Techno-Utopia/ Techno-Dystopia: Writing the Future of Cyber-Technology

Abstract

Will cyberspace ever become truly inhabitable, and if so, what kind of political climate will be present there? By investigating emergent discourses surrounding the future of cyber-technology, I reveal how online users are actively engaged in the preemptive literary construction and interpretation of a not yet realized cosmopolitics of virtual spaces. Additionally, I argue that futurism online constitutes the emergence of a novel form of real-time genre fiction intertextually linked to more conventional forms of science fiction that interpenetrate both public and academic discourses and interpret cyberspace as a potential source of either boundless freedom or dystopia.