Utopia is a complex and resilient concept. This article extends theory relating utopia to consumer culture and social media. After identifying two main schools of utopian consumer research, termed metopianism and wetopianism, the article inquires how social media discourses of utopianism challenge capitalism and what these challenges suggest about contemporary consumer activism. Sites of utopian discourse on YouTube concerning Walt Disney’s original EPCOT plans, Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project, and Elon Musk’s Silicon Valley vision of the future are sources of netnographic data. The findings first focus on various discourses comparing political and economic systems, environmental effects, technology, and the reflexive, playful, imaginative, emotional, and engaged aspects of utopianist messages. Next, findings reveal worshipful attitudes towards the three charismatic utopian entrepreneurs and their visions. Utopian discourse on social media is clicktivism, but it is also an important and relevant social phenomenon that reveals the spectrum of forms of online political participation.

Introduction

Ever since its conceptual founding in 1516 by Sir Thomas More, an English Catholic lawyer, philosopher, martyr, and Saint, utopia has been a concept fraught with ambivalence and greeted with large doses of skepticism, and yet the concept has proven surprisingly resilient. What has utopia become in the last half century, exactly? Three things at least. First, utopian describes a form of literature (Sargent, 1975) that is often linked to science fiction and political writing (Williams, 1978). Second, utopia is a conception of “systemic otherness”, the imagining of “an alternate society” (Jameson, 2005, p. 36), and the “expression of the desire for a better way of being” (Levitas, 2007, p. 290). Third, utopianism is linked to political beliefs and social movements through a “principle of hope” underpinning the human impulse to long for and imagine a better world (Bloch, 1986; Sargent, 1975). True to its ambivalent origins, however, utopias are conventionally discussed derogatively as wishful, manipulative, “impractical”, “ideological” ideas, notions that may even be “dangerous and incipiently totalitarian” (Levitas, 2007, p. 297).