Orlowski, Eric JW; (2025) New Technologies for Untold Futures: Techno-utopianism and everyday practice in Sweden. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis considers the future as a social and cultural construct through the lens of technology. The research focuses on techno-utopian ideas and how these translate into pracDce among several disparate—yet connected—groups and communiDes in Sweden, including transhumanists, biohackers, and cryonicists. These techno-utopians are radical only in the sense that they genuinely believe that technology can solve all problems humanity is facing, and will ever face. Yet, despite their radical techno-belief, there is both a failure of imaginaDon—whereby they fail to imagine a future substanDally different than the present—whilst also not being radical enough in their pracDces, preferring instead to fall back on a cosmology of humanity in the aggregate as a driver of inevitable progress. Based on the fieldwork carried out in Sweden among these communiDes—at their event spaces; their so-called third spaces; their offices; and wherever else they meet and spend Dme—the first half of this thesis focuses primarily on their pracDces, and how they imbue seemingly everyday objects with potenDal to bring about the techno-enlightened future. The second half focuses primarily on the methods of future-making: how the future is (failed to be) imagined, and how these imaginaries are sustained by a cosmology of inevitable human progress. Taken together, this gives their future visions a decidedly tragic undertone. As this thesis aims to contribute to the exisDng anthropological work on temporality and the future, I maintain here that in the face of uncertainty for what the future is, technology more broadly becomes entangled into the future as a cultural idea, and charged to answer quesDons that only humans can answer.

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