Here is the full transcript of Ruha Benjamin’s talk titled “Is Technology Our Savior — or Our Slayer?” at TED conference.
In her TED talk “Is Technology Our Savior — or Our Slayer?”, sociologist Ruha Benjamin explores the dualistic narratives surrounding technology’s impact on society. She critiques the Silicon Valley vision of a tech-utopia where all desires are instantly met, contrasting it with Hollywood’s dystopian portrayal of technology as humanity’s downfall.
Benjamin introduces the concept of “ustopia,” a blend of utopia and dystopia, emphasizing the role of collective human agency in shaping technological futures. She highlights examples of participatory democracy, like Barcelona’s “Decidim” platform, and community-driven initiatives in Atlanta, underscoring the potential for technology to serve public interests. Ultimately, Benjamin urges a reimagining of our relationship with technology, advocating for a future where it enhances collective well-being rather than exacerbating inequalities.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A Lopsided Imagination
This transmission is for future generations. As it stands, a small sliver of humanity is currently imposing their visions on the rest of us. They invest in space travel and AI superintelligence, and underground bunkers, while casting health care and housing for all as outlandish and unimaginable. These futurists let their own imaginations run wild when it comes to bending material and digital realities, but their visions grow limp when it comes to transforming our social reality so that everyone has the chance to live a good and meaningful life.
We are in many ways trapped inside the lopsided imagination of those who monopolize power and resources to benefit the few at the expense of the many. And as I see it, there are two stories these monopolists sell us about what the future holds. The first is the Silicon Valley version, in which all our preferences are tracked and desires catered to.
Chatbots, virtual assistants, driverless cars at our beck and call. All our wants and needs met in an instant.
This is their utopia, where technology is our savior, a future where our automated offspring know us better than we know ourselves. Ease and convenience, just a click away. And in their wildest dreams, we merge with technology, optimizing our potential to be stronger, smarter, superhuman.
Conflicting Narratives of the Future
The other story, preferred by Hollywood, is grittier, more chaotic. Conflict and competition run rampant. It’s “Hunger Games” meets “Blade Runner” meets “The Matrix.” People are ruthless and unpredictable. Inequality and precarity are permanent features in our lives. In this dystopian vision, technology is our slayer, displacing and dominating humanity.
And while these sound like opposing narratives, they have different endings for sure, one in which we’re saved, one in which we’re slayed, they actually share an underlying logic. And in both, we give up power. Both stories assume technology is in the driver’s seat, propelled by a will of its own. In the utopic and dystopic stories, technology impacts us for better or worse.
But our impact on technology, the human inputs, shall we say, are missing. The values, assumptions, interests, and needs that shape our digital and physical worlds are nowhere to be seen. To move forward, we have to pull back the screen. Rather than agonizing about a coming dystopia or longing for a future utopia, we have to reckon with ustopia.
The Concept of Ustopia
Ustopia is a word I’m borrowing from Margaret Atwood to describe the fact that the future is us. However loathsome or loving we are, so will we be. Whereas utopias are the stuff of dreams, dystopias, the stuff of nightmares, ustopias are what we create together when we’re wide awake. Ustopias invite us into a collective imagination in which we still have tensions, but where everyone has what they need to thrive.
When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley in the early 2000s, I witnessed firsthand how innovation often deepens social inequity. As the tech sector grew, people who had lived in the Bay area for generations were displaced and discarded. At the time, I was researching the social dimensions of biotechnology. As I observed scientists growing heart cells using pluripotent stem cells beating in a petri dish, I thought about how hard it is to grow empathy for other human beings in our everyday lives.
Here were billions of dollars being poured into the future of medicine, but health care for all was somehow far-fetched. This is what I mean by a lopsided imagination, where we can imagine regenerating sick bodies but not an ailing body politic. Utopias require inequality and exclusion. Ustopias center collective well-being over gross concentrations of wealth.
They’re built on an understanding that all of our struggles, from climate justice to racial justice, are interconnected. That we are interconnected. Take what’s happening in Barcelona, Spain, where a large-scale participatory experiment has been underway for almost ten years now using a digital platform called “Decidim,” which means “we decide” in Catalan, alongside in-person neighborhood-level deliberations to create policies that respond to people’s actual needs.
And the thing is, technology companies are not driving what’s happening. The collective intelligence of people from all walks of life are. Proponents call it a “New Deal on Data” that recognizes data sovereignty, privacy, collective rights to data. Decidim is open-source software, so it’s already been adapted and used in over 80 other cities, guaranteeing public transparency in a way commercial platforms don’t.
Once you install Decidim, you can create, comment, consult on ideas, and track what happens in real time. Over 40,000 residents have submitted proposals on everything from affordable housing to air quality, and about 70 percent of the government’s action plan have been derived directly from these proposals.
Take “Superblocks,” an initiative to cut carbon emissions and improve air quality, where 12 city districts have been closed to through traffic so the interior blocks are more hospitable to pedestrians, cyclists, more green space.
On the Barcelona coastline, another initiative is underway in which residents are working to make it more accessible to locals, rather than simply a playground for elites and cruise ships. Notice how different this is than the typical top-down, “we know best” approach to shaping the future. Like what happened with Sidewalk Labs in Toronto, Google’s urban development smart city play that would have collected masses of data data in order to create more efficient and convenient city services.
But which in the end was tech-driven rather than people-driven. Sidewalk Labs staged public input sessions in order to appear responsive to residents’ concerns about the newfangled surveillance that would have been embedded into the Quayside neighborhood. But people saw through the proposal and put an end to the development.
Ustopias in Action: Examples from Atlanta
In fact, there are ustopias taking shape right here in Atlanta. Known by some as Silicon Peach or Techlanta, because it’s the fastest-growing urban tech hub in the country, it’s also the city with the highest income inequality in the nation. Which shouldn’t surprise us when we remember that the fantasies of some are so often the nightmares of others. In many places, tech booms actually exacerbate inequality, increasing the cost of living, displacing local residents, and creating high tech tools for surveillance and social control.
But that’s only half of the story. Because here in Atlanta, and in many other locales, we’re also witnessing a historic mobilization of residents, creating ustopias that prioritize people over profit, public goods over policing. It started a few years ago, when Atlanta officials announced plans to build Cop City, a massive 90-million-dollar facility that would have trained police from all over the country. The development would include cutting down Weelaunee Forest, one of the four lungs of Atlanta that protects against heat waves and floods, and which is located next to a predominantly Black working-class community.
But ATLiens were having none of it. Utilizing direct action, digital tools, a broad coalition has formed to push back against the militarizing imagination of the city. Atlanta’s forest defenders remind us that true community safety relies on connection, not cops. On public goods, like housing and health care, not punishment. They understand that protecting people and the planet go hand in hand.
From college students to clergy, environmental activists to Indigenous elders, they’re inviting us into a collective imagination in which our ecological and our social well-being go hand in hand. An ustopia right in our own backyards. And even children are pushing back against the lopsided imagination of city officials. Like one who asked, “What did cops do to deserve a playground?” As they sat in the kids zone outside of the city council meeting where hundreds of people had showed up to speak out against Cop City.
Together, they’re reminding us that deadly systems may seem durable, but they’re not inevitable. And we don’t simply have to click: submit. We can each work to strengthen the social fabric in our own locale and create a shared vision in which no one is left behind. We can follow the example of data justice organizers in Barcelona, forest defenders in Atlanta, imagining and crafting the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within.
Imagining a Better World
The first step is to stop policing the borders of our own imagination. A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Naive. Work that doesn’t drive us into the grave? Impossible. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly.