Magical techno-utopias

As someone always interested in techno-utopias, I was interested in Rut Elliot Blomqvist’s recent overview of a few, focusing on a specific problem common to many: using what amounts to magic as the technological basis.

In Pulling the magical lever, Blomqvist’s point is that skipping over the actual technology that supports a techno-utopia makes the whole thing essentially a fantasy (he calls it “soft science fiction”), rather than the sort of vision that can provide direction to an actual project.

The article looks at three descriptions of techno-utopias where the underlying technology is little more than hand-waving to support a story that the utopia designer wants to tell, leading to “utopias” that don’t function as model for possible ways to live, and where the supposed utopia has no actual basis.

[I]t retells the story of modernization (or of ‘the modern world system’) by taking the colonial expansion of Western Europe as a starting point. This expansion wasn’t driven by some automatic force of modernization but by the accumulation of resources in privileged areas and the consequent impoverishment of peripheries. This perspective should lead us to ask whether institutions and artefacts that are often taken for granted in attempts to reimagine politics—like the technologies that are central in techno-utopianism—are compatible with or inimical to environmental sustainability and social justice.

This is, of course, a flaw of specific techno-utopias (if perhaps a common one) and not an inherent problem. And it is a less common defect in the sort of retro-futurist techno-utopias that interest us here, because so often the technology that might have been little more than hand-waving when it was proposed is now off-the-shelf stuff that anyone can buy.