Invisible Dystopias

A dystopia is what happens to a civilisation when it has stopped paying attention to reality.  Then again, when were civilisations ever self-aware?   However real the climate crisis may get, escapism into the Mind Prison will always get the better out of humans.  By the time thousands perish daily, there will be too much hunger, war and destitution for anyone to even bother remember what the climate crisis was.  Once a dystopia buries itself in the underworld of its parallel reality, it becomes impossible to crawl back out.  Our civilisation has entered a virtual space where everything is fake except for death itself.

Civilisations collapse in much the same way ecosystems do: they become dysregulated, and all the moving parts turn on each other like drunk men in a bar fight.  Frighteningly, The Thing may still survive this collapse, albeit heavily injured.  It will parasitize and monetize any remaining scraps of resources which will yield high profits due to their incredible scarcity.  

Necrocapitalism is a wildfire: as brilliant and vigorous as it may begin, it soon finds itself searching for new turf to digest.  Even in the cemetery of extinction, the embers of profit still burn bright, quietly, patiently waiting for any new green shoots to devour.

Provided a nuclear holocaust has not rendered the planet completely uninhabitable, pockets of local economies who rejected The Thing may exist within a wider technofascist dystopia emboldened by artificial intelligence-assisted surveillance.  New high-tech tools of manipulation will find fertile ground in the public’s panic and desperation, allowing even more ruthless versions of The Thing to generate novel ways of harvesting public discontent.  The Unhappiness Machine will become the Desperation Machine.  The post-doom realisation that humans are now past the peak of our species will be the biggest money-maker of a late-stage predatory psychonomy which is understandably too dystopian for us to even imagine today. 

“Hello, you are case number 9,139.  Our services may be slower than usual due to heavy climate disruption on our networks today.  Please hold, one of our AI agents should be with you shortly”.

Of course, there is always a temporal bias when considering dystopias.  A dystopia is always defined relative to the present baseline, which is considered “normal”.  But dystopias are not reserved for the future, or for science fiction.  They are all around us right now, today.  Very few of us consider the possibility that we are already living in a dystopia: a planet where human population has overrun Earth’s resources, where only 3% of animals are free, where our brain is full of microplastic.  The dystopias we are visualising have already happened, but they are simply invisible to us.

All dystopias make themselves invisible by becoming the “new normal”: a tolerable form of pain no one ever dares describe as a “dystopia”, given they have nothing to compare it to.  Through the ages, human societies sought to reassure their citizens that dystopias were the stuff of nightmares, and that the present reality was in fact a paradise beyond their wildest dreams.  The purpose of authority, religion and the media is and has always been to make our unbearable dystopias appear palatable, useless products appear essential, and corrupt leaders appear honest. 

And THAT, is a dystopia.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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