Why The Tech Utopia is Just Bad Fiction

The History of Utopian Writing proves Silicon Valley's Utopia Won't Work

The Automaton of Henri Maillardet | ca. 1810 | The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. Pic: The Franklin Institute

As the speed of technological innovation accelerates and billions are poured into Research and Development on A.I and robotics, we’ve started to hear the return of a word that was practically banished after WW2: Utopia. Only today Elon Musk declared, ‘We are on the event horizon of the singularity.’

And this is strange for those of us who were born in the last century. Because we lived through a time in which the very idea of creating a perfect Utopian society had been exhausted; a time in which this disproven and discredited ideal had come to fill the great and weary minds of the time with moral repugnance. After the hundred million or more who died under the horrors of the totalitarian regimes that had each promised man-made Utopias, there was a consensus which found its expression in the postmodernists of the late 1970s, such as Lyotard, that the “grand narratives” of “instrumental reason” and utopian social engineering were to blame for mass destructions of modernity. There were the works of Francis Fukuyama with his thesis of The End of History. Never again, these influential thinkers claimed, would society put its trust in dreams of a perfectly scientifically planned Utopian society, as such dreams had led so mercilessly to the gulag, the killing fields, the man-made deserts of famine and the death camps. Strictly no more attempts to achieve Utopia, was the agreement that rang throughout the western world.

At least that was the case until the early 2000s.

Then a new breed of utopians, who had been hiding away in the laboratories and basements of cyberspace with their tech toys, suddenly emerged, and oblivious to the banishment of belief in human perfectibility, they brought forth a new invention, or so they thought: Techno-Utopianism.

By 2025, these true believers have arrived in numerous varieties: the transhumanists, the tech optimists and the Effective Accelerationists. Roboticisation they tell us will bring about a new age in which we will be delivered from the pains of human toil; AI growth, will, Tech Guru Ray Kurzweil and his devoted followers, have foretold again and again, achieve the singularity; the great moment when the machine-mind will accelerate into exponential growth, surpassing all our amassed human intelligence, erupting in the pure white light of superintelligence, finally solving all universal human problems, ushering in a time of radical abundance, an end to poverty, sickness, suffering and even death.

As Transhumanist guru Nick Bostrom claimed in "Superintelligence," 2014, “The future could bring a state where suffering is greatly reduced or eliminated, and people have vastly enhanced capacities.” Recently, Truth Dig magazine in an article which lays out the reach of the new zeitgeist called ‘Effective Accelerationism’ and the Pursuit of Cosmic Utopia” declared ecstatically, “Let a thousand AGIs bloom and you get a utopian meadow.”
And these optimistic declarations of a coming accelerated perfection, are, once again, everything that the Utopians for hundreds of years before the technologists had been aiming for. So now we have, the worst idea of the 20^th century reborn for the 21^st, and this time with extra hype, added to attract hundreds of billions in venture capital.

Of course, it’s very tempting to imagine future worlds in which all of our present problems will be solved as if they were mere technicalities that can be sorted out by a computer, but as soon as we move from some vague ideas flying around the word Utopia, to looking at the real documented history of imagined Utopias as written down and stored in the libraries of the world, we start to discover some real problems. There is something rotten about Utopia, a kind of poison hidden within the flower, and the evidence of it is lurking within the entire historical canon of Utopian fiction and all the attempts made to describe Utopias in futuristic texts.

I’ve studied the history of Utopian writing for a decade and I’d like to explain why it is a dangerous and also deceitful concept. I’d also like to demonstrate that human beings have failed again and throughout the entire history of the Utopian canon, in fiction and in futuristic society planning, to depict or map a credible utopia, let alone design a future society built on one that could be, in any way liveable.

There Are Far Fewer Utopias Than You’d Realise - For a Reason

Utopian imaginings have mostly manifested in pamphlets and novels, but, as a genre, it has very few works that have been written to any standard and that have entered cultural debate - barely forty in the last five hundred years. None, in fact, have repeated the visibility of the very first book – Thomas More’s Utopia (1519). Even More’s title points to the impossibility of such a place, Utopia meaning ‘nowhere’ (from the Greek ou “not” and topos “place”). This no-place has proved far harder to imagine than has it’s opposite - the hell-on-earth that is Dystopian fiction.

Compared to the success of Dystopian imagining, one of the reasons why Utopia is not popular is that is it of poor quality in terms of storytelling and storylines. Utopias have no adventure or jeopardy and less imagination than you would imagine. Even its classics are rigid with almost no action or tension, with narratives that are really just essays full of didactic exposition (New Atlantis, The Isle of Pines, Utopia, The Blazing World, The Voyage to Icaria, Erehwon, Looking Backwards, Walden Two, H.G Wells’ Modern Utopia and Aldous Huxley’s Island). All these texts depict Utopias, in which the human emotions of hate, lust, violence, envy and greed have vanished, and all human problems such as poverty, pain and suffering and sadness have been banished (as the Tech utopians also dream). Surprisingly, all these texts use exactly the same narrative structure.

In each “a stranger” discovers a Utopian paradise cut off from the world (by sea, by mountains, by ice, or by social planners). They are then given a guided tour by a Utopian inhabitant (or inhabitants) in which the laws, mores and economics of this paradise are explained in great detail. The protagonist is then reduced to a simple cypher for the essay-writing author, so they ask questions such as, “tell me, I beseech you – how are your Taxes levied?” (Mercier, The Year 2440, 1771) and “I admit the claim of this class to pity, but who could they who produced nothing claim a share of the product as a right?” (Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887).

This tired literary device of having the protagonist feed questions to Utopian explainer can be seen all the way from Thomas More’s original Utopia in 1516, to 1942 and the Utopia of Behavioural Scientist B.F Skinner (Walden 2 ) in which the protagonist asks his tour guides over two hundred questions, such as, “But what do children get out of it?” and “May you not inadvertently teach your children some of the very emotions you are trying to eliminate?”

What little plot there is in Utopian fictions, is usually no more than a debate for the protagonist over whether, in the last few pages, they shall remain in this perfect place, or not. And this small dilemma is sometimes increased by having the stranger be accompanied by one or two others, from the old world, who have differing opinions on the Utopia. That’s about it for drama. In fact, as one tertiary visitor-character in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s all-female utopia Herland (1905) protests “[In this Utopia] they have no drama in their plays.” As all conflict has been erased from Utopian society, there is also no story for any reader to relate to. All there is for the reader is the possibility of marvelling at the efficient running of these perfectly planned socially engineered but thoroughly un-eventful societies.

As for the inhabitants of Utopia in fiction, they are never credible complex multi-dimensional characters, precisely because they are without flaws. As a result it’s impossible to write about the inhabitants of a perfect world, without them coming across as either brainwashed, bland or like tour-guide automatons - acting out the author’s rules for the planned paradise.

There are no real individuals in Utopian fiction, no-one memorable; the characters have no depth or psychological complexity and the genre actually dictates this. This is as true of the Harmony of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), as it is of Aldous Huxley’s The Island, as it is of Thomas More’s Utopia. These characters who live within “pleasant and profitable social relations on a scale almost undreamed of in the world at large” (Walden 2) are modified humans, either genetically or behaviourally, and they must - due to the necessary requirements of the genre - be without anger and the “petty emotions that eat the heart out of [normal humans]” (W2). For if the inhabitants of Utopia were like the rest of us, with flaws, ambitions, needs and greed, the Utopia would soon collapse back to the conflict-ridden civilisation that we already live in.

Utopian fiction is Formulaic

Again and again Utopian fiction employs two specific linguistic tricks in its attempts to imagine the unimaginable. These are:

1. Dependence on the repetition of hyperbolic adjectives that signify positive things, like ‘beautiful’, ‘joyous’ and ‘healthy’.

2. Repetitive use of negated negatives to infer positives. So in any given Utopia there is no war, no ego, no greed, etc.

William Morris’s News from Nowhere is a case study in wishing a Utopia into existence with nothing more than the linguistic trick of positive adjectives. His Utopian inhabitants are “handsome healthy-looking people, men, women, and children very gaily dressed… with a pleased and affectionate interest” and “musical laughter” who inhabit “this beautiful and happy country” that offers “endless wealth of beautiful sights, and delicious sounds and scents.”

Morris’s entire Utopia is built upon the adjective “beautiful”. In News from Nowhere the children are described again and again as beautiful, the skin of the inhabitants is beautiful, the arms of the women are beautiful. Also described as beautiful are the following: the coins, the horses, the rivers, the fields, the glassware, crockery and plates, the rose gardens, the “exceedingly beautiful books”, the weather, the wise women, the young women, the forests and the architecture “This whole mass of architecture which we had come upon so suddenly from amidst the pleasant fields was not only exquisitely beautiful in itself, but it bore upon it the expression of such generosity and abundance of life that I was exhilarated to a pitch that I had never yet reached.” Even young girls possess a unique beauty that, “was not only beautiful.”

If you were to remove the adjective beautiful from Morris’ Utopia it would collapse. Another Utopia completely dependent upon declaring positivity and embroidering it with happy adjectives is James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933). The name of his Utopia is one that has entered our modern repertoire - Shangri-La.

Shangri-La is a place of ‘total loveliness’, the protagonist’s guides to this Utopia are ‘good humoured and mildly inquisitive, courteous and carefree’ as they toured ‘one of the pleasantest communities he [the Protagonist] had ever seen’. The inhabitants of Shangri-La live for two hundred and fifty years, and by living there, ‘decades hence, you will feel no older than you are today – you may preserve…a long and wondrous youth… you will achieve calmness and profundity, ripeness and wisdom.’

The best written and most imaginative of all Utopias is Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland (1915), but nonetheless it’s perfection in the genre, exposes all the flaws and limitations of the genre itself. Herland is almost completely dependent upon long lists of positives with happy adjectives to create the illusion of a place of peace. In this entirely female parthenogentic collectivist Utopia, the children are “vigorous, joyous, eager little creatures”, who “knew Peace. Beauty, Order, Safety, Love, Wisdom, Justice Patience and Plenty.” And found themselves in a “big, bright, friendly world full of the most interesting and enchanting things to learn about and to do” in which “The people everywhere were friendly and polite.” The protagonist, a male visitor, “never heard a child cry in Herland’, while the Herlander adult tour guides are further strings of adjectives, being ‘tall, strong healthy and beautiful,’ with ‘peace and plenty, wealth and beauty, goodness and intellect.’ Again there is the reliance on the repetition of beauty as a description, in the ‘rich peaceful beauty of the whole land.’

Herland also creates its Utopia by simply negating things that are seen as negative. So there are “no wild beasts”, “cats do not kill wild birds”, there are “no criminals for 600 years”, “no childhood diseases”, “no homes”, “no property”, there is “no alcohol”, “no tobacco”, “no competition” and the inhabitants have “no sex feeling” and “no sex”. There is ‘no marriage’, their plays also have no drama and their homes have ‘nothing to hurt, no stairs, no corners, no small objects to swallow, no fire…’ in this paradise that is ‘no place for men’.

How such a society with so many beautiful things and so many negative things eradicated can actually be achieved by actual humans, is nowhere explained, because if it were the limitation of the Utopian genre would be exposed and we would see something much darker beneath it all.

The island Utopia of Edward Joseph Martyn (1859-1923), the first president of Sinn Fein, is also one of positive hyperbole and lists of No-this and No-that. His Agathopolis in which ‘every citizen is a horseman and our breed of horses is the finest in the world’, is one in which there is no science, there are no protestants, no socialists and – and in direct opposition to Herland – there is a ban on women’s suffrage. All traces of the ‘unclean world’ are to be erased.

The real consequences of the erasure of negatives start to become apparent in a Utopia which is almost entirely defined negatively, by what it is not. This is Aldous Huxley’s – The Island (1962). In this lost tropical paradise in which Buddhism is fused with Tantra, in which the inhabitants ‘do not fight wars’, there is also ‘no established church’, ‘no omnipotent politicians or bureaucrats’, they also ‘don’t have any captains of industry or omnipotent financiers’ with ‘no place for any kind of dictator’. And the same question arises: How can this actually be achieved? Huxley is a little braver than those Utopian writers who skirt round real consequences of erasing negatives; he advocates getting rid of bad people by ‘improving the race’.

This dark shadow of population control is also found in the utopian fiction Limanora: The Island of Progress (1903) by Godfrey Sweven/James Macmillan Brown. The Isle of Limanora is a scientific Utopia in which technological advances have created advanced computers, communication and travel for a race who experience great longevity. Sweven explains what was holding the rest of the world back: ‘The progressive element in mankind was dragged back by the dead weight of the criminal, the diseased, the habitual pauper and the naturally incompetent’. His Utopia was created through the application of “the secret of idlumian” for such types. It means sterilisation.

The Dark Underside of Utopian Fiction

Like Sweven, H.G.Wells in his Anticipations (1901) takes the purging of all negative elements from his imagined Utopia very seriously, and is not afraid of the human cost.“People who cannot live happily and freely in the world without spoiling the lives of others,” he says, “are better out of it.” His Utopia requires the mandatory sterilisation of the unfit and later in his A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells asks, “what Utopia will do with its congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men of vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people, too stupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative people? And what will it do with the man who is “poor” all round, the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade man who on earth sits in the den of the sweater, tramps the streets under the banner of the unemployed.”

Wells’ solution is, “the species must be engaged in eliminating them; there is no escape from that, and conversely the people of exceptional quality must be ascendant.”

In effect, Wells takes the Utopian impulse found in Morris, More, Bacon, Rousseau and Gilman Perkins, to take “no this / no that”, to its conclusion in the destruction of those who don’t fit the Utopian narrative.

The reason so many of these writers used these same tropes and held the same beliefs is that they were influenced by the same source in their thinking. Namingly, the Enlightenment tradition with its dream of a total science of humankind, and a perfectly planned society. As Condorcet (1743-94) propounded in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1795), ‘this perfection of the human species might be capable of indefinite progress.’ ‘the time will come when the sun will shine only on free men…’ and this will be done through the ‘annihilation of the prejudices’. History has taught us, through the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, that the annihilation of prejudices, also involves the annihilation of the lives of those seen to hold prejudice. Condorcet’s sun does not shine on the dead.

The Enlightenment dream of a perfectible human species found it’s logical conclusion in the thinking of the highly influential Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), polymath, meteorologist, anthropologist, inventor, and half-cousin of Charles Darwin; a self-described progressive and a proto-geneticist. The ideas of the enlightenment and of Galton can be found in one form or another in the majority of Utopian fictions from the 1700s to the first half of the 20^th century.

Galton’s theories of the stabilisation of the population and the genetic improvement of the human species evolved into eugenics. Eugenics brought out of the realm of the imaginary, the possibility of the beautiful, super-intelligent, disease-free, strong children that the Utopian writers had been imagining for centuries. And this strand of history led directly, in 1933 to the introduction of a Eugenic Sterilisation Law in 1933, under Adolf Hitler.

This is neither an accident of history nor a coincidence. Hitler, we should not forget, was also the creator of a Utopian fiction. His Third Reich, with its imagined Utopian city of Germania, was the tragic conclusion of those two strands of Utopian thinking – positivistic hyperbole and the negation of negatives. Of his Utopia he said, ‘The Crimea will give us its citrus fruits cotton and rubber…The Black Sea will be us a sea whose wealth our fisherman shall never exhaust. We shall become the most self-supporting state…in the world. Timber we shall have in abundance, iron in limitless quantities, the greatest manganese ore mines in the world, oil – we shall swim in it.’

We know now that his euphoric eradication of negatives, was literal genocide and after the second world war, with good reason, the Utopian tradition was cast into shame.

Enough Utopias, Already

It is time we stopped framing Utopia in a positive light, and using this vaguely defined dream-location as a justification for marching into the future with ever more ambitious Utopian plans that pay no heed to the past. The lastest locations for Utopia with our transhumanists and tech optimists are cyberspace and colonies on Mars, both in their way negations of existing mortal life.

The failing of Utopian writing is itself a damning indictment of the entire Utopian social engineering and technological project. Throughout its history, even on the level of mere fiction, it has shown, without exception, that you cannot try to create a perfect society without both dehumanising its inhabitants and enslaving them within blank conformism, while at the same time getting rid of all those humans who do not fit in with the master plan. The unwritten violence acted upon those cast out of Utopia haunts the entire genre. Their bodies hidden. Even H.G Wells, who attempted to invent numerous Utopias towards the end of his life came to realise that “Utopias are always static”. By that he meant they are the imposition of single idea upon a population, and this can only be done by force.

Utopian fiction fails precisely because it is fundamentally at odds with human psychology and the human condition. It is a social constructionist fantasy of 100% social engineering based on a Blank Slate idea of malleable humans without a shred of human nature. From this, it follows that our inability to create credible Utopian fiction is also evidence of why Utopian societies have failed throughout history and will continue to fail in the future. Contrary to popular belief, and no matter what good intentions they may have, or claim to have, Utopian authors and thinkers are not the good guys. The inability to address real human failings, desires and conflicts in Utopian fiction is actually a symptom of its inhumanity.

The problem lies at the very start of the genre, in the very first Utopian text – Plato’s Republic (360 B.C). A perfectly planned state, designed to create peace, harmony and justice for all, nonetheless is one which artists are banished to die in the wilderness, in which wives and children are communal property, in which parent-child bonding is prohibited, and in which eugenics is enforced by selective breeding under a military dictatorship ruled by a Philosopher King, ‘the bride and bridegroom must set their minds to produce for the State children of the greatest possible goodness and beauty’. Plato’s Utopia is also held together under ‘the noble lie’; a policy of systematically lying to the citizens, ‘to keep them content in their roles.’ And all roles are dictated and enforced from above. This first Utopia is very much like a modern totalitarian state. Even an anti-statist Utopia like that of The Digger, Gerrard Whitstanley in his Utopian work (Law of Freedom, 1651), has a tyrannical plan. In his Utopia, in which money is abolished, anyone who buys or sells anything, or who administers the law for money or reward is to be executed.

This is the hidden flip-side of those lists of negated negatives that occur so often in Utopian fiction - the “no competition”, “no money”, “no disputes”. They actually translate when put into reality, as death to those who compete, who have money, who dispute.

It might be wise to take an honest inventory of Utopian fiction and to acknowledge that it is actually a form of the authoritarian imagination. And to give up on this idea, that resurfaces every second generation or so, that the only things stopping us from creating a newly revised Utopia on earth is lack of imagination or political will; or that it is only bad people who stand in our way. The flaw lies within the Utopian ideal itself. As the fiction shows, we simply can’t imagine the people who could inhabit any and every utopia that’s ever been written, because such perfect creatures are no longer human.

As Ursula Le Guin showed us in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, W.F.Nolan showed us in Logan’s Run and Veronica Roth showed us in Divergent, the sure path to hell-on-earth is the attempt to force one single plan for Utopia upon everyone within a diverse and conflicted society. In fact, many Dystopian fictions are based upon this model of a false Utopia, or a Utopia-gone-wrong, such as Aldous Huxley depicted in Brave New World and Lois Lowry’s in The Giver. There are even some authors who started writing Utopias, only to realise what a hell they had accidentally created. One such is Gabriel de Foigny (1642-92), whose protagonist in A New Discovery in Terra Australis, begins with a unisex tribal Utopia and concludes with the protagonist being condemned to death along with the enemies of the Utopians - women and children from another tribe who had their throats slit in their thousands, who were left in huge rotting heaps for the birds and beasts to devour. His crime was the all too human weakness of pity for the non-Utopians.

Dystopian fiction with its depictions of hell-on-earth, is the more humane genre, a warning against the hubris and arrogance that aims to create perfect planned worlds while sacrificing what makes us different from each other; what makes us human.

The failure to invent credible Utopias within fiction should serve as a warning to us, as our technologists, and tech utopians attempt to bring life to the dead ideal, with their hundreds of billions of investments in bio tech, nanotech, AI, robotics and space travel, with their hubristic claims that all human problems shall be solved, humankind cured of all ills, led by their digital deity that knows all. Look closely at their Utopian linguistic expressions and you’ll see the same word games and tricks being used to pad out the missing details of their utopian plans. Those optimistic adjectives, the same euphoric declarations of negatives negated – no more hunger, no more pain, an end to all suffering. These are the same linguistic tricks that they use to lure investors into throwing billions at a vision of the future that can not only never be realised but which was only ever a trick with words to start with. A trick going back centuries.

What is alarming about our present wave of Silicon Valley Neo Utopians is that in their accelerating drive for future tech paradise, they have not once, not one of them, looked into the rear-view mirror of History, to critically investigate all the past attempts humans have made to imagine, describe and to create Utopia on earth. None of these transhumanists, e/acc advocates and tech optimists, not Kurzweil, Bostron, More, Pearce, Andreessen or Altman, has looked with more than a passing glance at the long and troubled history of Utopianism over the last five hundred years, let alone the last two thousand five hundred. And why should they? This is backward-looking and they might be discouraged by what they find, and this might cause ‘deceleration’. If that happened then they would never achieve the technological ‘escape velocity’ that is required for us to fuse with the digital deity and colonise the universe, living forever, beyond suffering within an infinitely expanding super consciousness, in perpetual plenitude and peace.

No, they do not even realise that all of this has been imagined and tried for centuries before and that Utopia always leads from little language tricks and pretty lies about human nature to the denial of the value of human life itself.

Ewan Morrison’s new novel: For Emma, explores transhumanism, AI and the human consequences of tech accelerationism. It is published by Leamington Books on 25th March, 2025 in the UK and by Arcade Publishing in the US on the 17th of June, 2025. It is available for pre-order at all good stores.