Trying a dark visioning exercise. When you think “dystopia” what’s the top feature of the world that immediately occurs to you?
No water. Concrete and metal everywhere with no people or animals inhabiting.
Hidden, unclear, or deeply misaligned and entrenched structures of power.
Feature wise - a muting of the color palette, specifically of people’s clothes. Doesn’t need to be to grey, just a “reduction in variance” as a vibe
Absolute and total surveillance of everyone and everywhere
Extreme bureaucracy. Minimal human interface.
Tyranny → (loss of privacy*) → thought police → societal entrapment.
Plus: always raining, smog filled, Tokyo-esque doom scapes, which seems to go hand in hand with ↑.
*
a distracted populace who all tattle on each other and use peer shaming to discourage others from asserting rights to privacy or sovereignty (we are already there in many places)
Lack of emotion. People concealing their true thoughts and feelings out of fear.
A Venus like atmosphere + brutalist metal architecture
lived experience - first few months when I moved to Prague and heard the air raid sirens go off on their monthly tests. Minutes long monotonous wailing sound as the background score to an otherwise normal weekday afternoon in the city.
Pursuit of pleasure and escapism at the cost of dealing with reality on its own terms. Pursuit of building the popular at the cost of building the necessary. Pursuit of indiscriminate moral panics at the cost of nuanced concern. Pineapple on pizza.
(lived experience) legacy air raid sirens going off on their monthly tests in Prague. Long, monotonous wailing background score to an otherwise normal weekday afternoon in the city. Constant war time/doom world sounds/warnings/announcements.
Extreme control but minimal legibility and accessibility. Doesn't have to be top down control necessarily. Could be a Philip K Dick or Italo Calvino style clusterfuck.
I close my eyes and see a society where I am advertised to nonstop, adblock is illegal, and there's really nothing else to do but consume.
science experiments on living humans against their will
Permanent mass surveillance combined with social credit system by a faceless self-serving bureaucracy.
Small cities heavily guarded behind huge walls to protect them from the unlucky, vast majority. The only time the dwellers get out of their bubble is to get resources. No more climate problems, as these cities are small and selective. Like on average the eCO2 tonnage is very low, but disparity city/rest is 1000x.
every human has a designated role decided by a governing body (AI/humans), no dispute in given role.
For me, the top feature of a dystopian world is a lack of courage to fight for the good, the true, and the beautiful. The result: a prison planet filled with entire populations of neutered, hedonistic drones incapable of any form of creative expression or independent thought.
For me, the top feature of a dystopian world is an overall lack of courage to fight for the good, the true, and the beautiful. The result: a prison planet filled with entire populations of neutered, hedonistic drones incapable of any form of creative expression or independent thought.
The greatest trick dystopia ever pulled was convincing the world it's a utopia
Half destroyed tall buildings with small bits of vegetation growing on them
broken, decaying, hot and humid, and mostly abandoned concrete-jungle urban centers. Like LA today but without the people.
Central control followed by mismanagement followed by starvation
Tall buildings, skyscrapers. Interesting exercise. Thank you for posting this.
2 + 2 = 5. All communication is lies, everyone’s an informant.
A lot of these feel unrealistically like the result of malicious punishment by an authoritarian regime. Framed as a “feature,” my answer is ability to pay for human connection, or “not needing to” go outside.
panopticon w/ no reinforceable bill of rights from first principles. it ends up mostly with psychological despair where one attempts to escape or disassociate after a while, only to be expertly put back into a state of captive attention by a superintelligent system that is maximally extractive of that attention.
Methods to coordinate to find solutions for known problems are deemed illegal or outright banned
