This book offers the first in-depth account of Swedish techno-utopianism and its everyday practices. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, it follows transhumanists, biohackers, cryonicists, and adjacent communities who believe that emerging technologies can address humanity’s greatest challenges and open radically transformed futures. Yet despite this expansive optimism, these groups often struggle to imagine futures that meaningfully diverge from the present, revealing a subtle tension between technological faith, everyday practice, and limited futural horizons.

Tracing the historical and cultural roots of Swedish techno-optimism—from welfare-state modernism to Silicon Valley transhumanism and global techno-utopian networks—the book examines how hopes for progress are enacted through bodily experimentation, mundane routines, and references to ancient narratives such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Offering rare empirical insight into an understudied Scandinavian context, it illuminates how technological imaginaries shape collective understandings of progress, possibility, politics, and the human future.

Eric J. W. Orlowski is a research fellow in AI Governance & Policy at the NUS Artificial Intelligence Institute, a research institute at the National University of Singapore. He completed his PhD in social anthropology at University College London in 2025, and has researched transhumanists and biohackers in Sweden since 2018.