Visions of the future were once so optimistic it almost makes your heart ache. From The Jetsons to Star Trek to countless paperbacks and comic books, usually pre-1970s, there was just a natural assumption that humanity was on a trajectory onward and upward.
This spirit of optimism even had its own visual language. The future was sleek and silvery with lots of soaring, ultramodern architecture. There were floating cities and glassy domes packed with moving sidewalks carrying an evolved humanity past decorative fountains and abstract sculptures. People spent more time at leisure than anything else, eating meals in a pill and zipping about in flying cars or with the aid of a handy jetpack. Robots were going to do all the grunt work, freeing people up to research science, compose music, sight see or whatever else might expand their minds and the frontiers of human knowledge.
There was no urban blight, no homelessness, no poverty, no starvation, no disease and no pollution. Heck, there wasn’t even any litter! It was simply understood all the material and social ills that could drag man down to the level of animals were going to be conquered. Science, cooperation and a can-do attitude would perfect the future.
Yes, there were always darker visions of the future, tales of dystopia that warned where things could go wildly, disastrously wrong. Nor did many of those optimistic visions pretend there would not still be problems: rivalries, jealousies, criminality and corruption that could hamper or even undo those shining silver cities. Except there was always a choice, a fork in the road where the decision was obvious: civilization or barbarism, continue to grow and progress or stagnate and regress.
Gradually, our collective imaginations realized all that shining, silver optimism was misplaced. Those who created visions of possible futures saw the darkness inside ourselves that so many projected utopias of the future had overlooked. There was injustice built into the foundations of our current society which would poison the future in the same way unregulated industries poison rivers.
Writers and artists use the future to critique the present. As the present grew more and more grim, the dystopia became an even more prominent projection of our civilization’s trajectory, and it too had a visual language of its own.
Dystopian aesthetic usually comes in two types: a post-apocalyptic Dark Age in which society collapses or a mechanized surveillance state where humans are replaceable cogs in a machine. The apocalypse that brings on the new Dark Age can have any number of causes, ranging from disease (Stephen King’s The Stand), nuclear war ( Planet of the Apes), lack of fuel ( TheRoadWarrior) oreven zombies ( The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later among many others), though often zombies are just an aspect of some exotic disease.
Never mind that zombies themselves are just acceptable placeholders for actual human beings in these nightmare scenarios. They make it acceptable to kill in the same way it is acceptable to run over leather-clad gearhead barbarians in Mad Max movies. I’m still waiting on the zombie movie where the hero is surrounded by the undead and instead of devouring him, they shove pills into his mouth and he comes back to sanity, realizing he has been shooting up crowds of innocent people.
The causes of the mechanized surveillance state dystopias are usually more vague. What these sorts of dystopias have in common are usually armed militias and secret police, propaganda everywhere, scarcity of resources and luxuries that we currently take for granted, corporate control of society, drugs or brainwashing that keep people passive, a pervasive sense of hopelessness, plus snitches, informers and cameras everywhere.
Examples of this sort of dystopia can be found in Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, the book and movie versions of Stephen King’s The Running Man and The Long Walk (both written under the pen name Richard Bachman), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and even the Days of Future Past storylines from the X-Men comics.
The grim irony of the two contrasting dystopias is that fear-mongering about a new crime-ridden, resourcepoor Dark Age ruled by tribes of criminal bandits is often used to slowly usher in the mechanized surveillance state— not in fiction, but in reality. If one were to look around and be asked to make a judgment call as to which dystopia we are currently careening towards, which would you say is knocking at the door? Don’t answer out loud, the snitches could be listening, but I bet I know which one came to mind.
These days, the choice has become not utopia or dystopia, but rather which dystopia you prefer. Snitches, hall monitors and people good at laying low will probably do best in the surveillance state. Bullies and ammosexuals would likely prefer the new Dark Age.
The question is where will the rest of us live? If we want Utopia we have to start building it ourselves.
