Schiølin Kasper
Program on Science, Technology and Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Soc Stud Sci. 2020 Aug;50(4):542-566. doi: 10.1177/0306312719867768. Epub 2019 Aug 29.
In 2015, the World Economic Forum announced that the world was on the threshold of a 'fourth industrial revolution' driven by a fusion of cutting-edge technologies with unprecedented disruptive power. The next year, in 2016, the fourth industrial revolution appeared as the theme of the Forum's annual meeting, and as the topic of a book by its founder and executive chairman, Klaus Schwab. Ever since, the Forum has made this impending revolution its top priority, maintaining that it will inevitably change everything we once know about the world and how to live in it, thus creating what I conceptualize as 'future essentialism'. Within a short space of time, the vision of the fourth industrial revolution was institutionalized and publicly performed in various national settings around the world as a sociotechnical imaginary of a promising and desirable future soon to come. Through readings of original material published by the Forum, and through a case study of the reception of the fourth industrial revolution in Denmark, this article highlights and analyses three discursive strategies - 'dialectics of pessimism and optimism', 'epochalism' and 'inevitability' - in the transformation of a corporate, highly elitist vision of the future into policymaking and public reason on a national level.
2015年，世界经济论坛宣布，世界正处于一场“第四次工业革命”的开端，这场革命由具有前所未有的颠覆性力量的前沿技术融合所驱动。次年，即2016年，第四次工业革命成为该论坛年会的主题，也成为其创始人兼执行主席克劳斯·施瓦布所著一本书的主题。自那时起，该论坛将这场即将到来的革命作为首要任务，坚称它将不可避免地改变我们曾经对世界的一切认知以及我们在其中的生活方式，从而创造出我所概念化的“未来本质主义”。在短时间内，第四次工业革命的愿景被制度化，并在世界各地的不同国家背景下作为即将到来的充满希望和理想的未来的社会技术想象而公开呈现。通过阅读该论坛发表的原始材料，并通过对丹麦对第四次工业革命的接受情况进行案例研究，本文突出并分析了三种话语策略——“悲观与乐观的辩证法”、“时代论”和“必然性”——在将一种企业的、高度精英主义的未来愿景转变为国家层面的政策制定和公共理性过程中的作用。
