> there bottom line isn't quite captured by any of the above, though. the modern dystopia is defined by individual paralysis as a result of being overwhelmed th

> there bottom line isn't quite captured by any of the above, though. the modern dystopia is defined by individual paralysis as a result of being overwhelmed the engineered political spectacle. it isn't that people are too happy to want change, nor are they too scared of death, nor are they immersed in paperwork, nor are they lost in cyberspace. they're too addled to envision a better world as anything other than a fantasy. I don't think this is the case at all in most of the west. In the US in particular, the Left's primary limiting factor is "how do we make a transition to better socioeconomic systems without further endangering the people that the current system hurts." This is a challenge that may not have an answer. And as for the Right, well, their principle limitation as we have seen is setting up an environment where they can obtain enough unilateral power to enact policies that benefit the minority they're interested in. And of course, we see elements of less strictly aligned ideology rippling around the US (it is a complicated place). > south korea recently dumped their government via swarming the streets with millions of people until their demands were met. a similar strategy is unlikely to be executed in the US, The last 8 years suggest that large scale protest action is becoming more common, not less. The mistake that big governments have given is allowing unlimited, virtual assembly of the masses as they see fit via the internet. The net result of this is that there's no practical break on internal cultural drift, and it's extremely easy to organize (or passively synchronize) efforts for maximum presence. The interesting feature of all these dystopias is a carefully mandated isolation and compartmentalization of the populace. That's precisely what we do not have. Tech, while contributing to a lot of economic problems around the world, has at least broken every social expectation and put us in a place that doesn't really fit these dystopian predictions. Which means we probably need a new one, but I don't think yours is it.