Space Tech Oligarchs: Technology, Politics, Futures

A Social Studies of Deep Tech (SSoDT) seminar with Professor Richard Tutton of the University of York, on “tech oligarchs” and their exercise of power over people and places.

In this talk, I explore how ‘tech oligarchs’ (Cohen 2025) are colonizing ‘extraplanetary imaginaries’ (Tutton 2020) and how their investment in space tech is implicated in their exercise of power over people and places. In doing so, I pay attention to the ‘discursive-material practices’ of space tech oligarchs, recognizing that discursive forms of future-making are thoroughly social practices involving ‘storytelling, imaging and imagining’ and certain ‘aesthetics, values and emotions’ (McNeil et al 2017: 457). In this respect, I discuss how these ‘extraplanetary imaginaries’ are characterized by ideas from neoreactionary politics and futurism (Smith and Burrows 2021, Taskale 2025). Following from this, I also consider how such ideas are implicated in the construction of material assets and in certain modes of technological development. Here, I am interested in thinking with Barbara Adams and Christopher Groves (2007) ideas to explore how the imagination and actions of space tech oligarchs involve ‘futures-in-the-making’, which could have potentially deleterious consequences over different spatial and temporal scales.