Digital Utopia Research Articles

Digital utopia and dystopia of schools after the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper aims to capture the digital imaginaries of Hungarian schools through the lens of digital utopianism as a theoretical framework. Employing a qualitative research approach and semi-structured interviews, this study contributes to the body of literature concerning organizational and policy-level educational management. It investigates utopian and dystopian visions of digitalized schools within the Hungarian education system, featuring participants comprising school leaders, teachers, and administrative staff drawn from five institutions, offering either general or vocational education, representing diverse ownership structures, including state and religious ownership. The study highlights prominent themes of the imaginaries, such as funding and infrastructure, equity, misuse, and social and pedagogical relations and suggests further research directions and methodologies applicable in this field.

Communist History Reloaded: From Digital Utopia to Lost Historical Consciousness

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Evaluation of the Economic, Ecological and Ethical Potential of Big Data Solutions for a Digital Utopia in Logistics

In the context of digital transformation and the use of big data technologies, this study shows the potential and possible applications associated with using big data, depending on the respective logistics area. The evaluation of this potential follows a logistical target system, which has been expanded to include ethical and sustainable aspects in line with the challenges of the 21st century. Furthermore, the status quo of the degree of digitization is determined, problems in understanding the terminology are shown, and cognitive and technical prerequisites and recommendations for action concerning the use of big data technologies (e.g., cobots) are derived. The survey methodology was based on a quantitative research method in the form of a survey. The article aims to provide the building blocks for a holistic approach (economic, ecological, and social) for politics and companies and to derive recommendations for action in logistics. The challenge is to find an alternative to conventional research, which examines big data almost exclusively for growth targets and optimization potential. Ecological and social goals should also be included here as an unchangeably fixed point and a normative limit as a value compass for business decisions. To close this research gap, it is necessary to evaluate the potential of logistics in connection with big data solutions to derive specific applications, their applications, and recommendations for action. This article presents an excerpt of the results.

Dispatches from Utopia: Black Queer Nightlife in Shakedown

Abstract Many critics have discussed the ways in which Cheryl Dunye's groundbreaking 1996 film The Watermelon Woman employs an exploration and interrogation of history as a means of creating and reshaping the present and future, a utopian extraction (which is ultimately an invention) of a symbolic Black lesbian figure who has been obscured and ignored throughout history. In this vein, this essay examines a work that similarly uncovers Black queer utopias of the past and actualizes queer potential for existence in the present: the 2018 documentary Shakedown, directed by Leilah Weinraub, which depicts a series of Black lesbian strip events in early-2000s Los Angeles. Drawing from a theoretical background that expands the political implications for queer sexuality, community, and performance, including queer of color critique, performance theory, queer utopia, and queer temporality, I present the ways in which joyful and utopic possibilities for Black lesbian being and belonging are opened in the strip clubs depicted by the film. Putting Foucault's model of heterotopias, or actualized utopic spaces existing across cultures, in conversation with these theories, I develop the concept of the “homotopia,” a queer utopian countersite that is both historically relational and temporally detached, existing affectively for queer viewers in multiple times and spaces. I argue that the film therefore not only represents an archival project of capturing and preserving a homotopic nightlife, but, further, carries it across space and time to shape an affective, digital utopia for the viewer. In this way, the documentary's depiction of these events constructs a homotopic space of its own, stimulating the spectator to engage in imagining alternative queer futures.

Digital Utopia: Labour in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Book Review: Jones Ph. (2021) Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism, London, New York: Verso. 144 p

Digital Utopia: Labour in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Book Review: Jones Ph. (2021) Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism, London, New York: Verso. 144 p

Book Review: The Circle of the Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech by Grafton Tanner

Jamie Ranger reviews The Circle of the Snake by Grafton Tanner. The Circle of the Snake grapples with the political consequences of the cultural turn to nostalgia, specifically the dynamic tension between the radical nostalgia required to contest the incessant homogeneity of cultural reproduction and the neoliberal narrative of a nascent digital utopia endemic to our contemporary systems of mediated communication.

Decommunization as a digital utopia

Decommunization as a digital utopia

Engels@200: Friedrich Engels and Digital Capitalism. How Relevant Are Engels’s Works 200 Years After His Birth?

This paper takes Friedrich Engels 200th birthday on 28 November 2020 as occasion to ask: How relevant are Friedrich Engels’s works in the age of digital capitalism? It shows that Engels class-struggle oriented theory can and should inform 21st century social science and digital social research.
 Based on a reading of Engels’s works, the article discusses how to think of scientific socialism as critical social science today, presents a critique of computational social science as digital positivism, engages with foundations of digital labour analysis, the analysis of the international division of digital labour, updates Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England in the age of digital capitalism, analyses the role of trade unions and digital class struggles in digital age, analyses the social murder of workers in the COVID-19 crisis, engages with platform co-operatives, digital commons projects and public service Internet platforms are concrete digital utopias that point beyond digital capital(ism). Engels’s analysis is updated for critically analysing the digital conditions of the working class today, including the digital labour of hardware assemblers at Foxconn and Pegatron, the digital labour aristocracy of software engineers at Google, online freelance workers, platform workers at capitalist platform corporations such as Uber, Deliveroo, Fiverr, Upwork, or Freelancer, and the digital labour of Facebook users. Engels’s 200th birthday reminds us of the class character of digital capitalism and that we need critical digital social science as a new form of scientific socialism.

"Brain-mimicking Machine" in Digital Utopias: From Memex to Hypertext and Beyond

Computer-brain analogies are ubiquitous in contemporary culture. They also have a long and relevant history. Throughout the history of computer development, computers as “brain-mimicking machines” were used as blueprints for computer design, as inspiration for new visionary ideas, as tools of liberation and as ideological construct obscuring actually existing power relations. Today, with the growing disenchantment with the results of digital transformation, we are forced to admit that these analogies often underpin relationships between human and technology that are disempowering and increasingly problematic.
 Keywords: human-machine symbiosis, augmented reality, memex, hypertext, ideology, Web 2.0, platform capitalism

How can man and machine collaborate?

There's no longer any doubt that the relationship between humanity and technology has seen monumental change throughout the past century – and indeed, this relationship will likely continue to evolve over time. The question is, what will our relationship with machines look like in the years to come? Predictions about whether we are set to live in a digital utopia or be subjugated by the machines we created are being hotly debated even as we speak. New technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) will change many aspects of the world we know today. For the data security sector, the changing relationship between man and machine is very noticeable. There are also many benefits that technologies such as AI will bring. However, the growing capability of hackers and their malware must be understood in depth, and businesses would do well to get ahead now with new AI defence mechanisms, argues Nikolas Kairinos of Fountech.ai.

“Useless Class” or Uniquely Human?

This essay explores recent developments surrounding the Fourth Industrial Revolution, particularly as they relate to the challenge of technological unemployment. In an age of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence (Al), so warns the philosopher-historian Yuval Noah Harari, ordinary people may become unemployable, unable to contribute to society, and therefore be declared a “useless class.” In contrast to such a dystopian view, futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom envision a digital utopia, while more realistic optimists emphasize that Al will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys. As an alternative to these perspectives, this essay proposes a Judeo- Christian approach that, independently of traditional frameworks of paid work, affirms the unique value and dignity of all human beings by highlighting the theological significance of human creativity, the balance between work and play, love as an overarching framework for life, and the role of human beings as ethical decision-makers.

Utopia Digital: Non-governmental organizations and the making of consumers in Brazil’s “New Middle Class” shantytowns

This article examines how class, consumerism, and employment influence beliefs of an idealized digital world in marginalized communities. I recount 24 months of ethnographic and institutional observation in a non-governmental organization that promoted the concept of “ utopia digital” (digital utopia in Portuguese) in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas (shantytowns). This corporate-funded non-governmental organization employed members of Brazil’s traditional middle class and promoted the liberating potentials of digital inclusion to members of a “New Middle Class” made up of 35 million “previously poor” Brazilians. Interviews with middle-class employees reveal how ideas of digital utopia act as a code for corporate efforts to encourage consumerism among the New Middle Class and bolster employment opportunities for members of Brazil’s traditional middle class. Reflecting on informal conversations, I also highlight a middle-class “crime talk” that frames the favela as an inherently violent place and, in contrast to their inclusionary work related to digital utopia, encourages non-governmental organization workers to physically avoid favela space. I use Zygmunt Bauman’s discussion of an “active” or “hunter” utopia as an ethnographic lens to discuss the practical and everyday experiences of technological inclusion in classed settings. By describing digital utopias as actively shaped by everyday understandings of urban exclusion and privilege, this article provides an ethnographic framework for decoding the socially reproductive nature of class-inflected consumer interventions in marginalized communities.

A great leap of faith: The cashless agenda in Digital India

This article assesses the rationale for India’s November 2016 demonetization, in terms of its origins and impact over the following year. I argue that this intervention was conceived and understood as part of a larger international monetary experiment. The article draws upon international media commentary, impact assessments by Indian scholars and the professed goals of the Government of India. Having established a direct link between demonetization and an advancing ‘cashless agenda’ around the world, I situate Narendra Modi’s Digital India programme as the putative foundation for a transactional economy. Drawing upon ethnographic studies exploring the everyday experience of India’s year of living digitally, this article raises the critical question of who must, or indeed can, bear the transaction costs of this digital utopia. In conclusion, I argue that the rapid expansion of digital money situates these concerns at the heart of social and cultural, as much as economic, analysis.

Imagining a Professional Future: Cognitive Criticism in Our Era of Information Work

Imagining a Professional Future:Cognitive Criticism in Our Era of Information Work Amanpal Garcha (bio) There is real trouble, though, and it has to do with money. —George Levine (1993) Information about money has become almost as important as money itself, as evidenced by the explosive growth of electronic banking. —Walter Wriston, Citicorp chairman (1983) Cognitive scientists view the human mind as a complex system that receives, stores, retrieves, transforms, and transmits information. —Neil Stillings (1995) Dream of the 90s From a 1995 issue of U.S. News and World Report, here is one description of what a digital utopia looked like at the end of the last century: “Catherine Sellman is an environmental engineer for a consulting firm in Northern Virginia. The view from her office window? The snowcapped mountains surrounding Telluride, Colo. She works in faded jeans at her Toshiba T1900 laptop—and breaks for snowboarding when the urge strikes” (Hannon 1995, 86). Academics in the humanities might seem like an unlikely group to fantasize about this model of long-distance, technologically enabled and flexible work, especially since the 1990s, when the focus of so much of academic discourse turned toward the need for more secure, institutionally supported university employment. Yet, as the following pages will show, cognitive criticism’s popularity within and outside humanities departments has been in part shaped by the cultural dominance of such utopian visions. [End Page 385] Cognitive criticism’s emergence occurred within a discursive environment with two distinguishing features: first, a culture-wide focus on the economic implications of information networks, which the growth of the internet, the dot-com bubble, and ever-more sophisticated computerized financial strategies helped spur; and second, the large amount of commentary about the humanities—commentary that attended less to its intellectual and political agendas (agendas that were the focus of the “political correctness” controversies that constituted the crisis-in-the-humanities discourse in the late 1980s and early 90s) and more to its economic future. Within the copious amounts of analysis devoted to the “crisis in the humanities” over the two decades since George Levine declared that our troubles have to do primarily with money, there have been few works of criticism that postulate a relation between on the one hand, the economic issues that have dominated both journalism and the discourse about the humanities since the 1990s, and, on the other, the precise content of literary criticism. The present analysis begins with the hypothesis that the nearly uninterrupted stream of commentary discussing, sometimes in great length and detail, the economic factors at the root of the current “crisis in the humanities” has altered what academics write about when they write about literature. There have been two theoreticians on whose work this essay will build who have similarly postulated a connection between literary criticism’s research agendas and the humanities’ monetary crisis. John Guillory argues that “the most politicized current modes of criticism” in the mid-nineties had their roots in young academics’ frustrations with the “dire state” of the academic job market (1996; 5, 4). More recently (and somewhat more obliquely), Alan Liu has written of research in the digital humanities (DH) as “register[ing] the larger uncertainty of employment in the humanities,” an uncertainty that has in turn created a “‘crisis’ in the meaningfulness” of humanities scholarship itself (2013, 419). Before discussing cognitive criticism’s links to information work and academics’ status anxiety, it is worth clarifying how these theorists understand academic research’s relationship to its practitioners’ socioeconomic conditions. Underlying Guillory’s and Liu’s analyses of economic factors and scholarly work is the notion, probably first and most powerfully articulated by Pierre Bourdieu in Homo Academicus (1988), that scholarship not only analyzes its objects of study but also performs a kind of sociological work: any given scholarly piece is about its topic at the same time as it tries to secure various kinds of power or capital for its author—for example, by denigrating other forms of inquiry associated with other disciplines or trying to reinforce the prestige of its own discipline (or institution or department) against those competing for the limited amounts of status and resources in the academy. Bourdieu’s...

Digital utopias and real cities—computer-generated images in re-design of public space

Virtual environments are seen nowadays as extensions of our physical activities in the city. Are people, however, aware what the digitally mediated cities they live in are? The starting point of my paper is a question of how computer-generated images (CGIs) influence human perception of real space. I am interested in the conflict between a vision and reality, which occurs when an architectural project materialises in a public space and is subsequently rejected by the inhabitants. To explain this conflict, I will use the notion of digital utopias and compare CGIs with the great tradition of “paper” architecture. I will analyse two case studies from a medium-sized Polish city—Poznań. The first case is a redevelopment of the Main Railway Station; the second is a re-design of a local square in Poznań. The analysis focuses on the ambiguity of CGIs used to advertise new investments. The Station in the phase of digital visualisation was appreciated by the Poznań inhabitants but when the project was finally realised, strong criticism of its users followed. The second one provoked public protests already in the phase of visualisation. In conclusion, I state that the concept of agonistic public spaces should be expanded and its virtual dimension should be taken into consideration as well. When dealing with hyper-realistic CGIs, we experience a certain utopia. Confronted with their material execution, we often experience dystopian disillusion which stirs us into action.

The web will kill them all: new media, digital utopia, and political struggle in the Italian 5-Star Movement

This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement ( Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2009, this movement succeeded in becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections in Italy. This article aims to discuss how elements of digital utopia and web-centric discourses have been inserted into the movement’s political message, and how the construction of the web as a myth has shaped the movement’s discourse and political practice. The 5-Star Movement is compared and contrasted with other social and political movements in western countries which have displayed a similar emphasis on new media, such as the Occupy movement, the Indignados movement, and the Pirate Parties in Sweden and Germany. By adopting and mutating cyber-utopian discourses from the so-called Californian ideology, the movement symbolically identifies itself with the web. The traditional political establishment is associated with “old” media (television, radio, and the printed press), and represented as a “walking dead,” doomed to be superseded and buried by a web-based direct democracy.

¿Estamos todos? La otra cara de Internet y la mundialización a través de África y sus periódicos electrónicos

On-line journalism is an unstoppable phenomenon and a result of a spectacular progression that has happened in a very short period of time. The information items being very easy and versatile to adapt to the Net and the fast progress in the developed world have contributed to this. The rapid flourishment of the digital era brought a new enthusiasm to connect the whole planet to the same communication system in which each individual could know what was going on somewhere else in the planet. However, in less developed countries this digital utopia shows big gaps in this area, as well as in other areas, and therefore on-line journalism has been very limited. The aim of this report is to try to show part of this reality through a study of on-line African newspapers, 70 in total. To carry on this research, a questionnaire was sent to the editors and a short draft of the situation has been made with the answers they sent back.

Our posthuman futures and education: Homo Zappiens, Cyborgs, and the New Adam

This paper is a philosophical reflection on the historical development of ideas about the nature of human beings and what this development may mean for the future of and in education. In terms of the causal layered analysis developed by Sohail Inayatullah, it is an investigation on the levels of worldviews and archetypes. Ideas of human nature describe a trajectory from supranature (theological and mystical) via nature (philosophical and mechanical) to subnature (digital). With the development of psychological science about a century ago, so called psycho-utopian visions of a better society arose, based on the transformation of the human mind. Such visions seem today to have been replaced by digital utopias, based on the development of superfast computers and the enhancement of brain capacity through neural implants. The latter is a prominent feature of so called transhumanism. The transhumanist ideas of Ray Kurzweil are briefly presented and contrasted with traditional religious and spiritual ideas. Of special interest in this context is Rudolf Steiner's philosophical–spiritual understanding of human being and development, which underpins Steiner Waldorf education. There is an existential choice confronting us today: whether to see humans as essentially spiritual beings, or as highly complex bio-computers. This choice has obvious ramifications for education as well as for the future of human being in general.

You Shouldn't Have Been That Sentimental

The intricacies of motion picture restoration tend to mystify greater public. Indeed, it is not uncommon for individuals to register outright surprise that there remains any point to preserving motion picture film, as we move inexorably toward some vague digital utopia. Already we have come to covet our moving images on a small disk, a tangible commercial good to own and consume on a relatively small screen, at our convenience, company of our choice. We also appreciate these products for their ability to add layers to film experience, to supplement our understanding and enjoyment with materials such as alternative endings, international versions, audio commentary tracks, and exclusive interviews. Many promise to be definitive edition of a given film, returning original artistic vision of director who may have been victimized by censors, studios, or producers, with inferior or incomplete results masquerading as final version for years. Arguments over what is authentic version tend to play themselves out this scenario. In other instances, film was released as planned, but decades of travel, projection, or inadequate storage have decimated footage, leaving modern audiences to interpret a mangled text.Film restoration and can encompass all of these issues and many others. It must also be noted that movies allegedly restored for DVD release may not have undergone any physical restoration or of original film elements, but were instead scanned onto a hard drive and digitally corrected. This is not simple or cheap, but it is outside scope of this paper, which will focus exclusively on film restoration as a process ultimately acted out upon celluloid through either analog or digital techniques (Koeber, 2003).1 Practice is complex, and so is language. Before discussing issues we will visit problem of terminology, so that we have a proper mapping of terrain when considering ethical challenges of practice, which will be subsequent undertaking. Finally we will explore one of more physically and ethically difficult examples film history: James C. Katz and Robert A. Harris 1996 restoration of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.Although we are principally concerned with restoration, is a good concept to begin with, since process of restoring a film often results de facto preservation. Karen F. Gracy observes that in film archives community, meaning of is mutable and elusive (Gracy, 2007, p. 141). Literature on subject would indicate that she is absolutely correct, since definitions become difficult to fix when agendas of various constituencies within community tend to overlap or compete with one another. Still, there are core practices which can be considered as preservation, and definition supplied by National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) encompasses a range of meanings while still remaining focused: the full continuum of activities necessary to protect film and share content with public. Film now embraces concepts of film handling, duplication, storage, and access (NFPF, 2004, pp. 3-4). In this sense, involves storing film properly and inspecting it regularly, but also taking necessary steps to ensure that it is duplicated onto new, preferably polyester, film stock. If there is enough money available to preserving institution, it is excellent practice to produce an additional film negative, so that preservation negative remains untouched event that further prints of film become necessary.The NFPF also provides an excellent definition of restoration as something that goes beyond physical copying of surviving original materials and attempts to reconstruct a specific version of film. Ideally this involves comparing all known surviving source materials, piecing together footage from these disparate sources into order suggested by production records and exhibition history, and some cases, enhancing image and sound to compensate for past damage (NFPF, 2004, pp. …

The Rhetoric of Digital Utopia after Sade: Utopian Architecture and the Static Subject of Digital Art

The Rhetoric of Digital Utopia after Sade: Utopian Architecture and the Static Subject of Digital Art