicon Valley. The Californian Ideology was a set of beliefs combining bohemian and anti-authoritarian attitudes from the counterculture of the 1960s with techno-utopianism and support for libertarian economic policies. It was reflected in, reported on, and even actively promoted in the pages of Wired magazine, which was founded in San Francisco in 1993 and served for a number years as the "bible" of its adherents. Libertarian Transhumanism is an extension of the belief that the free market is the best developer of technologies that can benefit humanity.

This form of techno-utopianism reflected a belief that technological change revolutionizes human affairs, and that digital technology in particular - of which the Internet was but a modest harbinger - would increase personal freedom by freeing the individual from the rigid embrace of bureaucratic big government. "Self-empowered knowledge workers" would render traditional hierarchies redundant; digital communications would allow them to escape the modern city, an "obsolete remnant of the industrial age".

Its adherents claim it transcended conventional "right/left" distinctions in politics by rendering politics obsolete. However, techno-utopianism disproportionately attracted adherents from the libertarian right end of the political spectrum. Therefore, techno-utopians often have a distaste of government regulation and a belief in the superiority of the free market system. Prominent "oracles" of techno-utopianism included George Gilder and Kevin Kelly, an editor of Wired who also published several books.

During the late 1990s dot-com boom, when the speculative bubble gave rise to claims that an era of "permanent prosperity" had arrived, techno-utopianism flourished, typically among the small percentage of the population who were employees of Internet startups and/or owned large quantities of high-tech stocks. With the subsequent crash, many of these dot com techno-utopians had to rein in some of their beliefs in the face of the clear return of traditional economic reality.

In the late 1990s and especially during the 2000s decade, technorealism and techno-progressivism are stances that have risen among advocates of technological change as critical alternatives to techno-utopianism.

Principles

Bernard Gendron, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, defines the four principles of modern technological utopians as follows:

1. We are presently undergoing a (postindustrial) revolution in technology;
2. In the postindustrial age, technological growth will be sustained (at least);
3. In the postindustrial age, technological growth will lead to the end of economic scarcity;
4. The elimination of economic scarcity will lead to the elimination of every major social evil.

Criticism

Critics claim that techno-utopianism's identification of social progress with scientific progress is a form of positivism and scientism. Critics of modern libertarian techno-utopianism point out that it tends to focus on "government interference" while dismissing the positive effects of the regulation of business. They also point out that it has little to say about the environmental impact of technology and that its ideas have little relevance for much of the rest of the world that are still relatively quite poor (see global digital divide).

See also

• Cyberdelic
• Eschatology
• Historicism
• Immanentize the eschaton
• Millenialism

• Singularitarianism
• Technocracy movement
• Technological singularity
• Transhumanism
• Utopian socialism

Additional Sources

Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1985. (ISBN 9780226744360)

Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture: Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005. (ISBN 0-8156-3061-1) (Syracuse UP catalog page)