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> I would offer that I think we are more worried about dystopia because we are so much more aware of all of the ways the world can turn into a dystopia, but I d

> I would offer that I think we are more worried about dystopia because we are so much more aware of all of the ways the world can turn into a dystopia, but I don't think that necessarily tracks with the actual likelihood of dystopia. Unless you live in part of the world that became dystopian in the last 30 years, any optimism you had in the '90s that dystopia was far away was not false confidence. It was borne out by the facts. If you feel less optimistic now, that might be due to valid concerns, and it might also be borne out by the facts. We'll see. I also don't think people in the '90s were poorly informed compared to now. Sure they didn't have much of Wikipedia, but on the other hand, nonfiction journalism was in a better state and the internet (although less widespread) was also not as finely tuned to create information bubbles.

ksdale 7y ago
I think in the 90’s, people were just a single digit number of years removed from the end of the Cold War, just a few decades removed from the Great Leap Forward, another few decades from the holocaust and gulags, not to mention WW2, which had a combat death toll that is just utterly unimaginable today, but which was comparable to WW1, just a few decades before that. Then there was the Spanish Flu in there. That just barely covers the past hundred years, but there were a ton of people alive in the 90’s who had lived through all of that. Anyone born since the late 80’s has lived through basically nothing like that. Certainly, lots of bad stuff has happened in the meanwhile, but in my opinion, nothing that remotely approaches WW2 or the Great Leap Forward as far as death and destruction, and I think it’s hard to argue that anything like that is more likely to happen in the future than it was in the 90’s (which also gave us attempted genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda). I think people in the 90’s were informed, but they weren’t bombarded with negativity the way people are today. That’s not because there wasn’t negativity around. I don’t remember where I saw it, but someone had a post about how far the Overton window has shifted in politics, and compared quotes from Bill Clinton on immigration in the 90’s to quotes from modern day Republicans (if I recall, they sound almost identical) to emphasize just how much our sensibilities have changed, which was another illustration for me of how our perception of the nearness of dystopia is not necessarily very accurate.

ksdale 7y ago

I think in the 90’s, people were just a single digit number of years removed from the end of the Cold War, just a few decades removed from the Great Leap Forward, another few decades from the holocaust and gulags, not to mention WW2, which had a combat death toll that is just utterly unimaginable today, but which was comparable to WW1, just a few decades before that. Then there was the Spanish Flu in there. That just barely covers the past hundred years, but there were a ton of people alive in the 90’s who had lived through all of that. Anyone born since the late 80’s has lived through basically nothing like that. Certainly, lots of bad stuff has happened in the meanwhile, but in my opinion, nothing that remotely approaches WW2 or the Great Leap Forward as far as death and destruction, and I think it’s hard to argue that anything like that is more likely to happen in the future than it was in the 90’s (which also gave us attempted genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda). I think people in the 90’s were informed, but they weren’t bombarded with negativity the way people are today. That’s not because there wasn’t negativity around. I don’t remember where I saw it, but someone had a post about how far the Overton window has shifted in politics, and compared quotes from Bill Clinton on immigration in the 90’s to quotes from modern day Republicans (if I recall, they sound almost identical) to emphasize just how much our sensibilities have changed, which was another illustration for me of how our perception of the nearness of dystopia is not necessarily very accurate.