From the 19th to mid-20th centuries Karl Marx believed that
science and
democracy were the right and left hands of what he called the move from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. He argued that advances in science helped delegitimize the rule of kings and the power of the
Christian Church. 19th-century
liberals,
socialists, and
republicans often embraced techno-utopianism.
Radicals like
Joseph Priestley pursued scientific investigation while advocating democracy.
Robert Owen,
Charles Fourier and
Henri de Saint-Simon in the early 19th century inspired communalists with their visions of a future scientific and
technological evolution of humanity using reason. Radicals seized on
Darwinian evolution to validate the idea of
social progress.
Edward Bellamy's
socialist utopia in
Looking Backward, which inspired hundreds of socialist clubs in the late 19th century
United States and a national political party, was as highly technological as Bellamy's imagination. For Bellamy and the
Fabian Socialists, socialism was to be brought about as a painless corollary of industrial development. The
Bolsheviks imagined "a world of magnificent factories and mechanized agriculture that produced all of society's necessities," a new socialist machine age. Siddiqi writes that "this obsession with the power of science and technology to remake society was partly rooted in crude Marxism, but much of it derived from the Bolsheviks' own vision to remake Russia into a modern state, one which would compare and compete with the leading capitalist nations in forging a new path to the future."
H. G. Wells in works such as
The Shape of Things to Come promoted technological utopianism. To many philosophers, the horrors of
World War II and the
Holocaust, as
Theodor Adorno underlined, seemed to shatter the ideal of
Condorcet and other thinkers of the
Enlightenment, which commonly equated
scientific progress with social progress.
From late 20th and early 21st centuries A movement of techno-utopianism began to flourish again in the
dot-com culture of the 1990s, particularly in the West Coast of the United States, especially based around
Silicon Valley. 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. This form of techno-utopianism reflected a belief that technological change revolutionizes human affairs, and that digital technology in particular – of which the
Internet was but a modest harbinger – would increase personal freedom by freeing the individual from the rigid embrace of bureaucratic big government. "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". Its adherents claim it transcended conventional "
right/left" distinctions in
politics by rendering politics obsolete. However, Western techno-utopianism disproportionately attracted adherents from the
libertarian right end of the political spectrum. Western techno-utopians often have a
hostility toward government regulation and a belief in the superiority of the
free market system. Prominent "
oracles" of techno-utopianism included
George Gilder and
Kevin Kelly, an editor of
Wired who also published several books. In the late 1990s and especially during the first decade of the 21st century,
technorealism and
techno-progressivism are stances that have risen among advocates of
technological change as critical alternatives to techno-utopianism. However, technological utopianism persists in the 21st century as a result of new technological developments and their impact on society. 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.
Cyber-utopianism, first coined by
Evgeny Morozov, is another manifestation of this, in particular in relation to the
Internet and
social networking.
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. In
Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World, he further explored ideal scenarios where human civilization reaches technological maturity and solves its diverse coordination problems. 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. In
North Korea, technological utopianism remains one of the key themes of the state's
Juche ideology. The pursuit of advanced strategic technologies is promoted as an integral part of autarkic economic development. North Korean technological utopianism essentially rests on three narratives: the rejection of consumer society and culture, an emphasis on heavy industry, and a belief in the ability of the masses of workers to make great technological achievements under the
Workers' Party of Korea. In practice, this has resulted in most of North Korea's technological resources being utilized for large scale, resource intensive, infrastructure and military projects, many of which have primarily symbolic importance. Domestic innovations in nuclear and space sciences continue to play a major role in the state's propaganda narratives, which seek to portray North Korea as a modern regional power. ==Principles==