In this essay I argue that utopian writing has re-emerged in the early decades of the twenty-first century in a corporate guise promoted by, among others, the tech elite of Silicon Valley. Those who today put forward radical visions for how to achieve better and more just societies through total-system overhauls are not merely members of the intellectual and political elite, but the CEOs of tech companies who express their visions and social critique by way of commercialization. I propose we regard these corporate visions and business models as ‘corporate utopias’ because doing so will direct our analytical attention to their inherent social critique and thus help us diagnose—as did their predecessors of previous centuries—contemporary core dilemmas regarding the distribution of power and the capacity for problem-solving.

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Utopia

  • Nina Holm Vohnsen

摘要

In this essay I argue that utopian writing has re-emerged in the early decades of the twenty-first century in a corporate guise promoted by, among others, the tech elite of Silicon Valley. Those who today put forward radical visions for how to achieve better and more just societies through total-system overhauls are not merely members of the intellectual and political elite, but the CEOs of tech companies who express their visions and social critique by way of commercialization. I propose we regard these corporate visions and business models as ‘corporate utopias’ because doing so will direct our analytical attention to their inherent social critique and thus help us diagnose—as did their predecessors of previous centuries—contemporary core dilemmas regarding the distribution of power and the capacity for problem-solving.