Techno-Utopian Iconography
Today marks the zenith of techno-utopianism. From its origins in the counter-culture through to the anarcho-capitalism of today's tech giants, Silicon Valley's guiding ideology has rebuilt the world in its own image. The original prophets of techno-utopianism shunned politics and instead sought to change the world through action. The businesses their ideas inspired now run the world.
Recently, as their beliefs have marched rightwards, senior figures in Silicon Valley have decided to become directly involved with politics. We urgently need to understand their ideology, and its flaws, if we are to resist their power.
The network is the ultimate symbol of techno-utopianism. To techno-utopians, everything is a network. Society is a network. The brain is a network. The economy, cities, companies, libraries: they're all networks. Lets take one specific example: the city. Techno-utopians romanticise the slum and the favela to argue that cities can be self-organising systems. They say that planning control destroys the very lifeblood of cities and removes their residents' agency.
Today's tech giants say they will free us from the “communist” terror of mass-transit and brutalist housing blocks. Around the world, they are attempting to build new cities from the ground up, governed by software and paid for by cryptocurrency.
But the language and iconography they use to describe these projects obscures the anti-democratic nature of their own technology. That a system is decentralized does not mean it is democratic. Indeed, their main aim appears to be to create chaos, through disruption and division, so they can rule this new world like feudal princelings.
“Techno-Utopian Iconography” invites the viewer to look at anew at cities and at self-organising systems. In this techno-utopian vision of the city, the austere geometric forms of the modernists may have disappeared, but the stochastic forms of computerised networks and self-organising systems are no less artificial. When we pare the city down to something as inhuman as a network, as a data-flow, what have we lost?
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Open Edition released on highlight.xyz on 20th November 2024.