A great leap is happening in digital capitalism with artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, gene editing, quantum computing, and 3D printing all vaunted as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Billions are being invested, with the talk of an AI financial bubble starting to dominate economic headlines. We are also told this shift in digital capitalism is inevitable. Moreover, we are told that despite the existential risks, we should embrace a capitalist world in which humans will be dominated by general artificial intelligence when AI reaches human levels of cognition and even surpasses human intelligence.

Ultimately, 4IR technotopia suggests it will solve all our problems. The common-sense talk is of machines being more ‘unhuman’ in their intelligence, having superpowers beyond human capacities, and eventually being completely autonomous to decide their own course of action. The speed, computing power, and capabilities of algorithmic intelligence give credence to this technotopian claim and have prompted the question: Is this the final human invention? Yet, democratic deliberation and critical public discourse are lagging behind, and the totalitarian implications of such technologies to transform every aspect of our life worlds are not being engaged with sufficiently. The 4IR techno shift is a serious development for our societies, for the futures of our species, and for ecological relations.

In a recent volume that I edited titled ‘Digital Capitalism and its Limits–Technotopia, Power and Risk’, the much vaunted arrival of digital capitalism and its ideological progeny, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, is brought under critical scrutiny. The destructive side of digital capitalism is magnified to highlight what is occluded by technotopian futurism, the class power relations shaping digital capitalism, and the risks posed in a world in the grip of the fourth great crisis of capitalism, a poly crisis.

Technotopia and shallow futurism

The massive financial investment driving the 4IR has framed a dominant techno-nationalist narrative in the US, South Africa, and beyond: 4IR equals progress, development, and more growth. Narrow economic and market-friendly reasoning dominates the narrative while occluding deeper thinking. For instance, will the 4IR bring more unemployment, inequality, and anti-democratic dynamics to the fore? How is it changing capitalism itself? What is it doing to us as a species? Who benefits from the power relations it constitutes? Will it worsen the polycrisis?

These questions emerge from a critical techno-realist perspective that neither rejects nor blindly supports the techno shift of digital capitalism. Such a perspective centers the 4IR as a class project of the digital monopoly fraction of global capitalism, intent on unleashing a new wave of accumulation, driven by a technotopian imaginary working with ambitious assumptions about the role and implications of such technology.

So what is technotopia? What is its shallow futurism all about? In shorthand, today, technotopia refers to the fetishization of digital commodities, technologies (as forces of production), including the new 4IR wave of converging digital technology, big data, knowledge structures (robotics, manufacturing, military science, biology, neuroscience, earth science, etc.), and cultural experience. There is a shallow digital futurism at work that conflates digital monopoly interests, human progress, development, and the future; we are all meant to be conscripts on this bandwagon.

There are three aspects to digital technotopia and its discursive functioning. First, it is about idealized conflations of digital futures and human society. A perfect future is one in which anthropocentric human mastery of self and the world around us can be achieved through digital technologies. A world free of imperfections but subordinated to the power of digital technology. The logic of this is about the bio-technological remaking of the human as a trans-human, such that we ‘grow up’ as a species by embracing the cornucopia of digital science and technology. This is the evolutionary leap of history that is underway, and it is inevitable. It is grand teleology for a post-relational world. Second, techno-solutionism has answers to complex and variegated social problems. Computing power, the algorithm, quantum computers, metadata tools, and more are meant to provide answers to the human condition and the challenges of socio-ecological relations.

Digital technologies are hyped up as risk-free and benign as part of a convergence with hyper-individualism. They are just good for the individual and, by extension, good for society and nature. Yet, digital guidance systems help us navigate, but they are also used for missiles; drones help with research but also kill in military conflicts; and 3D printers manufacture usable objects but also firearms.

As Shoshana Zuboff argues, instrumentarian power has arrived, subjecting human behavior to digital observation, extraction, predictive control, and dependence. It appropriates our behavioral surplus and translates it into digital control of our lives. Put simply, all we need to do is ask Google or ChatGPT to figure out our challenges. Third, digital technologies are hyped up as risk-free and benign as part of a convergence with hyper-individualism. They are just good for the individual and, by extension, good for society and nature. Yet, digital guidance systems help us navigate, but they are also used for missiles; drones help with research but also kill in military conflicts; and 3D printers manufacture usable objects but also firearms, for instance. Currently, the big hype is driverless cars, but are resource-intensive driverless cars really good, given that clean energy public transport will use less resources, will be better for the climate and will certainly benefit society in general? Moreover, the speed of digital techno change does not leave room to question the risks and downsides. The historical lock-in or path dependence and inevitability arguments of technotopian thinkers also seem to suggest there is no going back: we are on the march from the mid-1700s (with mechanized spinning and weaving, then steam engines and machine tools), through 1870 to 1930 (electricity and fossil fuel power, water and sanitation, modern health care and high-yield agriculture due to artificial fertilizers), the 1950s onwards involving breakthroughs in computing technology, information management and new manufacturing technologies, and then of late the ubiquitous 4IR.

Yet, we are dealing with dual-use technologies that have imminent dangers and serious risks. Klaus Schwab, the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, which brings together the thousand most powerful corporations in the world to think through global trends, dynamics, and futures, is a strong and purposive advocate of the 4IR. While Schwab recognizes risks, he believes these can be mitigated through stakeholder capitalism. Given the asymmetries of power between digital monopolies and societies, this is wishful thinking, to say the least. Also, the current geopolitical rivalries between the US-led bloc and China, the ‘chip wars’, highlight how unrealistic stakeholder capitalism is in mitigating digital technology risks, as Chris Miller writes. Key thinkers from Google also identify the risks but merely argue that more power is going to be given to the individual in the ‘ungoverned space of the internet’ (Schmidt and Cohen 2013). What they don’t bother to mention is how this ideal type of libertarian individual is ensnared in instrumentarian power in ways we all don’t even understand.

The fourth great polycrisis and the dangerous contradictions of 4IR

These dimensions of technotopian ideological thinking are part of a new class project of the digital fraction of the global ruling class. As the techno-financialized stage (1970 to the present) of capitalism addressed the crisis of over-accumulation through neoliberalization and unleashing the market, this finance-led class project has run into crisis; the fourth great polycrisis of capitalism (mid- to 2000s till the present) with oil peak, financialized overaccumulation and inequality, multiple globalized food system shocks, accelerating climate change and extremes, resource constraints, biological disasters such as COVID-19, and hollowed-out market democracies increasingly de-democratizing. The digital capitalist class project, 4IR, is understood as one way out to inaugurate a new wave of capitalist accumulation. The 4IR has become the buzz phrase and meme for this version of technotopian thinking. Our techno-determined past is now our future. Technotopian conceptions of history are normative, idealistic and deterministic. They are shot through with a desire and ideological preference for its realization to be history. Put more starkly, digital technotopia is history, it is inevitable, it is universal, and the capitalist world will fit into it. But what kind of socio-ecological orders is technotopia producing? The world has had robotics since the 1950s, cell phone technology since the early 1970s, personal computers and the internet in the 1980s, and now we have algorithms, forms of AI, and platforms. Digital technology has moved into other spheres of the economy and society. As a class project of digital capital, it is implicated in the fourth great crisis of capitalism, including accelerating global financialization for about four decades.

However, the mainstreaming of the digital monopoly capitalist class project, as a response to the polycrisis of capitalism, prompts several techno-realist questions: Will the climate crisis or digital capitalism destroy life on earth? What lies beyond the hype of Silicon Valley technotopia and digital capital’s class project?

However, the mainstreaming of the digital monopoly capitalist class project, as a response to the polycrisis of capitalism, prompts several techno-realist questions: Will the climate crisis or digital capitalism destroy life on earth? What lies beyond the hype of Silicon Valley technotopia and digital capital’s class project? Are the interests of digital monopoly capital the same as societal and planetary interests? Is the cost of further digital technotopia human and non-human life itself? Is digital technotopia centrally implicated in the second coming of fascism? My argument is that digital technotopia is going to accelerate, worsen, and amplify the dynamics of the fourth great crisis of capitalism and its poly crisis of socio-ecological reproduction. It is not a solution but a risk and threat multiplier.

This might sound like hyperbole, but when grounded in an analysis of the political economy/ ecology of the dangerous contradictions of digital capitalism, this trajectory is very real. The dangerous contradictions being engendered by digital capitalism that need to be interrogated from a techno-realist perspective include the following:

• Precariousness, surveillance and the end of privacy;
• Social media and the rise of neo-fascist authoritarian politics;
• Cyber attacks, robotized soldiers and endless war;
• Hyperindividualism, commodification of cultural experience and the metaverse;
• Financialization, cybercrime and the ‘Crypto Wild West’;
• Artificial Intelligence and the making of the ‘transhuman’;
• More extraction, waste, carbon emissions and engineering of earth relations.

Locating the digital shift in the deep just transition

The transition to full-blown 4IR digital capitalism is happening in the context of class and popular struggles to achieve deep just transitions to survive the worsening climate crisis. Such just transitions are about transitioning beyond the polycrisis and not just a single dimension of the crisis. The technotopian advocates of 4IR see themselves as disruptors, as innovators and harbingers of a new world. Their version of being ‘transformative’ is about unleashing their technologies in our life-worlds. Technotopia will save us, solve our problems and even improve our anthropocentric species. From the analyses in the volume ‘Digital Capitalism and its Limits’, it is clear that digital monopoly capital, while unleashing its power, does not appreciate the risks and dangerous contradictions it is engendering as part of the polycrisis. More unemployment, inequality, delayed action on worsening climate crisis, biodiversity loss, extractivism, food system collapses, and failing marketized politics, all due to faith in technotopia, is unacceptable. Hence, the politics of deep just transitions to survive the polycrisis is also about transitions to deal with the risks of the 4IR class project.

Placing the 4IR class project and digital monopoly capital within a transformative political frame is essential to ensure that technological transformations are grounded in a deep, just transition framework. Such a framework must address the risks of technotopia and the broader polycrisis, guided by several critical questions that shape this process.

Placing the 4IR class project and digital monopoly capital within a transformative political frame is essential to ensure that technological transformations are grounded in a deep, just transition framework. Such a framework must address the risks of technotopia and the broader polycrisis, guided by several critical questions that shape this process. First, the geo-physical resource constraints facing the world to advance deep just transitions must prompt our societies to ask if scarce resources should be channelled into the technotopian 4IR leap or to meet the needs of human and non-human life through climate debt funding, for instance? Second, given the de-democratizing dynamics of digital instrumentarian power, how should digital monopoly power be subject to legal oversight and transformation to address digital violations, harms, injustice and ensure digital privacy? Third, what institutional capabilities need to be built in society, drawing on independent academic research, to track and empower society about technotopian risks and transformative societal responses? Fourth, how should digital technology innovation, design, and use be democratized and decommodified to ensure that an ethics of care for human and non-human life informs digital technology design, algorithms, data management, and computing practice? Fifth, how do we ensure public literacy on digital technology use and attendant risks, while also ensuring universities provide research, pedagogy,y and institutional practice on critical technology studies?

Addressing these questions is about pulling the brake on 4IR technotopia so it does not exacerbate and accelerate the polycrisis. Moreover, locating the 4IR as part of the deep just transition means some parts of the digital technotopian shift have to be rejected and stopped in the public interest, other aspects have to be democratized to give society greater control, and some aspects need to be subject to stringent regulatory standards.