The sense of incontestable certainty that infuses Paradiso's vision has long been recognized as a key feature of utopianism. In their definitive history of utopian thought, Frank and Fritzie Manuel wrote that "since the end of the eighteenth century the predictive utopia has become a major form of imaginative thought and has preempted certain scientific techniques of forecasting… the contemporary utopia… binds past, present, and future together as though fated. The state they depict appears virtually ordained either by god or by history; there is a carry-over of millenarian certainty.…"

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 690