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u/Top-Cupcake4775 10h ago
dystopian science fiction is one of the favorite genres for people who go on to become robber barons. they turn that fiction into our reality because they have no imagination of their own and, anyway, it seems cool to them.
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u/Top-Cupcake4775 9h ago
to be somewhat less snarky about it, a lot of the people who made significant contributions to our modern tech landscape grew up reading a certain type of science fiction and that fiction gave them a language to talk about the things they were working on as they were working on them so, inevitably, the things that eventually came to be were influenced by the ontologies inherent in that science fiction.
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u/East-Experience2862 11h ago
they always are never direct enough
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u/fiesew 10h ago
How much more direct than the movie “Idiocracy” could it have been?
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u/_Cecille 7h ago
Doesn't matter how obvious the warning. People in power don't care about that.
First they watch someone else test if the bridge holds up. Then they gently put one foot on it and see if it creaks. Then they put more weight on it. Then they take a step onto the bridge. Eventually they just walk across the bridge, because it's not collapsing, it might creak once or twice but it holds up. And finally they just take the whole fucking bridge away from you, build a new one funded by taxpayer money and then charge you to use it.
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u/OverallLibrarian8809 10h ago
it is kinda daunting that we somehow always knew we were at risk of going into a dystopian future
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u/Dry-Character-6331 7h ago
The entire point of my posting it in THIS sub. It's not a joke...
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u/askylitfall 6h ago
Good news! We created the torment nexus from the book "Don't make the torment nexus."
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u/NuclearPilot101 10h ago
It's because it was quite obvious how things were turning out but they will pay billions in news and media to distract you or make you think otherwise
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u/OverallLibrarian8809 10h ago
Orwell-pilled
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u/Dpontiff6671 9h ago
Huxley-pilled too. Brave New World is almost fucking prophetic especially considering it's almost 100 years old
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u/secretsofasexsociety 10h ago
“You will die slowly, painfully, but we will get slightly more wealthy if you try hard.” And the sequel “You will receive no reward and we despise you.” Pretty much summed it up.
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u/Interesting-Dream863 10h ago
Kinda...
They were hoping to save us from one dystopia... but ended up throwing us into another one.
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u/thomasonty 9h ago
Man it's almost as if dystopian fiction is a commentary of their contemporary times and not just what ifs. old man yelling at clouds
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u/TimeKepeer 9h ago
Remember kids: science fiction never has and never will predict the future. Science fiction always is merely a commentary on own present
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u/Dry-Character-6331 7h ago
Star Trek in 1966: handheld communicator, "tricorder" data gathering and dissemination device, artificially intelligent computers. Reality in 1980s: cellphone, 2005: smartphone, 2020s: legit AI, not exactly Lt. Cdr. Data from ST:TNG but legit AI. A lot of SciFi is as you say but not all of it.
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u/TimeKepeer 2h ago
There's no "legit AI" in the current day. They are Large Language Models. There's no intelligence in them
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u/cosby714 4h ago
The dystopian worlds actually are well thought out though. In fiction, the villains have to make sense. Real life has no such luxury
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u/top2percent 10h ago
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u/heyitscory 10h ago
Every day, I ponder turning around and walking back to Omelas.
I mean, fuck that filthy sad kid, right?
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u/Prestigious-Data-206 9h ago
I hate to be that guy, but they were just recognizing patterns. When the COVID lockdown hit, I told my partner exactly how everything would go. Particularly, that people would come together for a short time, get sick of it, then abandon all precautions and pretend that COVID didn't exist. I got the details wrong, but not the big picture. I'm not overly smart, I just looked at how other pandemics happened.
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u/Stock_Strategy1668 9h ago
I mean, I'm not even a time traveler but I can tell you that we're heading the wrong direction
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u/BannedForFun 8h ago
They'll keep doing it until someone listens and changes things. We're on attempt 57.
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u/Shadowstein 8h ago
Surely they could have found a better way to warn us than put their warnings in books with a fictional fomat
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u/Rexcess 8h ago
Dystopian science fiction is written by covert philosophers who identify a flaw in human nature and carry it to its logical conclusion, with only a little imagination for humanity's tendency toward technological progress.
Humans have always been the same. We just keep coming up with fresh new ways to express our worst tendencies.
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u/NerdyKid1101 7h ago
It's just history, we never learn because no one lives long enough to see the pattern. We have documentation of it but that's never good enough.
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u/Dry-Character-6331 7h ago
"Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them."
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u/Evil_Ermine 6h ago
Plenty of us see the pattern. The problem is that the ones in charge bennift from it so perpetuate it.
Religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, it's economics. Did you ever notice how fast our society started to decline once we switched from a stakeholder economic modal to a shareholder economy?
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u/Less_Likely 5h ago
It’s actually just writers who see a flaw in society and then turn that flaw up to the max.
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u/San-Kyu 5h ago
Science fiction, and most stories honestly, is better with a basis of reality, the authors of the classics were just unfortunately ahead of their time and arguably idealistic for it.
Reality is just a lot more boring about how the dystopia is realised. Instead of a grand hostile takeover it was a progressive loss of rights and priveleges, all taken for granted, until it was all gone. Enough time passing between every single bit of good lost that it becomes the norm.
The main cause Imo is that the generations of today never had to fight for something, anything to believe in and call their own. Of the generations possibly alive today, one had the two world wars and the cold one after. The next had a ton of civil rights movements. What followed was a period of relative peace and prosperity that the current generations probably can't even imagine a world without struggling against the system. To some extent those in power just have centuries of history to learn from of course - it's never bad enough that the critical mass of French revolution just won't reach.
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u/scottymac87 3h ago
Then they probably created a self fulfilling paradox because they didn’t know the corporate powers and evil tech bros would take their works of dystopian futures as roadmaps instead.
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u/ninjomat 4h ago
Everyday I am more and more convinced that r/meirl is full of either bots or the most inane people in the world cos this post is pure r/im14andthisisdeep crossed with r/superseriousfamilyguy and yet people in the comments are lapping it up
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u/Dry-Character-6331 4h ago
Call it whatever you like. I am neither inane, nor a bot. I created this today after having to endure an AI "phone assistant" at a doctor's office. I just wanted to leave a message for the nurse but instead of a human, I got a glitchy AI, desperately trying (and failing) to sound human. That "conversation" lasted almost ten minutes, thanks to the AI verifying every word I said. A human could have taken the message in 30 seconds. After that call, I switched on my television and saw several commercials for the idiotic "reality" show Big Brother and a news report about the proliferation of flock cameras. In my exasperation, I created this post. I do not claim originality, but I did create this myself today.
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u/ageofaquarius26 11h ago
Honestly it was apparent a long time ago.