Post by Deleted on May 24, 2019 9:19:25 GMT
In The Giver, people are drugged to keep from having sexual urges and thereby forced to be complacent. They’re euthanized when they show chronic disobedience or are not useful to society. And they don’t feel any wild swings of positive emotion either. Love, happiness, pleasure — they’re are all muted in order to keep order and control. That’s the thing about utopias, as the dystopian genre warns us, there’s always a trade-off.
In Brave New World, published in 1932, Aldous Huxley put to page the anxieties the country was facing over rapid changes to how connected the world was. Through cars, airplanes, and new mass media, the world seemed more connected than ever. And yet, Huxley troubled over what the trade-off was for this, imagining a world in which all connection to nature was lost. In his future creation, people chased happiness only — they used drugs, the joined mass orgies, and they no longer had children. They didn’t know the land or read Shakespeare. Enjoyment of flashy mass media, infinite distractions, he worried, was leading to mindlessness. It was a means of controlling the masses.
In Fahrenheit 451 (1953), set during the meteoric rise of television sets in homes, the world has rejected knowledge. People prefer reality entertainment about dysfunctional relationships over books, literally seizing and burning them to avoid accidentally getting facts. Yes, author Ray Bradbury predicted our obsession with reality TV, but more chillingly, it feels like he predicted a world in which facts, knowledge, and science would be rejected by the people. Considering trends of mainstream climate change denial, this is uncomfortably close to home.
From The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which imagines a future in which women’s hard-earned rights are being stripped away by an extremely religious government, to Gattaca (1997), which struggles through the ethical implications of gene selection (and how it could be used to design the perfect child), dystopian fiction’s greatest fears of their times, are often reflected in our current reality.
In Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, the upper class is so far removed from the reality of reality television that they’re willing to watch children kill each other for ultimate entertainment. In Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, gaming is now a 24-hour endeavor, with people escaping a dying world fulltime to live in virtual reality.
The TV show Black Mirror is constantly examining the dark sides of tech — from uploading your consciousness into a computer after death to being able to record every conversation using just your eyes to a social media app that can compile a version of deceased loved ones to talk to you.
In Brave New World, published in 1932, Aldous Huxley put to page the anxieties the country was facing over rapid changes to how connected the world was. Through cars, airplanes, and new mass media, the world seemed more connected than ever. And yet, Huxley troubled over what the trade-off was for this, imagining a world in which all connection to nature was lost. In his future creation, people chased happiness only — they used drugs, the joined mass orgies, and they no longer had children. They didn’t know the land or read Shakespeare. Enjoyment of flashy mass media, infinite distractions, he worried, was leading to mindlessness. It was a means of controlling the masses.
In Fahrenheit 451 (1953), set during the meteoric rise of television sets in homes, the world has rejected knowledge. People prefer reality entertainment about dysfunctional relationships over books, literally seizing and burning them to avoid accidentally getting facts. Yes, author Ray Bradbury predicted our obsession with reality TV, but more chillingly, it feels like he predicted a world in which facts, knowledge, and science would be rejected by the people. Considering trends of mainstream climate change denial, this is uncomfortably close to home.
From The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which imagines a future in which women’s hard-earned rights are being stripped away by an extremely religious government, to Gattaca (1997), which struggles through the ethical implications of gene selection (and how it could be used to design the perfect child), dystopian fiction’s greatest fears of their times, are often reflected in our current reality.
In Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, the upper class is so far removed from the reality of reality television that they’re willing to watch children kill each other for ultimate entertainment. In Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, gaming is now a 24-hour endeavor, with people escaping a dying world fulltime to live in virtual reality.
The TV show Black Mirror is constantly examining the dark sides of tech — from uploading your consciousness into a computer after death to being able to record every conversation using just your eyes to a social media app that can compile a version of deceased loved ones to talk to you.
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