Are there any current techno-optimist visions of the future that aren't shills for manchild billionaires?

As much as it made for more dramatic TV, I've always resented DS9 as being the death of Star Trek's rosy picture of humanity freed from the constraint of deprivation and meaningless strife (we have enough terrorism and forever-wars in the present, thanks!)

Is there anything on the horizon to take up the mantle?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk

https://longnow.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Communism

no

Examples of live action solarpunk cinema include James Cameron's Avatar

Technology is all about control. In evolutionary terms, we're not very different from the first homo sapiens who discovered tools and funded primitive societies, and the people who will man spaceships will look like us too just with a few more gadgets. I think that point is made quite well by, like, the entirety of the sci-fi genre. I don't see much space for pessimism or optimism when you're dealing with this amount of uncertainty. It's the point, it could go either way, the future does not solve the dilemma of our identity.

https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace

The fully automated luxury communism link posted upthread sounded promising but the first critique I found included the line

the most positive thing I can say about the book is that I don’t doubt that it will be Elon Musk’s favourite book of 2019 – and he’ll tweet about it as he prevents his workers from unionising.

So I do think one of the properties of a successful successor is that it also wouldn't be a roadmap, but how to do that and avoid cooption by oligarch fans who would impose their own roadmap? One thing TNG did pretty explicitly was paint Randian attitudes as super gauche, to the point of caricature.

I managed to never see this but wasn't this about human military gargamels colonizing super smurfs for their gold by using telematic realdolls?

Pretty much yeah, but the fact that our human protagonist gets educated to be on the smurf's side, and that it is not guaranteed they'll lose, makes it optimistic still. Not suggesting you should watch it tho.

Iain M Bank's Culture novels aren't recent - so much so that the author has passed - but more recent than Star Trek I guess...

also he nobs a smurf

Thinking of Earthseed, though still not sure whether it was 100% a positive vision.

Iain M Bank's Culture novels aren't recent - so much so that the author has passed

You say that like he died of old age! He was only 59.

Technology is all about control.

Propopia Futures:
https://medium.com/protopia-futures/protopia-futures-framework-f3c2a5d09a1e

Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism:
https://www.archdaily.com/982652/lo-tek-reclaiming-indigenous-techniques-to-work-with-nature
https://www.taschen.com/en/books/architecture-design/04698/julia-watson-lo-tek-design-by-radical-indigenism/

*Protopia

I'm really digging the Lo-Tek stuff but it seems to have petered out? It's really nice to see living examples over a manifesto though.

in that sense the arc of technology is intrinsically against centralized control and tends to be more wealth-distributive, despite what technology's seeming wedding to dwindling resources controlled by the few might have to say about that.

hmmm https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/23/14323760/inequality-europe-chart

I dunno about the black death and WWI/II as being technological innovations we deserve... but it might have been the ones we needed!

Deserve and moralism ain’t got nothing to do with it.

I think one of the reasons why optimistic views of the future are rare is because we’re in a transition period where we’re very much aware of a lot of bad shit going on, but not what forces are going to develop out of it to counteract it. So optimism doesn’t have a lot of buy-in, at the moment.

The Srsly Wrong guys will occasionally put out eps on library socialism, which is their attempt at envisioning a better future one or two steps down the line.

https://srslywrong.com/

I like this idea of the library as forward model for efficient resource allocation and prioritizing use over ownership and hoarding, but am ambivalent over it being framed as distinctly capital-S Socialist instead of just a normal feature of any decently advanced civilization, mostly because libraries are already or have always been under attack by politicizing doofuses.

I'm reading the latest Kolbert book and so far it's pretty optimistic to the point of being shill-y of promising green technologies but then I skipped towards a later chapter and it throws a cold shower over those.

To say that amazing work is being done to combat climate change and to say that almost no progress has been made is not a contradiction; it's a simple statement of fact.