Technological utopianism

Based on Wikipedia: Technological utopianism

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbled, Ronald Reagan offered a prophecy that captured the spirit of an era: "The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip." It was a seductive idea—that technology itself could defeat oppression, that circuits and code were inherently democratic forces. This belief, that advancing technology will inevitably lead humanity toward paradise, has a name: technological utopianism. And it has been with us, in various forms, for centuries.

The Promise of the Machine

At its core, technological utopianism rests on a simple premise: science and technology can and should bring about an ideal society. Not just a better society—a perfect one. A world where laws and governments operate solely for the benefit of all citizens, where suffering has been eliminated, where scarcity is a distant memory, and where perhaps even death itself has been conquered.

This isn't mere optimism about gadgets. It's a comprehensive worldview that sees technology as the primary engine of human progress—not politics, not philosophy, not spiritual enlightenment, but the relentless advance of our technical capabilities.

A techno-utopian doesn't ignore the problems technology creates. They simply believe that more technology, better technology, will solve those problems too. It's a kind of faith, really—faith that the arc of innovation bends toward paradise.

Marx and the Machines

You might be surprised to learn that Karl Marx was, in his own way, a technological utopian. He believed that science and democracy worked together as the twin forces driving humanity from what he called "the realm of necessity" to "the realm of freedom." Scientific advances, Marx argued, had helped delegitimize the divine right of kings and weakened the power of the Christian Church. Technology was liberation.

This wasn't an eccentric position in the nineteenth century. It was practically mainstream among progressive thinkers.

Consider the intellectual ferment of that era. Joseph Priestley, the English chemist who discovered oxygen, was also a radical advocate for democracy. Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon—early socialist visionaries—all imagined futures where scientific and technological evolution would perfect human society through the application of reason. When Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, radicals seized upon it as validation that progress was built into the fabric of nature itself.

Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward painted a portrait of a socialist utopia set in the year 2000, as technologically advanced as Bellamy's imagination could stretch. The book inspired hundreds of socialist clubs across the United States and even spawned a national political party. For Bellamy and the Fabian Socialists in Britain, the transition to socialism wouldn't require revolution—it would arrive as the natural, almost painless consequence of industrial development.

Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels saw more conflict in the process, but they agreed on the destination. The advance of technology, Marxists believed, would create not just a new economic system but new kinds of human beings—people reconnected to nature and to their own authentic selves. Once workers seized power, their first priority would be "to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible."

The entire spectrum of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Left—from moderate social democrats to revolutionary communists—was united in its embrace of industrialization, economic development, reason, science, and progress. Technology was the train, and history was the track leading inevitably toward utopia.

The Soviet Dream Machine

Nowhere was technological utopianism more fervently embraced than in the Soviet Union. From its very inception, according to historian Asif Siddiqi, it served as a "millenarian mantra"—an article of quasi-religious faith.

The Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917 imagined transforming backward, peasant Russia into something magnificent: a world of gleaming factories and mechanized agriculture that would produce everything society needed. A new socialist machine age.

This obsession had roots in Marxist theory, certainly. But much of it came from the Bolsheviks' desperate need to prove themselves. They wanted to remake Russia into a modern state that could not just compete with the leading capitalist nations but forge an entirely new path to the future. Technology would be the means of that transformation.

From the 1930s onward, Soviet technological utopianism took on a distinctly populist character. Siddiqi summarizes it as "technology for the masses." Science fiction flourished, and Soviet authors imagined futures where technological utopia and socialist utopia had merged into one glorious whole.

There was a peculiar twist to Soviet techno-utopianism, though. As the scholar Paul Josephson noted, most strains of it insisted that technology was fundamentally apolitical—a neutral force that served the profit motive and the industrialist under capitalism but would benefit all humanity under socialism. The machine itself was innocent; only the system directing it was guilty or righteous.

This belief had practical consequences. To avoid dependence on capitalist nations, the Soviet Union and other socialist governments tried to create their own domestic technological innovations, building entire engineering communities and supply chains that could operate independently from the West. Technology would set them free—but only if it was their own technology.

The Dark Side of Progress

Not all technological utopianism pointed toward liberation. Some of it led somewhere much darker.

In the early twentieth century, a significant number of technological utopians embraced eugenics—the idea that humanity could be improved through selective breeding. Studies of families like the Jukes and the Kallikaks (famous case studies in hereditary degeneracy) had convinced many that traits like criminality and alcoholism were passed down through bloodlines like hair color or height. Science, they believed, had proven this.

The solution seemed obvious to them: sterilize those displaying negative traits. Prevent them from reproducing. Cleanse the gene pool. Forcible sterilization programs were implemented in several American states, and similar programs spread across Europe and beyond.

Here was technological utopianism's shadow self—the conviction that science could perfect humanity, even if perfection required eliminating the imperfect.

And then came the Second World War.

To many philosophers, the horrors of that conflict—and above all, the Holocaust—seemed to shatter the Enlightenment dream forever. The philosopher Theodor Adorno, himself a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, argued that Auschwitz had invalidated the optimistic vision of thinkers like the Marquis de Condorcet, who had believed that scientific progress and social progress were essentially the same thing.

The Nazis had been technologically sophisticated. They had used modern industrial methods—railways, gas chambers, meticulous record-keeping—to murder millions. Progress and barbarism, it turned out, were not opposites. They could coexist. They could even reinforce each other.

This was the opposite of what technological utopians had promised. Science was supposed to make us more humane, not more efficient at inhumanity.

The California Dream

For several decades after the war, technological utopianism lay somewhat dormant in the West, chastened by history. But in the 1990s, it came roaring back—and it found its new home in a very specific place: Silicon Valley.

The dot-com boom created a new kind of techno-utopianism, distinct from both the socialist variety and the earlier progressive tradition. This was the "Californian Ideology"—a peculiar blend of counterculture and capitalism, hippie idealism and libertarian economics.

Its adherents combined the bohemian, anti-authoritarian attitudes of the 1960s counterculture with a fervent belief in free markets and a hostility toward government regulation. Wired magazine, founded in San Francisco in 1993, became its bible, promoting and reflecting this worldview for years.

The core belief was that digital technology—especially the Internet—would increase personal freedom by liberating individuals from bureaucratic big government. "Self-empowered knowledge workers" would make traditional hierarchies obsolete. Digital communications would let people escape the modern city, which was dismissed as "an obsolete remnant of the industrial age."

The Californian Ideology claimed to transcend the old left-right political divide. Politics itself, its adherents believed, was becoming obsolete. Technology would make it irrelevant.

In practice, though, Western techno-utopianism attracted far more adherents from the libertarian right than from anywhere else on the political spectrum. Its prominent voices—figures like George Gilder and Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired—tended to share a faith in the superiority of free markets and a deep suspicion of government interference.

During the late 1990s boom, when the speculative bubble convinced many that an era of "permanent prosperity" had arrived, this techno-utopianism flourished. Its believers were typically employees of Internet startups or owners of high-tech stocks—people who stood to benefit enormously if the new economy really was different.

Then the bubble burst. The dot-com crash of 2000 and 2001 wiped out trillions of dollars in paper wealth and forced many techno-utopians to revise their beliefs. Traditional economic reality, it turned out, had not been abolished after all.

Wikipedia and the Democratization Dream

Not all the techno-utopianism of the Internet era was about making money. Some of it was genuinely idealistic.

Wikipedia, according to The Economist, "has its roots in the techno-optimism that characterized the Internet at the end of the twentieth century." That optimism held that ordinary people could use their computers as tools for liberation, education, and enlightenment. Anyone could contribute knowledge. Anyone could learn. The sum of human wisdom would be available to everyone, for free.

This was techno-utopianism in its most democratic form—technology as the great equalizer, giving everyone equal access to information and equal ability to contribute. On the Internet, the thinking went, everyone had equal status. A teenager in Manila could correct an error made by a professor at Harvard.

The media theorist Douglas Rushkoff catalogued the claims surrounding this democratic techno-utopianism:

• Technology reflects and encourages the best aspects of human nature—communication, collaboration, sharing, helpfulness, and community.
• Technology improves our relationships. Early Internet users shared their knowledge with others around them.
• Technology democratizes society by connecting people to information and expanding freedom of expression.
• Technology inevitably progresses, each innovation building on the last.
• Unforeseen impacts of technology tend to be positive. When the government released the Internet to the public, its "social side effect became its main feature."
• New technology can solve the problems created by old technology.

It was an optimistic vision—perhaps naively so. But millions of people believed it, and many still do.

The Accelerationists and the Singularity

In the twenty-first century, technological utopianism has evolved into several distinct strains, some more radical than others.

Transhumanists believe that technology can and should be used to enhance human capabilities beyond their current biological limits—extending lifespans, augmenting intelligence, perhaps even uploading consciousness into computers. Singularitarians go further, anticipating a moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and triggers an "intelligence explosion" that transforms everything.

The philosopher Nick Bostrom has explored these possibilities in depth. He argues that the rise of machine superintelligence carries both existential risks—the possibility of human extinction—and extreme potential to improve the future. In his book Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, Bostrom imagined scenarios where human civilization reaches "technological maturity" and solves all its coordination problems. He listed technologies that are theoretically achievable: cognitive enhancement, the reversal of aging, self-replicating spacecraft, arbitrary sensory inputs (any taste, any sound), and precise control of motivation, mood, well-being, and personality.

This is utopia taken to its logical extreme—a world where technology has solved not just material problems but existential ones. A world where suffering is optional and death is a choice.

More recently, a movement called effective accelerationism—often abbreviated as e/acc—has emerged, advocating for "progress at all costs." Its adherents believe that accelerating technological development as fast as possible is a moral imperative, regardless of risks or disruptions. If some people are harmed along the way, that's an acceptable price for getting to utopia faster.

The Last Technological Utopia

There is one place on Earth where technological utopianism remains an official state ideology: North Korea.

This might seem surprising. North Korea is one of the poorest, most isolated countries on the planet, its population malnourished and its infrastructure crumbling. Yet the pursuit of advanced strategic technologies is promoted as an integral part of the country's Juche ideology—a doctrine of national self-reliance.

North Korean technological utopianism rests on three narratives: the rejection of consumer society and culture, an emphasis on heavy industry, and a belief in the ability of the masses to make great technological achievements under the guidance of the Workers' Party. In practice, this has meant that most of North Korea's technological resources flow toward large-scale, resource-intensive infrastructure and military projects—many of which have primarily symbolic importance.

Domestic innovations in nuclear weapons and space technology play a central role in the state's propaganda, which seeks to portray North Korea as a modern regional power. Never mind that ordinary citizens lack reliable electricity or enough food. The rockets fly, the bombs detonate, and the regime declares progress.

It's a grim parody of the old Soviet dream—technological utopianism stripped of everything except military spectacle and ideological control.

The Four Principles and Their Critics

Bernard Gendron, a philosopher at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has distilled modern technological utopianism into four core principles:

1. We are presently undergoing a post-industrial revolution in technology.
2. In the post-industrial age, technological growth will be sustained at least at current rates.
3. This 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.

Each of these claims is debatable. Critics point out that technological utopianism conflates scientific progress with social progress—an assumption they reject as a form of positivism, the belief that only scientific knowledge is valid, or scientism, the inappropriate application of scientific methods to domains where they don't belong.

Libertarian techno-utopianism, critics argue, focuses obsessively on "government interference" while dismissing the positive effects of business regulation. It has little to say about the environmental impact of technology. And its ideas have limited relevance for much of the world's population, who remain poor and lack access to the technologies being celebrated. This gap is sometimes called the global digital divide.

The cultural critic Imre Szeman has made an even more pointed argument. In his 2010 study System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster, he contends that technological utopianism is one of the social narratives that prevent people from acting on what they already know about oil's effects on the environment. We tell ourselves that technology will solve climate change, so we don't have to change our behavior now.

"There is no evidence to support it," Szeman writes of technological utopianism. Its persistence, he argues, "shows the extent to which modern societies place faith in narratives of progress and technology overcoming things, despite all evidence to the contrary."

The X-Factor Test

In August 2011, riots swept through British cities. Stores were looted, buildings burned, and social order broke down in ways that shocked the nation. In response, then-Prime Minister David Cameron suggested that the government should have the ability to shut down social media during crime sprees to help contain the violence.

This proposal sparked an interesting experiment. A poll was conducted asking Twitter users a simple question: Would you prefer to have the service temporarily closed to help stop the violence, or kept open so you could continue chatting about the television show The X Factor?

Every single respondent chose The X Factor.

L. Gordon Crovitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, used this anecdote to illustrate what he saw as technological utopianism's dark underside. Society has become so dependent on technology, so addicted to the constant stream of connection and entertainment, that we cannot part from it even for the greater good. The tools that were supposed to liberate us have become chains we refuse to remove.

This is the paradox at the heart of techno-utopianism. Technology promises freedom but often delivers dependence. It promises connection but sometimes produces isolation. It promises solutions but frequently generates new problems that require still more technology to address.

The Recurring Dream

Technological utopianism refuses to die. It has survived the horrors of the twentieth century, the dot-com crash, the revelations about social media's toxic effects, and countless disappointed predictions. Every few years, a new technology arrives—the personal computer, the Internet, the smartphone, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence—and the old dream revives.

Perhaps this persistence tells us something important. Human beings seem to need utopian visions. We need to believe that things can get better, that progress is possible, that our children will live in a better world than we do. Technology provides a tangible, visible vehicle for that hope. Unlike political or spiritual utopias, technological utopias can point to actual achievements—the eradication of smallpox, the moon landing, the smartphone in your pocket—as evidence that progress is real.

But the critics have a point too. Technology is not inherently good or bad. It is a tool, and like all tools, it can be used for liberation or oppression, for healing or harm. The assumption that more technology automatically means more progress is an act of faith, not a logical conclusion.

The microchip did not, in the end, bring down totalitarianism. China has used digital technology to build the most sophisticated surveillance state in human history. Social media has been weaponized to spread disinformation and undermine democracy. The same Internet that gave us Wikipedia also gave us QAnon.

Maybe the truth lies somewhere between the utopians and the skeptics. Technology expands human capabilities, for better and worse. It amplifies what we already are. If we are curious, generous, and creative, technology can help us be more so. If we are fearful, greedy, and cruel, technology can help us be more so too.

The dream of a technological utopia is neither foolish nor wise. It is simply human—a reflection of our eternal hope that somewhere, somehow, there is a better world waiting to be built.