Dystopia is all the rage these days. Not only does it make for hit television, in the form of Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale or Amazon's The Man in the High Castle, but it is the concern of many popular fiction and Internet ruminations. Indeed, it has become a weaponized term in the culture, used against Donald Trump, intrusive data collection by big Internet firms, the State of Israel, environmental degredation, racism, and just about anything that anyone wants to denounce. Unfortunately, “dystopia” is as poorly understood as it is frequently employed as a form of name-calling. The word has become a verbal tic.
This tendency to define dystopia down should encourage caution in use of the term. After all, the charge of “dystopia” is not one to take lightly, suggesting as it does tyranny in its bleakest forms. Once reserved for grim fictional futures as in 1984 or Brave New World, or the nation-sized prisons of Pol Pot's Cambodia and Mao's China, today “dystopia” is overused and under-thought. What does dystopia really look like?
Read Full Article »
