A glance at some of the titles in the growing techno-utopian canon suggests that, if anything, he understates the case. Apart from Zuckerman's Rewire, there is Diamandis's Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, and U.S. Interior Department analyst Indur Goklany's The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, to name only a few. By far the worst of these is Byron Reese's new Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War. Reese is a self-described "inventor, technologist, historian, author, speaker, entrepreneur, and philanthropist" who created such websites as HappyNews.com and now serves as chief innovation officer for Demand Media, the company that has brought us such sites as DailyPuppy.com.
Almost all contemporary techno-utopians extrapolate from Moore's Law, the hypothesis made by Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every two years; such exponential improvements, they argue, apply to virtually all technology. But Reese's confidence is extreme even by those standards. "[W]ith the Internet and associated technologies flourishing in a Moore's-Law-like manner," he writes, immense amounts of wealth will be created. As a result, "the poor will get richer, and the rich will get vastly richer." In this post-scarcity world, "socialism can't even exist."
Well, that's a relief! This confidence that technological innovation will ensure that liberal free market capitalism continues to reign supreme is a commonplace of techno-utopian writing. Zuckerman, for one, justifies his call for a new digital cosmopolitanism partly because it is a prudent way to cope with unexpected threats like the SARS epidemic (whose seriousness he vastly overstates) or political upheavals like the Arab Spring, but he is also at pains to emphasize how good the transformations he heralds will be for capitalism. For all the praise he lavishes on diversity and multiculturalism, Zuckerman's notions of politics are extraordinarily impoverished and unicultural. He is obviously more than within his rights to reject the critique of capitalism leveled by the anti-globalization movement, but he is not at liberty to write as if it scarcely existed. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker on the emotional range of Katharine Hepburn's acting, Zuckerman's runs the gamut of political possibility from A to B.
Reese doesn't even make it to B. On the future of culture, he insists that we are standing on the threshold of "a new Golden Age for humanity," where today's "Internet Renaissance" dwarfs its Italian predecessor "a hundredfold, a thousandfold." Where medicine is concerned, disease will become largely an artifact of the past. "Imagine," Reese writes, "if Hippocrates had a fraction of [what is available to scientists today]. If Jenner had had e-mail, Pasteur an electron microscope, Salk a genetic sequencer.… I ask you again, does disease even have a chance?" I'm sure the researchers stymied by such terrible illnesses as ALS and bone cancer will be relieved to hear that victory is just some high-tech medical devices and a Google search away.
In Reese's account, hunger and war are equally certain to disappear as well. Alluding to the work of Norman Borlaug, the Iowa-born agronomist who was one of the principal architects of the Green Revolution, he declares, "One guy from Iowa came along with some garbage bags and saved a billion lives. How much more should we be able to [do] with the Internet, computers, and other technology? I say we can improve things not by 20 or so percent, but by twenty times or more." As for war, Reese begins by somewhat hedging his bets, writing uncharacteristically that "in making the case that war can and will be ended, I have my work cut out for me." It soon turns out that there was no real cause for alarm. "'But wait!'" he writes, "'Is that a distant bugle I hear?' Out of the blue, the cavalry comes to the rescue. All right then, not the cavalry, but a marshaling of arguments and observations that will show how the end of war is inevitable, or nearly so." If only there were an app for that.
It is easy, not to mention enjoyable, to make fun of Reese. But at one point toward the end of Infinite Progress, he marshals the ubiquitous, omnipresent claim of techno-utopians past and present: This Time It's Different. "I know it has been the vanity of every age to think it represents a high point in history," writes Reese. But today, he says, "this is no idle boast." Zuckerman makes a related point, though less assertively, insisting that it is "unhelpful to dismiss the ambitions of [the] technological optimists … simply because the futures they hoped for haven't yet come to pass." With optimism and the arc of history in their pockets, they bemoan the poverty of ideas among cynics and skeptics of this future-perfect, but it's the idea of poverty that brings odd bedfellows together.
At first glance, it would be difficult to imagine views further from those of a Reese, a Kurzweil, or a Diamandis than those of the international development community. To put it mildly, transhumanism and poverty reduction are the unlikeliest couple. Yet if one views both groups through an ideological lens, what is striking is not what separates them but rather what unites them -- first and foremost, the rigidity of their optimism. From Reese this is probably to be expected because inside Infinite Progress there is a perfectly respectable self-help book screaming to get out. But when Reese states, "I believe in the future I describe … not out of a childish wish, but because it seems the obvious and natural progression of history," he is being no more categorical than Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates, who wrote in late 2012 that "a realistic appraisal of the human condition compels an optimistic worldview." Compels! Compared with that kind of determinism, Ethan Zuckerman starts to sound like Hannah Arendt.
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