Technological utopianism
He concludes that it shows the extent to which modern societies place faith in narratives of progress and technology overcoming things, despite all evidence to the contrary.
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.
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.
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.
"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".
[11][12][13] 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.
For example, several technical journalists and social commentators, such as Mark Pesce, have interpreted the WikiLeaks phenomenon and the United States diplomatic cables leak in early December 2010 as a precursor to, or an incentive for, the creation of a techno-utopian transparent society.
Nick Bostrom contends that the rise of machine superintelligence carries both existential risks and an extreme potential to improve the future, which might be realized quickly in the event of an intelligence explosion.
He listed some technologies that are theoretically achievable, such as cognitive enhancement, reversal of aging, self-replicating spacecrafts, arbitrary sensory inputs (taste, sound...), or the precise control of motivation, mood, well-being and personality.
[20] Bernard Gendron, a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, defines the four principles of modern technological utopians in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as follows:[21] Rushkoff presents us with multiple claims that surround the basic principles of Technological Utopianism:[22] Critics claim that techno-utopianism's identification of social progress with scientific progress is a form of positivism and scientism.
[25] For example, In a controversial 2011 article "Techno-Utopians are Mugged by Reality", L. Gordon Crovitz of The Wall Street Journal explored the concept of the violation of free speech by shutting down social media to stop violence.
A poll was conducted to see if Twitter users would prefer to let the service be closed temporarily or keep it open so they could chat about the famous television show The X-Factor.
As it stands as of 2022[update], most text, email, and instant messages offer fewer nonverbal cues about the speaker's feelings than do face-to-face encounters.
