Techno-utopianism is the belief that progress in science and technology will eventually lead to a utopian society. It’s most common form, presently, is the anarchist/libertarian sections of the internet, such as The Pirate Bay, where people feel they can escape from the oppression of the political-economic system of the IRL world.
Techno-utopian anarchists believe that through the internet they can shape a new world, free of the centralised institutions of power that have dominated in the past; for instance the government and mega-corporations.
They ignore the innate human lust for power.
That’s not to say all people desire power or to dominate others, in fact most people don’t. But a few people always will, and a few people is all it takes.
In his new show, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, Adam Curtis dismantles the myth that it is possible to create a community free from domination and subordination. He takes the example of the counter-culture communes established in America, particularly in California, in the 1970s.
Many of these communities were extremely libertarian, with the nobel aim of fostering voluntary, anarchic cooperation. Everyone helped grow the food and cook the meals. In exchange, everybody got a fair share of the resources.
In theory, everybody was free to express themselves and, indeed, they were encouraged to express themselves without restraint in group therapy sessions. In these sessions, the community members were asked to say exactly how they felt about each other, so that everybody could understand the effects their actions were having on other people’s feelings.
Unfortunately, the communes failed. The reason? Bullying.
Stronger members of the communes expressed themselves in much more forceful terms than the shyer members, to the point of abuse. One former hippy described the group-therapy sessions as “hazing”. The weaker members felt bullied and left and the communities collapsed.
The internet is much the same today. Carefully considered, intelligent opinions rarely get noticed. He who shouts loudest and uses the most vile and abusive language gets noticed most. Why be intelligent and considered, when you CAN USE FUCKING ALLCAPS?!?!?!?!
Wikileaks was supposed to be the anti-thesis of centralised government; a highly libertarian organisation that revealed secrets with no regards for the establishment’s laws. It ended up being dominated by one man: Julian Assange -by all accounts a very arrogant person whose former friends are new queueing up to bad-mouth him in the press.
Twitter, for all it’s incredibly important function in protecting freedom of speech, is dominated by a few very obnoxious characters. And the recent witch-hunt to name Ryan Giggs, unethical as his actions may have been, should concern anybody who cares about mob-rule.
And that’s another thing Adam Curtis talks about in his show: mobs. Or, as the techno-utopians like to call them, “systems”. In the techno-utopian view of the world people are no longer individuals. We are just nodes in a system.
Our only function is to serve the interests of the powerful on Twitter. A loud-mouth conservative bitch names a famous footballer, and all the nodes in the system do his bidding; re-tweeting the name until the laws are rendered pointless. Wikileaks looks like a tool for Julian Assange to take out his beef with the man by dumping insane amounts of other people’s prattle into the tubes.
Techno-utopianism, at its core, has a vision of the future that we are inevitably moving towards, in which humans are in harmony with both nature and technology. Their vision of harmony, like the vision of all myopic ideologies, is actually one of total compliance; a world in which if you dare speak out against the ubiquitous mob rule you will be crucified all over Twitter. God forbid!
Posted on June 2, 2011
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