Digital Queers’ cyberutopia after the end of history

A non-profit organization called Digital Queers was founded in 1992 in San Francisco, California, to organize queer tech workers’ capital, knowledge, and labor for queer activism. This article draws upon archival research to historically trace Digital Queers’ efforts to raise funds, conduct computer trainings for queer activists, and distribute computer equipment to other non-profit organizations including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. I argue that Digital Queers’ media activism demonstrated “cyberutopian” desires for digital computation to produce better living which integrated queer activist practices to the American technology industry’s political economy. This orientation towards liberal reformist accommodation with capitalist systems questions the automatic equation of queer utopianism with anti-capitalist futurity which has appeared in queer media studies after the influential work of José Esteban Muñoz. The example of Digital Queers shows how utopian media studies must fully account for utopia’s social functions rather than presuming that the presence of utopian traces is sufficient cause for celebration. Rather than dismissing utopian methodologies, this article calls for a historically materialist approach to utopian media studies which unpacks the utopian interests of Digital Queers’ cyberutopianism and considers how utopian desires can support capitalist hegemony.