We appear to have an imagination problem. And by we, we don’t mean just you and us – our scholarly community. We mean society at large. And the problem of imagination we are referring to is not that we are imagining radically different and improbable things; it’s that we have been robbed of our abilities to imagine differently altogether.
Whether it’s climate change, food scarcity, obesity, road safety, or political dysfunction – every challenge is framed as a problem that technology will solve. As the opening quotes suggest, technology is no longer just a tool; it has become our salvation narrative. It promises to “make the world a better place” and fuel “growth and abundance.”
To be clear – though, frankly, it probably already is – we’re not talking about just any technology. We are referring to modern technology: the Internet, big data, algorithms, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. These are the so-called “technological fixes” that have come to dominate our responses to the world’s problems and, more importantly, the limits of what we can even imagine as a solution.
Just as the sky is blue, so too is the belief that technology can solve virtually any problem and deliver all the innovation necessary to ensure ‘progress’. Apple’s now-iconic slogan, “There’s an app for that”, is emblematic of this worldview: that technology holds the foundational power to change and enrich our lives. Progress has become virtually synonymous with technological advancement.
When the printing press arrived, the Enlightenment narrative held that knowledge could now spread further, travel faster, and be reproduced more easily. Thereafter, the advent of the World Wide Web provided ‘a means to process, review, and distribute scientific publications at a much lower cost and faster pace’, consequently ‘revolutionising’ scholarly publishing. And when Google Scholar was launched, it allowed us to metrify and index scholarly literature – and once more, it was framed as a solution to navigating the flood of ever-growing published literature. Time and again, the story has been the same: technology improves how we create and share knowledge. And now, with the rise of generative AI, we hear it once more: AI will change research, and the loudest voices are screaming, ‘it will change it for the better.’
Of course, adopting technology is not the same as adopting a techno-optimistic worldview. But when the dominant belief is that technology will revolutionize research and knowledge in ways that make it ‘better’, more productive, that’s where the optimism holds strong and steady.
We are also not of the view that technologies themselves are inherently problematic. But our concern is that the uptake of technological products is never just about functionality. Technological innovations are not developed by neutral, disinterested, value-free actors: they are shaped by specific ideologies, cultures, and worldviews. As a result, the technologies we use come bundled with the cultural imports of the people and institutions who create them.
To understand the cultural and ideological imports that academic research invites through its use of new technologies, we must therefore ask:
The Figure of the Tech-bro
As is alluded to by the title of this essay, the knights in technologically advanced shining armor riding to our rescue are the Tech-bros. A Tech-bro can belong to any ethnicity, sex, gender or social class – although they are usually white men from upper-middle class families. Regardless of their individual characteristics, a Tech-bro in the purest form is likely to have dropped out of a prestigious university to found a disruptive technology company at a relatively young age. They are idealists, full to the brim with confidence that technological innovation can guarantee boundless profits and societal benefit – and we should trust them for they are at the cutting edge. And we, the rest of society who will benefit from the tech they are developing, idolize them. We are obsessed with what time Sam Altman wakes up, Elon Musk’s favorite books and where Bill Gates thinks the future of the world is going. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that they are bestowed a god-like status: we cannot do without their amazingly useful products and we venerate the extreme wealth they acquire through the successes of their enterprise.
Just about any individual can become a Tech-bro regardless of their individual characteristics – making their formation a relatively clear case of culture prevailing over nature.
