Global Dialogues

Close your eyes for a moment and think about a technological utopia—it’s hard to avoid the 1970s imagery of frictionless cities, robots, and flying cars. This is an imaginary where humans are served by machines and our lives are convenient, efficient, and rational. With the flip of a switch, mundane tasks are automated, human suffering is alleviated by technological abundance, and individuals flourish.

For us, it’s hard to imagine for whom this automated world would be appealing, let alone irresistible. A utopia where machines produce human comforts without work helps to foster exploitations. Machines must still be built and maintained, typically through increasingly complex global supply chains and labor relations. While DC residents imagine that they order a car or a meal from Uber, they rely on marginalized workers who are classified as independent contractors, who arrive at their house on motorbike. And when Americans read the news that a drone strike has been carried out in a foreign country, they are invited to overlook the military personnel that are responsible for its coordination and the people in the conflict zone. Indeed, technological utopia feeds into one of the most dystopian views of the present, which imagines an elite society on Mars with humans surviving on oxygen support after the Earth’s resources have been exhausted. A few wealthy individuals with access to power and technology live on, at the expense of everyone else. 

We want to reverse the question: To whom do technological utopias appeal? They appeal to those who want a singular, completely legible future, where complexity is stripped away and the messiness of life, the mundane, the unpredictable, is treated as a flaw to be fixed.

But real utopias aren’t frozen. They are messy, collective, full of friction, needing constant human input to repair. The appeal of technological utopias lies in the fantasy of escaping this work, the hard work of building a shared world, and instead ceding control to bots. But far from offering freedom, they trap us in a singular vision, imagined by a few and imposed by technologies on everyone else. Even when things work as designed, it is far from a utopia, it is a dystopia, because the design assumes a world without mess, without conflict, without people and without inequality.

A pluralistic future of technology is possible, but it won’t come from the techbros selling frictionless dreams. Their utopias are built by running away from the messiness of life. Instead, we need to embrace the slow, difficult work of change, ridden with conflict, and human effort. Technology isn’t the problem, it is the dominant ideology that shapes it, the narrow visions it serves, and the people it excludes. Technology can change too, if we confront what shapes it and build it with different priorities and regulations. A world shaped by Octavia Butler’s reminder: “God is Change.”

Katherine Chandler and Rajesh Veeraraghavan are professors at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and currently teach a course on public interest technologies with students from Georgetown University and the Dakar American University of Science and Technology.