Research: Utopia in the Digital Age
Francesco Romano Fraioli (Rome, 1993) achieved both a bachelor's and a master's degree in Philosophy at 'La Sapienza' University of Rome, both with full marks and honors. From 2020 he is a member of the editorial board of Rivista di Politica. His research interests focus on the utopian tradition of contemporary political thought and on the liberal-democratic one.
Research: Utopia in the Digital Age
Keywords: Utopia, Technology, Democracy, Liberalism
The utopian tradition, born into the riverbed of modernity and since then firmly present in its lexicon, represents a sort of karst river, which re-emerges sometimes, taking different shapes and reliefs. One of these re-emergences – certainly the most recent – is represented by the Techno-utopias or Cyber-utopias, which have flourished in recent decades in conjunction with the Digital Revolution.
The purpose of this research project is to put this new and important utopian trend under the lens of historical and conceptual analysis, to define its structural characteristics and to test its theoretical consistency; and, secondly, to evaluate the relationship between these ideal constructions and the assumptions, forms and institutions of liberal democracies. To this end, lacking to date a systematic scientific literature on the subject, it will be carefully examined a series of texts written by intellectuals and scholars of various backgrounds (including Chris Anderson, Henry Jenkins, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, Pierre Levy, Nicholas Negroponte, Tim O’Reilly, Howard Rheingold) and by visionary entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Peter Thiel o Mark Zuckerberg.
The goal is to trace, for the first time, the structural characteristics of the visions developed by these authors, identifying their origins, following their developments and envisaging their possible outcomes. Referring to the Baconian archetype, my hypothesis is that the techno-utopians of the new millennium support the idea that a reorganization of scientific research and a strong development of technology are sufficient to provide for both social and individual needs. Therefore, among the fundamental questions of my research, we must certainly include which and how many differences exist between politics and techno-politics, or between science and techno-science, in order to better distinguish, even from a socio-economic perspective, what kind of opportunities and distortions the techno-utopia is producing. In the hypothesis that leads this project, Techno-utopia is based on three fundamental concepts: exponential development, abundance and singularity.
The research will be divided into four areas. The first will be dedicated to a genealogical reconstruction of the concept of utopia. The second will concern the context in which techno-utopias have flourished, that is the set of processes that go by the name of Digital Revolution, with particular attention to the development of the Internet, the ICT (Information Communication Technologies) and the Web. The third scope will consist in the analysis of the texts, trying to specify the salient features of the thought of the authors in question. The fourth area will focus on the state of the art of studies on the subject, presenting both the reasons of those who have exalted and encouraged the phenomenon, and of those who have criticized and/or opposed it.