Introduction: Audible Hope

Abstract

This is a book about the collective and utopian impulses in everyday capitalist life that gather around technological innovations. It is written for anyone who has ever marveled at the technological wonders of our time and all of the New that it promises, and who is yet struck by the fact that somehow the New never quite arrives as wished for or even as advertised. It is written for those who turn to technological products, consciously or unconsciously, full of wishes and hopes—that one’s quality of life will improve; that one will have more leisure time, will be forced to struggle less, and will be happier; even that social conditions will improve; or that the world will become more equal and filled with less suffering—only to find that promising new technologies, while able to transform some areas of our lives, nonetheless fail to change the essential things about which people hope and wish. Our modes of production have generated such material abundance and such remarkable capabilities that by reason and by any stretch of the imagination they should already have changed the world in these essential ways by now, but still have failed to do so. We now possess so many things that people in the past used to dream about as futuristic and, to the extent that the future can be imagined as discovering and embracing a better way of life, as utopian.¹ Something tells us that given the things we are able to make and do, we should all live lives of extraordinary leisure and plenty, yet very few of us do. We feel that there is something wrong.