A special report from the utopian future.
David Rieff
Foreign Policy, May/June 2013
EXTRACT
Even comparative moderates in the futurological sweepstakes tend to swoon when the subject is the pace of technology-led change. Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT's Center for Civic Media, argues in his new book, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, that it is an entirely realistic goal for humans to “take control of our technologies and use them to build the world we want rather than the world we fear.” The present moment, Zuckerman asserts in his book's concluding sentence, offers “an opportunity to start the process of rewiring the world.”
In his own new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, cyber-utopianism's severest and most eloquent critic, Evgeny Morozov, has dubbed such grand assertions about the mastery that we, with or without the help of intelligent machines, can exert over the future of the species the “Superhuman Condition.” (Full disclosure: I blurbed Morozov's book.)
