“A Way of Revealing”: Technology and Utopianism in Contemporary Culture

Abstract

Although technology was once viewed literally as a means of bringing about utopian society, its means to that end was exhausted in the minds of many when it fostered the nuclear attacks on Japan in 1945. Since then, not only has technology lost its utopian verve, but it also has been viewed by some quite pessimistically. Nevertheless, technology does provide an avenue for utopian cultural production, whose utopian energy must often be rescued by readers and scholars using the Blochian utopian hermeneutic. In this way technology is as Heidegger described it—“a way of revealing,” that is, the tool that brings the carving out from within the rock. This article argues that although technology has come to be viewed by some pessimistically in the years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is now experiencing a utopian renaissance in that it allows for utopian cultural production to be widespread as never before. This is occurring thanks to new technology-facilitated genres such as the Alternate Reality Game, the mass audiences tuned in to Internet avenues for utopian production, and the continued improvement of older technologies such as film and television. Technology cannot be the impetus for ideal change by itself, no matter how embraced such a concept might have been upon the introduction of the telegraph or the Internet, but it has brought about new methods of injecting new energy into culture, which can only serve to benefit society as a whole.