Utopia, Techtopia or Dystopia? None of the Above.
None of these ideas have ever happened and they're unlikely to ever happen and that's actually good news for the future of humanity.
We humans have an odd penchant for catastrophizing our species and our world. While we also like to tell stories about a coming, possible utopia and lots of stories about. coming dystopia, or that we’re already in a dystopia. We aren’t. Of more recent times, there is talk of a techtopia. These topics make for some interesting memes, debates, movies, books and so on. None of them will come to be.
Technologies play an important role in these narratives as well. Perhaps never more so than today as we bring techtopia into the mix. Which is interesting in and of itself. In this article, I will briefly explore (because this isn’t a book), what these terms mean with a technology lens, since I’m a technology anthropologist, so, hammer nail thing.
A Quick Definition of Utopia, Dystopia and Techtopia
Why do we, as a species, love to catastrophise anyway? It bears understanding as it sets the stage for the three main subjects here, even a utopia. Which would be, in a very real sense, a dystopia.
Humans catastrophise as a society and individually. On an individual level, sociologists and psychologists believe this can be from traumatic experiences, our cultural and social influences and things like cognitive distortion. Societally, it can be a sort of group-think, reactions to perceived societal threats (like a possible war) or today, existential anxiety over Artificial Intelligence and social media. Catastrophizing goes back thousands of years, perhaps even pre-Biblical era. It’s a thing we do.
“Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics… The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.” — Emile Durkheim, Sociologist
The idea of utopia has been around a while too. Possibly back to ancient Sumerian or Egyptian times, maybe longer. The evidence is thin. The more modern idea is said to have come from Sir Thomas Moore in his book of the same name in 1516. He created the word by combining two Greek words: ou, meaning “not” or no” and topos, meaning “place.” So really, utopia means “nowhere.”
How societies and cultures see utopia is quite varied. Utopias are best seen as a comparative to an undesirable state of affairs in a period of time and used as an argument to shape an alternative.
Dystopias have been around a while too, but was first broadly used by John Stuart Mill as an argument opposing Moore’s idea of utopia. Like a utopian idea, dystopias can be used to mock a certain state of current affairs or a potential outcome. Perhaps the best known dystopia is George Orwell’s book, “1984.”
Lastly, techtopia. This is essentially where technology is used to solve all human problems and enhance human capabilities. It also ties in with technolibertarianism, which is the belief that technology will enable us all to have individual freedom and autonomy and that government should be replaces by a technocracy. Techtopia isn’t really a unified theory. Yet. It’s a whole bunch of ideas all mushed together like a messy stew.
Why None of These Ideas Will Happen. Especially A Techtopia.
They are all ideas, ideals. Mostly, they are arguments and jumping off points for debates around potential future states regarding sociocultural systems. They’re really philosophical positions. This does not make them any less important. Especially with regard to a techtopian possible future.
They are important to help frame discussions and debates about how we want to govern and shape our current and future societies. They are used in pop culture, the aesthetic part of culture overall, to tell stories. Like “1984” or The Terminator and The Matrix and literally thousands of books, short stories, poems and songs.
Storytelling is a critically important methodology humans use to come to agreements on our realities, but also to explore alternative realities and how we’d like to live.
“the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” — David Graeber, Anthropologist
In today’s world of mis/disinformation and where AI tools are starting to have us question our reality at a time when the world is going through massive geopolitical shifts, it is easy to get locked into confirmation biases or cognitive distortion.
We are also in a period of rapid technological change at a pace humanity has never before experienced. Societally, we have witnessed some good things with these technologies such as disease detection with AI, but also some rather nasty things, like the negative effects of social media.
Tie this in with geopolitical shifts, increased conflicts and regional wars, massive human migrations, growing income inequality, autocratic leaders pushing the envelop and flexing their muscles, perceived economic threats from Artificial Intelligence, well, it’s quite a recipe. Especially for dystopian stew.
Some claim we are living in a dystopia. Not really. While issues like surveillance capitalism, declining privacy and rights to our personal data are of critical import, we are not yet in a dystopia. Overall, we have more freedoms, rights and agency than ever before in human history.
The invisible hand of culture and society is pushing back against the abuse of social media and algorithms by technology companies. No one believes that the technology companies can self-regulate. As much as these technology companies claim they can, it is as daft an idea as utopia.
In some ways too, we’ve long lived in a techtopia, to varying degrees. Ever since we banged some rocks together and made some tools (or maybe we stole the idea from our ancestors?) we’ve been adding technology to our world. The fundamental truth is that we cannot survive without technology.
In the past, when a sociocultural system disliked technologies, they either abandoned them (some cultures rejected farming and the related tools needed) or set up new rules of use via norms and traditions. Or we just walked away. We did that a lot.
Thing is, we don’t have anywhere to walk away too anymore. The planet is all rather sliced and diced into the idea of property ownership. Unless you want to live on the water, in the middle of an ocean. Harder to get to Costco though. Bit nasty in a storm.
Culture is mutable, always changing. So are societies. Culture has enabled humanity to survive, where biological evolution has been slow. The ideas of utopia, dystopia and the vague ideas of techtopia, are useful constructs, but don’t reflect how human societies actually work.
The upside is that none of these states are likely to occur. They may in various degrees in certain societies, but none are ever fully realized and to whatever degree they do exist, they always end. And we have, throughout history and very much in lockstep with technology, always advanced as a species. Thing is, humans don’t really want any of these three ideas. And therein lies the hope.