ABSTRACT
25Ask any analyst to gaze into the future and describe what life will be like in ten or twenty years and, chances are, that analyst will reference technology somewhere in that answer. Some will undoubtedly offer a utopian take on our future – describing a world where individuals are healthier, wealthier, more tightly connected to one another, better informed and more able to communicate, share information and collaborate. To these analysts, the future promises greater equality, greater efficiency, greater speed and greater creativity – all enabled by technologies like three-dimensional printers, ubiquitous computing and advances like virtual reality. Others will undoubtedly offer a much more pessimistic glimpse into our putative future: forecasting the development of a tiered system of information haves and have-nots; a growth in new and better technologies of global surveillance; a system where rights appear to belong to information and those who collect it rather than to individuals, amidst wider projects of ad hoc geoengineering and the global diffusion of advanced weapons and other forms of technologically enabled instability (Smith 2014; Morozov 2011; Manjikian 2015). 1
