Administered Happiness and Affective Colonization in Tierra contrafuturo: Critical Utopia and the Technopolitics of Desire

Abstract

This article examines Tierra contrafuturo, a novel by the Colombian writer Luis Carlos Barragán Castro (2021), as a critical utopia that problematizes administered happiness as a technology of government and a form of affective colonization. Drawing on contemporary utopian studies, the theory of the novum, and approaches to biopolitics, psychopolitics, and the governance of well-being, it explores the ambivalent nature of the novel’s central techno-scientific devices. The analysis argues that robotic communism, the pantelepathic network, the technoscientific transmigration of consciousness, and the Multicorporeal Arena expand human possibilities while simultaneously introducing new forms of subjective regulation. Induced happiness emerges as the organizing principle of this utopian project by reshaping memory, desire, suffering, and conflict. Finally, the article contends that the novel warns against equating technological progress with human emancipation.