Living in Worlds We’d Like to Live In: Capitalist Utopias in an Age of Counterfactuality

If we lived exclusively in jump-linked, page-turned worlds, from ad to ad—or from simulacrum to simulacrum, as Baudrillard (1994) had it—the question may arise, Whose utopias are these? Extensive exploration of that question, however, moves to dim backgrounds, while (potential) questioners more comfortably treat utopias as launch points promising worlds fabricated beyond immediate events. After all, these utopias open up aspirations that supply the term "utopia" its animating power and core meaning, articulated with each utopia's details: we might live to live there. Each utopia becomes personal, seemingly one's own, not others'. Eyes look past manipulations that supply just enough comfort to see, as Herbert Marcus (1991) noted, false needs as necessities. Furthermore, since 9/11, we live up to, or down to, metaphors derived from Foucault's (1977) account of the Panopticon, where we learn of "the birth of [a] prison" so effective that the inmates, seeing themselves under surveillance, are more effective than the guards. Once surveillance-oriented architectures redefined obedience into free or prudent choice by the end of the nineteenth century, normalized affirmations of conformity and uniformity became emblematic in the next century, even in the name of uniqueness during and after the birth of youth culture and the culture wars that Todd Gitlin (1996) claims have perished since the 1960s.