Why do new technologies repeatedly inspire imagined futures even in the face of failures to productively transform social relationships? This paper theorizes this paradox by building on Raymond Williams’ (1966) theory of “modern tragedy.” Using a historical study of the University of Mid-America (UMA)—a 1970s effort to use television and later digital technologies to democratize access to higher education—we analyze how technological innovation became increasingly decoupled from educational purpose. Drawing on archival sources and recent literature on imagined futures and technological hype, we trace the evolution of UMA’s sociotechnical imagination from means of reform to ends in themselves.
We identify a “tragic trajectory” characterized by technological fetishization, means-ends inversion, discursive decoupling, and pathologizing of the present. Rather than dismissing techno-utopian visions as a farce in the face of repeated failures to transform education, actors like UMA’s leaders perceived them as tragedies—missed opportunities for institutions to live up to technology’s revolutionary promise.
We argue that the concept of tragedy offers a useful way to study the dark side of imagined futures: it captures the emotional and narrative structures through which actors hold on to a vision of the future despite repeated disappointments and provides a critical framework for interrogating the persistent allure of technological futures in particular. Tragedy, we suggest, can deepen our understanding of organizational temporality, moral imagination, and the politics of innovation.