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Douglas Adams commented something along the lines of you can tell you're watching a dystopian movie if it's a grey day in Los Angeles at some point in the near

• frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  >I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings. A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery. Only? Why? (Pure curiousity, no judgement.)
  • roceasta 9y ago
    Parents in general don't read pessimistic literature to young children. (Nor would you I think!) So it is perverse and demoralising for society that adult sci-fi has been so consistently pessimistic for the past three decades. It engenders despair and nihilism imo.
  • slededit 9y ago
    It's important to distill a sense of agency in children. That they can control at least some aspects of their future. In my opinion one of societies current ailes is that we underestimate the amount of agency individuals have in society.
    • mmirate 9y ago
      Underestimated? These "underestimations" seem very accurate to me, and without a 300-million-person hive-mind, I can't imagine anything different. Any single person who isn't a politician, intelligence agent, etc., is meaningless today, and no single cause is capable of rallying enough popular support to have any impact in the first-past-the-post polls.
      • slededit 9y ago
        You don't need an election to make your own way in life.
        • mmirate 9y ago
          Well, there aren't any more unsolved problems that aren't touched by politics (n.b. this wasn't the case back when CS was a new field and better algorithms were being discovered left and right), and it's no easier to get into a royal family than to get the right person elected.
          • slededit 9y ago
            With respect I think that's a very myopic view. I don't think one should build their life around "problems" regardless but if you choose to do so there are two revolutions happening simultaneously. Self driving vehicles were Sci Fi just a few years ago, and Bitcoin is changing how we think of currency.
            • mmirate 9y ago
              If the SEC performs a particular action, Bitcoin can be deep-sixed, at least domestically, and since the US likes to export its laws (cf. copyright), probably worldwide in time. Self-driving vehicles' practicality as a mass product, iirc, is currently dependent on not-yet-achieved processor hardware (ops per second, ops per watt, etc.) and battery energy density, without which they have insufficient visual-processing capabilities and range, respectively. (Yes, those are hardware problems not political problems; still, not being an engineer in either of those fields I've no more agency over them than over political problems.) Even after that, they will still be dependent on having not too many regulatory bottlenecks (cf. what the FAA has done to avionics for the past few decades) or legally-mandated misfeatures (cf. Cory Doctorow's Car Wars).
• TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I think those stories are actively eroding the fabric of the society. Note that in most dystopian fiction, the society and its institutions are either incompetent or outright evil. People keep reading/watching those stories, and just through availability heuristic, it colors the way they see the world.
  • scottLobster 9y ago
    To be fair, by their actions a lot of modern-day CEOs and politicians could be described as incompetent and/or at least malicious if not outright evil. I'm not so sure if that piece of the coloring is so inaccurate. By contrast the old ideas of corporate loyalty and blind patriotism seem laughably naive knowing what we know these days. A lot of Dystopian fiction also celebrates the utopian few, usually of or descended from common people. Sure it might erode trust in large institutions, but a lot of it seems to support the concept that good people do exist and can make a difference. I'd not sure it "erodes" so much as "reshapes".
    • Banthum 9y ago
      It can be true, but still harmful. To function, society depends on mass belief in many falsehoods and fictions. Teaching everyone the truth about everything will destroy any society. Theres a very strong tension between true beliefs and beliefs that help people/societies survive.
      • liberte82 9y ago
        Can you give some examples?
        • interfixus 9y ago
          I see at least one elephant in the room: Religion.
          • liberte82 9y ago
• pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > I think I used to assume that the point of dystopian sci-fi was to try to prevent nasty futures from happening. That's the idea. Writers show us our possible futures, and it's up to us to pick which one we want to implement. Dystopias are cautionary tales. > I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings. That's actually kind of a modern development, itself.
  • roceasta 9y ago
    >Writers show us our possible futures, and it's up to us to pick which one we want to implement. Dystopias are cautionary tales. Dystopian pessimism is more sinister than that, I'm afraid. The spirit of pessimism is the idea that what ever you do, things go wrong, because we're bad. So there's no point trying to implement things. Whereas in optimistic fiction things go bad but the protaganist learns something and sets the world to rights by the end. >>I only read stories to my kids that have good old-fashioned happy endings. >That's actually kind of a modern development, itself. Good point! Makes me think of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Aesop's Fables. Must take another look. (If I recall correctly these are moral tales rather than pessimism, however.)
    • btrask 9y ago
      > Dystopian pessimism is more sinister than that, I'm afraid. The spirit of pessimism is the idea that what ever you do, things go wrong, because we're bad. So there's no point trying to implement things. If authors really believed this, why would they even bother writing?
      • Jtsummers 9y ago
        The authors may not believe it as a philosophy. But it's the philosophy their stories present.
      • roceasta 9y ago
        Pessimism reflects their false and possibly unacknowledged reality that life is meaningless. I don't know what the motivations are. Consciously: perhaps trying to impress other authors/screenwriters of the same ilk. Perhaps trying to make money; to be famous. Unconsciously: perhaps trying to project their despair onto the public. By attributing the feeling of despair to an external cause (which they help to create!) they get relief because they don't have to acknowledge and face it internally. Crazy, I know, but ultimately evil is unknowable and it's better not to dig too deep.
• thinkfurther 9y ago
  "Technology" in and of itself is a meaningless word though, even our teeth in a way are a piece of technology. So the question isn't technology or not, but what kind of technology, made by whom and why, used how and why. > War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships. -- George Orwell There is no "Western psyche". Only individual people have one, and I for one write dystopian rap lyrics as a way to cleanse myself, to uplift myself -- and it works, too. You cannot polish a turd but you sure can make a shiny painting of it. It changes nothing, especially since in my case I don't much care for an audience, but it changes me. It reminds me to not give in when too many people around me do the opposite. If you are more shocked and depressed by being called an accomplice and tool of murderers than by all the countless people being dead, that's too much sympathy with the aggressor and too little with the victims. Not buying one bit of it, except I would agree that "The West" is not terribly special, just ahead in some respects, and that poor people can be dicks, too. It goes through all strata and all continents, but yeah, I'll just say it: most people aren't good enough, they haven't been given enough or didn't have the freedom to take enough as a child. They are like bonsai trees to the actual tree they should be, and that's why we get the results we get. Too big groups of too little people. And while I can't prevent what people do, but I can change my own habits and think thrice about whom I am loyal to and why. And you know, if everybody did just that, that would be more than enough. IMO one has to decide between the people who are and the people who should be, you can't serve two masters. > A crisis occurs and the heroes overcome it by finding new knowledge and bravery. It really depends on what that knowledge and bravery are. I'm thinking of all sorts of action movies that are really just a glorification of fascism winning against "fascism plus $nasty_thing", and essentially just sits on the receptors for non-bullshit without not being bullshit. In contrast, the kind of things that leave me with a bad ending force me to resist, and to develop my own knowledge and bravery. Think "The Wire", for example. Too many happy endings, and you have bubble gum, too little hope, and you have a mouthful of dirt. But still: > Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe. -- Franz Kafka, Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27th 1904