Whose Dystopia Is It Anyway?

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From Slate:

Dystopia is everywhere. No longer just a narrative form in the vein of 1984 or Soylent Green, the very word is seeping into our daily news and culture, invoked as readily in the pubs of London as the checkpoints of Gaza. Far from “an imagined … society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic,” dystopia is now used to describe Facebook, Brexit, biometric data, militancy, antibiotic resistance, and HQ Trivia.

. . . .

Of course, the Western political and economic upheavals of the past few years are about as dystopian as a party balloon next to the reality of life in, say, North Korea, whose government sums up the rights of its citizens with a simple phrase—“One for all and all for one”—better known in the West for a book that is probably not discussed much in Pyongyang. Like Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany before it, the totalitarian oppression of the DPRK feels so remote that it becomes almost pantomime. The hysterical weeping of party officials at the death of Kim Jong-il and the assassination of Kim Jong-un’s defector brother, with the killers allegedly told it was part of a “prank” show, feel closer to fiction than fact—stories to be marvelled at, rather than profound human truths. Propaganda and history collide, blurring the lines between fiction and reality; as these lines move, so does our cultural understanding of dystopia.

Perhaps the sci-fi anthology show Black Mirror has been a catalyst for shifting the definition of dystopia away from Mad Max–esque cannibals and dehydration to a new conversation of insecurity, intrusiveness, horror, and internalized, personal calamity. Here, dystopia becomes an everyday experience in which the promises of freedom, equality, and basic human rights are corrupted by the very structures we have built to empower us. Your digital assistant is a torture device; your aspirations to be a good parent destroy lives; your cartoonish satire is the tyranny of tomorrow.

Yet historically speaking, we’ve never had it so good. We beat smallpox and polio is on the verge of eradication, solar power grows in leaps and bounds, and humans have never been richer or lived longer. As for the internet! The advent of mobile data gives us more knowledge and power in our hand than the crew of the Enterprise could have dreamed of. The world is awesome.

. . . .

Animal Farm is one of the few novels that explores how the final tyranny of its world is created, from the subversion of a utopian ideal into a dystopia that favors the select few. Black Mirror picks up on this theme and asks, What if through our utopian ideas and technologies we are creating the very opposite?

In his book Ordinary Men, the historian Christopher Browning examined how men from across 1930s Germany were transformed from harmless next-door neighbors into the Einsatzgruppen, working behind Nazi lines to murder approximately 2 million people. The conclusion he reached was depressing in its universality. These were not special men with violent tendencies. They were told that Jews were less than human, other, but more importantly, they were commanded by authority figures and pressured by the camaraderie of the unit, to kill. Our moral compass collapses with devastating speed, and it is easy to obey, and to walk into darkness.

Link to the rest at Slate

8 thoughts on “Whose Dystopia Is It Anyway?”

  1. I love dystopian stories, both books and movies. They are great entertainment.

    Everybody needs to read:

    Factfulness
    by Hans Rosling

    and see what the real world is like. That massive change for the better has occurred since 1800. Rosling points out that educated people are the worst at understanding what is actually happening in the world, because media has always pushed the dystopian view rather than reality.

    This is a YouTube series discussing Factfulness.

    Hans Rosling on factfulness (2015)

    Look at any of the videos on YouTube by Hans Rosling and you will see what is real.

    The PBS Newshour did a series lately about how social media pushes people’s buttons to build a false outlook on reality, because extremes make money. It all started in America.

    How Facebook’s news feed can be fooled into spreading misinformation

    Online anger is gold to this junk-news pioneer

    Why we love liking junk news that reaffirms our beliefs

    Inside Facebook’s race to separate news from junk

    The only way to clean up the system is shut down social media, or make it a subscription service with no adds to drive the extremes.

    Why we should be more like cats than dogs when it comes to social media

    Essentially:

    “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.”

    Jean de la Fontaine

    • Too late for simply shutting it down, the sheeple are trained to react to they think is outraging them, most have not the brains to be brought back from following the herd. They’ve been trained that anything said against their way is just a con the other side is playing, never realizing that the side they’re on is doing the exact same thing to them.

      I fear it’s going to get very ugly before things get on a more even keel, the damage done before you can trust anything said or seen.

      And the worst part is facebook isn’t the worst of fake/false/stir them up news sources. In their own way every one of the ‘news’ groups ‘spins/shades’ the news to help you believe what their corporate spongers what you to believe.

      Yeah, that’s right, what you hear is controlled by advertisers trying to sell you crap. Dull ‘everything is okay/fine’ news doesn’t sell, they need/want you stirred up and upset about something so you won’t be asking yourself if you really need that thing they’re telling you to buy.

  2. I love dystopian stories, both books and movies. They are great entertainment.

    Everybody needs to read:

    Factfulness
    by Hans Rosling

    and see what the real world is like. That massive change for the better has occurred since 1800. Rosling points out that educated people are the worst at understanding what is actually happening in the world, because media has always pushed the dystopian view rather than reality.

    This is a YouTube series discussing Factfulness.

    Hans Rosling on factfulness (2015)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6iAhU2E_Vc&list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7BgvtALD4k8aXZfE

    Look at any of the videos on YouTube by Hans Rosling and you will see what is real.

    The PBS Newshour did a series lately about how social media pushes people’s buttons to build a false outlook on reality, because extremes make money. It all started in America.

    How Facebook’s news feed can be fooled into spreading misinformation
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8u8k_4VrlA

    Online anger is gold to this junk-news pioneer
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKCOAL6EPFE

    Why we love liking junk news that reaffirms our beliefs
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64A-x8LnX-I

    Inside Facebook’s race to separate news from junk
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc26zcT7Tfc

    The only way to clean up the system is shut down social media, or make it a subscription service with no adds to drive the extremes.

    Why we should be more like cats than dogs when it comes to social media
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UROaLW8lmc0

    Essentially:

    “Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.”

    Jean de la Fontaine

  3. I love dystopian stories, both books and movies. They are great entertainment.

    Everybody needs to read:

    Factfulness
    by Hans Rosling

    and see what the real world is like. That massive change for the better has occurred since 1800. Rosling points out that educated people are the worst at understanding what is actually happening in the world, because media has always pushed the dystopian view rather than reality.

    This is a YouTube series discussing Factfulness.

    Hans Rosling on factfulness (2015)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6iAhU2E_Vc&list=PLAA_uxQHVV7U761wk7BgvtALD4k8aXZfE

    Look at any of the videos on YouTube by Hans Rosling and you will see what is real.

  4. That’s weird. The first two posts clearly failed when I started, so I narrowed the post down to the third. Yet there all three are. How odd.

    I suspect the system is glitching again. HA!

    I recomend keeping the first post because it is cleaner and delete the duplicates.

    Thanks…

    • HA! I know. The system has been doing odd things with the posts here on TPV.

      Here I’m trying to get the Hans Rosling stuff across, but three times is too much.

      Just finished the book, and it is devastating. I already see that many of the Dystopian Stories I’m working on need to have Africa be up and running while America falls apart. That they consider sending “foreign aid” to help, but we are far too dangerous.

      Think Mad Max Thunderdome here in America while Africans shake there heads over their suburban breakfast. The mother telling her children, “Eat all your food. Children are starving in America.”

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