Paper short abstract:

Dissecting Alcoa's World War 2 'Imagineering' campaign, uncovers the lasting grip of corporations on our collective imagination. Exposing aluminum fantasies in a historical context assists in navigating present and future sociotechnical imaginaries.

Paper long abstract:

In January 1942, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) merged Imagination and Engineering into a newly coined term: Imagineering. This term was the theme of a nationwide advertising campaign, introducing an imaginary of an “aluminized” America in the post-war future. To meet all the aluminum requirements of American warfare and their allies, Alcoa, the great monopoly of the era, exceeded its production capacity to an unimaginable degree, which spun into a pressing issue for the future. Vivid depictions of post-war America addressed the fate of the metal surplus, the break-up of Alcoa’s monopoly, and constant battles between businessmen and the New Deal administration. My research shows how Alcoa’s imaginary acted as normative frameworks for the different members of society to orient themselves toward that future, conveying Imagineering as a belief in technological innovation and operating as a fantasy of the end of politics, and the destruction of tradition. My findings confirm that the campaign had an acute impact on public discourse, a phenomenon I refer to as Corpofuturism (Chomski, 2023), the power that corporations possess in imposing horizons of expectations, narratives, and values. My research reveals how material affordances, political agendas, and sincere optimism are reflected in Alcoa’s visions and the public response to them. By contemplating the lasting impact of these visions on our collective imagination of modernity, I would explain why, from a contemporary perspective, these vision seems naive, even obsolete while still highly futuristic and relevant to present sociotechnical imaginaries.