Introduction

Ever since the widespread distribution and adoption of digital technologies in everyday life from the 1980s onwards, two counter imaginaries have been expressed in both the popular media and the academic literature. The first imaginary deals with the techno- utopian dimensions of novel digital technologies: that is, the almost magical benefits they can supposedly offer human lives in terms of promoting social networks and communication, improving health and productivity, solving mundane problems and removing the tedium of low-skilled work. The second imaginary is directly opposed in its dystopian directions, positioning digital technologies as manipulating people, knowing ‘too much about them’, profiting from their personal data without their knowledge or consent, taking away their jobs, de-humanizing personal relationships, de-skilling children and young people and so on. Both imaginaries are simplistic, techno-determinist and hyperbolic, yet they continue to receive widespread attention and promotion (Wajcman, 2017).

Techno-dystopian visions of new digital technologies can be characterized as a broader affective atmosphere (Anderson, 2009) experienced by countries of the Global North, in which the future is increasingly imagined as disastrous, with little hope for redemption (Urry, 2016; Tutton, 2017). Sociologists of the future have identified the seemingly intractable pessimism that pervades future-oriented imaginaries. Tutton (2017) characterizes this approach as outlining ‘wicked futures’, replete with imaginaries of social problems that are difficult to solve. For Urry (2016, p. 33), the dystopian portrayal of novel technologies and other trends such as environmental pollution and climate change is born of what he describes as ‘new catastrophic futures’: a pessimistic sentiment about the future that began to emerge in the early 2000s.

This timeline is evident in the altered visions of digital technologies. Devices and software that in the late 20th century seemed to hold much promise for contributing to human flourishing, by the turn of the century had begun to feel tarnished, their potential for democratic expression, activism and civil society overtaken by what Zuboff (2019) describes as ‘surveillance capitalism’. Surveillance capitalism refers to the commodification of the digitized information about people that is generated when they go online and use mobile devices and apps. Zuboff's influential book on this subject is replete with generalizing and hyperbolic statements about the manipulation and exploitation of internet users by the major tech companies: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook.