is dystopia dead?

When broken windows and rusted cars litter the streets of rural and urban areas alike, a cabinet of oligarchs worthlessly barks orders down the line of a government quickly collapsing in on itself. What used to be the early warning signs of a potential future danger now seem laughable for how close to home they often hit.

Is dystopia dead? Killed by the bullet of capitalist realism?

When working on a collection of short stories set in a far off future entitled The Wanderer, I couldn’t help but think about the world I was crafting and its relation to reality. It’s hard to really call what I’m doing “Dystopia”, and really, I feel it’s hard to call anything “dystopia” anymore.

The reality of our world is that when we view these classic pieces of dystopian fiction is that we always perceived them with this level of wonder or amazement, a certain opposite of immersion and suspension of disbelief which created the ability to feel as if we were simply an observer of the commonly terrible lives lived in these fictional worlds.

This way, when we saw the Mood Organ from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Read of Electric Sheep, we would think of how ridiculous it would be to simply dial a mood or feeling and let that overwrite our entire personality regardless of our previous mood. Then, we developed medicines, patches, or drugs that were capable of very similar attributes to the mood organ.

Similarly, we used to view the idea of our lives being monitored or tracked daily as something beyond horror, a level of existential or even cosmic form of horror seen in the likes of Orwell's “Big Brother”, which was inspired by Foucault's Panopticon.

Now, our governments can access information on exactly every action we’ve made in society whenever they feel the need to access it, our texts, what we have bought, where we have been. Surprisingly, instead of feeling horror, most actively support this. We upload our lives to social media to be viewed willingly in the eyes of the societal panopticon itself.

Perhaps something which scares you is propaganda and the nature of indoctrination, where you can look no further than Huxley's Brave New World, where children are separated into social classes from the moment they are born. Most live laborious lives in unsettling discomfort as the higher class of society enjoys rich lives filled with luxurious soirees, higher standards of education, and total individual freedom.

Authoritarian regimes, environmental crises, fascist control, lack of bodily autonomy, class disparity, social manipulation, etc. etc. etc. It’s just all too familiar now, isn't it?

So how do you write dystopia when the world you live in is dystopic? What new and crazy concept about totalitarianism or authoritarianism can even begin to be weaved from the future, when the thread is already in the past?

In my opinion, I think this is a major contributor in why we have fallen out of love for dystopia, or why it may feel overplayed in modern culture. We feel sad when engaging with dystopia now simply because we see ourselves in the mirror of what was supposed to be fiction.

This is why the time for dystopia is past. But what comes next?

Would the world be better off if we turned the lens inwards on an introspective journey through the disasters of our own creation?

When the world as the pianist begins their final performance, how would we tell the story? 

Would it remain a sad and dreary piece which travels across notes weepingly as it swims in minor chords?

Would it be grandiose in nature, exploring the bombastic yet short existence of our history in crashing percussion and screeching violin?

What if it was a soft melody, a concert gracefully exploring our diverse history, playing both the good and bad of us in acts?

What if the leitmotif of the world carried with it sprinkled accents of hope?

Maybe then we will have begun to see a post-dystopian world.