Is techno-optimism cruel?
And if so, what are the alternatives?
Surely optimism, a positive outlook on life espoused by self-help gurus on bestseller lists, can’t be cruel? Few would raise their eyebrows about the connection between technology and optimism. After all, medical technologies have arguably improved things for the better in many ways, for example. But associating optimism with cruelty, that’s another matter. It sounds pessimistic, perhaps even cynical.
But it does not have to be — today I want to dip into how dichotomies such as optimism and pessimism, in the case of our attitudes to technology, can be transcended. This will lead us to adjectives such as ‘hard’ and ‘radical’, but hey, that is the time we live in.
Better life through technology
Let’s start with what techno-optimism actually means and how it manifests. Scholar John Danaher summarises techno-optimism as “the view that technology, when combined with human passion and ingenuity, is the key to unlocking a better world.” In his 2022 article, Danaher uses a quote from a 2019 Jeff Bezos interview as a classic example of optimism towards technology: human ingenuity, when wedded with technology, will enable us, in Bezos’ words, to “invent our way out of any box” — the box being climate change.
We can consider techno-optimism to be a range of positive attachments to technology in general. A techno-optimist sees technologies as evidence of human inventiveness and progress and is attached to them via their perceived promise of improving the state of things towards the better — whatever ‘better’ means. Such valuations tend to be politically and ideologically motivated, either implicitly or explicitly. At their most vocal, techno-optimists cry for the boundless acceleration of technology.
Danaher writes about how optimistic views — that things are pretty good or will get better — in general are not favoured in academic circles because they do not seem intellectually respectable. Pessimism is as a stance that persistently favours the bad over the good, whilst the optimist stance does the opposite: good persists over evil and misery. However, given that the world is in fire today, it is difficult to fully embrace optimism, but that does not mean that we should succumb to nihilism (which pessimism as such is not) or abandon hope. In Buddhist terms, attachment to either end causes suffering, hence the middle way. In that middle ground, I suggest that there is an opportunity to transcend the dichotomies — more of that later.
Danaher sets out to produce an ‘ameliorative’ analysis of the optimist view in its various manifestations, i.e. approaching techno-optimism without prejudice and rigorously identifying both its strengths and weaknesses. He introduces and breaks down various flavours of techno-optimism, based on their orientations. The orientations vary in their temporal scope, i.e. optimism focused on the present versus the future — for example, transhumanists belong to the future-orientated optimists whereas statisticians who like to celebrate narratives of historical improvements (Hans Rosling comes to mind) are ‘optimists of the present’. Another variety is whether the optimism orients towards personal versus impersonal betterment. Forms of techno-optimism skew to impersonal optimism, i.e. we find venture capitalists, technology entrepreneurs, transhumanists, etc making claims about how technology is good for humanity in general rather than for individuals or the few. (Even if often, and in 2025 increasingly so, the loudest voices represent the views of the few.)
Nevertheless, Danaher’s analysis is useful in reminding us that there is no one techno-optimism, but rather it is “a cluster of views” that varies along several dimensions. These include how significant a role technology is given in the optimism, i.e. how important are technologies in ensuring that good prevails over bad, and how forcefully the optimism attributes a better future to technological solutions. Often these manoeuvres figure in the optimists’ mindset, although we cannot know how the future turns out, and despite well documented accounts about the lack of foresight over technologies’ unforeseen consequences.
Modest techno-optimism
In his analysis, Danaher aims to arrive at a target concept, an ideal way that we should use the term ‘techno-optimism’ to capture its nuances. He has analysed various degrees and orientations of techno-optimism and while he concludes that strong forms of techno-optimism are not intellectually defensible, “a modest form of agency-based techno-optimism may remain intellectually viable”.
Agency-based optimism towards technological solutions “need not be an irrational faith in the inexorable march of technology but, rather, a realistic stance grounded in the transformational power of collective human agency to forge the right social institutions and to translate the right ideas into material technologies.” (P. 26.)
Danaher’s proposal is certainly modest and calculated in comparison to the mouth-frothing marcandreessens out there. I don’t think it stands up to much historical scrutiny, though, but let’s stay optimistic. I find agency-based optimism similar in spirit to the responsible innovation approaches that typically draw attention to the values that underlie innovation practices and/or the politics of innovation. But seldom, or to the extent that I have come across, do they challenge the mantras of modernity, such as infinite economic growth and a singular notion of progress. Thus, I personally find them insufficient.
The labor of maintaining optimism
Now, after introducing a lawyerly, somewhat left-hemispheric approach to the question of techno-optimism (he works at a school of law, after all), allow me to draw from a more descriptive, metaphorical perspective. I propose this gets us beyond Danaher’s argumentation and towards an ideological reading of the dynamics of techno-optimism.
For this, Lauren Berlant, a cultural theorist and Professor of English, comes to our aid. Their 2011 book _Cruel Optimism_ makes the argument that, in neoliberal contexts, the promises of optimism, and attachment to them, themselves inhibits the attainment of said promises. Berlant writes:
[O]ptimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving. — Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011), p.2.
Importantly, Berlant writes about personal and collective optimism instead of the impersonal orientation that often risks skewing towards the bureaucratic. In scholar Mathias Thaler’s reading, cruel optimism represents “putting faith in a solution that comprises within it the very causes of the problem” and therefore, this act “ultimately represents a form of self-harming cruelty”. Self here can be understood both in individual and collective senses.
For Berlant, optimism is about attachments to fantasies about “the good life” and how prevailing hegemonies in society actually prevent us from reaching such goodness. The cruelty of this arises from a certain kind of dynamics; a dynamics where striving for a notion of good life becomes influenced by ideologies that uphold suffering rather than detach from it. If you have read my recent posts about hospicing modernity, you realise that we are treading similar territory. Similar to how modernity hides its cruel traces and conditions of existence, strong and extreme forms of techno-optimism hide the cruelties that underpin them. Once you see through the veil, maintaining optimism in such a context becomes laborious.
While Danaher discusses optimism through its objects, i.e. the outcomes towards betterment in the present or the future, for Berlant it is the relations that optimism constructs that are critical (rather than the objects they relate to). In her words, optimism “is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.” The question is, has our relationship to technology become similarly ambiguous? Is it there to bound us to certain pleasures and conveniences that ultimately prevent us from dealing with the predicaments that the same conveniences have led us into?
So what?
We arrive, then, to the question: is techno-optimism, regardless of the degree, cruel? Cruel optimism would suggest that techno-optimism promises a better future through technology, but the established processes of building and consuming technologies in themselves are the issue that prevents the better future from arriving. If techno-optimism by its nature is cruel, it is because the practices with which we build technologies contain elements of cruelty, i.e. as collective human activities they “wilfully cause pain or suffering to others” or feel no concern about doing so, to quote the dictionary. This should not surprise anyone who has paid attention to the systemic relations where technology comes into being, not the least regarding how the materials for many advanced technologies are sourced from nature.
For techno-optimism to shed its cruelty, the ways we attend to technology and its systemic relations would need to radically change. Again, we see that technology, as anything else, comes into being only through its relations. The cruelty in being strongly optimistic about technologies as all-encompassing solutions comes into being through ignoring the cruelties that exist in those relations, both in individual and collective scales.
Another aspect of cruelty, in a form of self-deception, is evident when a technology is touted as an improvement or as an enabler of new use cases, but the proposed technology actually undermines the lived experience that is needed to make most out of such new opportunities. Today, AI is embedded into all kinds of applications to provide evidence of its ‘usefulness’ — mostly to investors and policy makers — but too often its application produces unsatisfying results because to use it well, the person needs to have the experience to engage with it with correctly attuned, longitudinal attention. When technological solutions imply leapfrogging years of valid knowledge amassed through experience, and they are promoted by techno-optimists as improvements, the optimists undermine the skill-acquisition process, let alone the value of intuition. And most disturbingly, the emergence of wisdom through lived experience. If that isn’t cruel, what is?
Transcending optimism with radical hope
I first came across Lauren Berlant’s work and cruel optimism in an article by Mathias Thaler where he presents a ‘reparative reading’ of ‘eco-miserabilism’, a term that describes “a bleak narrative of our climate-changed world according to which it is already too late to avert the catastrophic breakdown of human civilization or the earth system altogether” (p. 318).
Thaler picks up Berlant’s articulation about a particular stance, an alternative to cruel optimism, that embraces “the action not being worn out by politics”. He likens it to the eco-miserabilists, some of whom I have cited in my essays. Their disposition expresses paradoxical hope, “a phenomenon whereby one keeps being driven by that desire while relinquishing an optimistic attitude toward our species’ capacity to “solve” the ecological crisis” (p. 324).
To complement the idea of radical hope, I want to point out to a sister concept, ‘hard imagination’, as introduced by the Hard Art collective:
“Hard Imagination represents the pull of a future that calls us to transcend the limitations imposed by current economic and technological paradigms to embrace possibilities.” — Hard Art collective
This is where the connections to techno-optimism, and the search for alternatives to it, without becoming anti-technology, start becoming concrete. But importantly, “the action not being worn out by politics” is not about pessimism or defeatism, and it is certainly not about cynicism. As Thaler puts it, the stance is about radical hope that provides guidance in the time of endings. It is different from mainstream environmentalism (and the alarmism it often succumbs to) in that it attempts to step away from finding solutions using the traditional routes — through soft-reform orientation, as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira calls it — and looks for new modes of cultural and social coping mechanisms. Part of this is the regrowing mindset where what has already been abandoned as ‘primitive’, especially in the face of technological development, re-enters the discussion as something to be salvaged for ways of living in the future.
This reminds me of a quote from Walter Benjamin:
“It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.”
Radical hope is there to connect those of us who were about to lose hope.
Thanks for reading.
With love and kindness,
Aki