Imagining the Smart Utopia

Abstract

In 1516 Thomas More (2005)¹ published his famous book Utopia, depicting an island oasis where people live harmoniously and without adversity. His fictional title, a word literally meaning ‘nowhere’, has entered our language to refer to an imagined perfect place or state of things. A proliferation of technological utopians emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, putting forward their dreams for a future in which ‘progress was precisely technological progress’ (Segal 1986: 119). Like More, the aim was to achieve a ‘perfect society’ — one free of crime, disorder, mess, chaos, dirtiness and hardship, and fuelled by ‘clean, quiet, powerful electricity’ (Segal 1986: 123). The irony is that these utopian visions of ‘nowhere’ often ended up going nowhere, never being realised, or at least not in the ways these utopians imagined.