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Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1998"


Book
31 May 1998
TL;DR: In "City of Quartz" as mentioned in this paper, Davis reconstructs LA's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy, giving us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West.
Abstract: No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In "City of Quartz", Davis reconstructs LA's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West-a city in which we may glimpse our own future, mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this special 15-year anniversary edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city's current status.

1,613 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Dec 1998-Futures
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors suggest that there are other arenas to explore that, were they taken seriously, could exert sufficient symbolic pull to qualify as desirable images of future worlds, and they could then begin to act as ''magnets'' for the realisation of possibilities that are presently obscured.

67 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article examined the British Union of Fascists (1932-40) as a utopian movement providing a valid and valuable insight into the ideology and motivations of Blackshirts, and argued that examining the UK UF as a Utopian movement provides a valid, valuable insight to the motivations of the Blackshirts.
Abstract: By coining the word 'Utopia', Thomas More bequeathed to scholarship the means to describe the gaze of desire which looks at life as it is and then projects a picture of how it could be, resolved of its defects. This was a vision which was outopia, no-where in reality but potentially a powerful spur to action because it suggested what could be. More's island was also an eutopia, a good place. In contrast, fascism is synonymous with the dystopian hallmarks of oppression and misery. Nonetheless, it is the contention of this article that examining the British Union of Fascists (1932-40) as a utopian movement provides a valid and valuable insight into the ideology and motivations of Blackshirts.'

30 citations


Book
28 Sep 1998
TL;DR: Acknowledgements Wordsworth's Charting Utopia: An Introduction From Dystopia to Utopia Narrative and Lyrical Geographies Naming New Worlds A 'Scanty Plot of Ground': The 1802 Sonnets Abandoning Utopia Conclusion Notes Index as mentioned in this paper
Abstract: List of Plates Acknowledgements Wordsworth's Charting Utopia: An Introduction From Dystopia to Utopia Narrative and Lyrical Geographies Naming New Worlds A 'Scanty Plot of Ground': The 1802 Sonnets Abandoning Utopia Conclusion Notes Index

27 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article spells out the dystopian scenario of applying market principles to North American Universities and the brave new universities that emerge will be hailed as yet another triumph of the free market even as liberal education atrophies.
Abstract: Market capitalism, not the Internet per se, is the force behind developing the wired university. Applying market principles to North American Universities will, as David Noble warns, fundamentally alter them and possibly destroy what we think of as a "great democratic higher education system". Ironically, however, students in their roles as consumers are more likely to embrace than to resist these changes. The brave new universities that emerge will be hailed as yet another triumph of the free market even as liberal education atrophies. This article spells out the dystopian scenario.

20 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors compare the utopian and dystopian discourses about the electronic town meeting concept and critique the media's dystopian vision of technology and demagogy at the expense of any utopian vision for technology and democracy.
Abstract: Utopian thinkers since the nineteenth century have advocated or opposed different forms of direct democracy. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of experiments with teledemocracy were conducted, yielding a rich discourse on the relationship of technology to democracy. However, in the 1992 presidential campaign, the “electronic town meeting” concept was represented by selected print news media without a hint of this discourse. Instead, the idea was analyzed as a crackpot proposal with roots going back to the 1960s made by a dubious candidate, Ross Perot. This article contrasts the utopian and dystopian discourses about the electronic town meeting concept and critiques the media's dystopian vision of technology and demagogy at the expense of any utopian vision of technology and democracy.

17 citations


01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that both the utopian and dystopian visions are fundamentally flawed, in so far as they are founded on a predominantly technologically-determistic view, and they draw on a comprehensive field study of the phenomenon in practice to illustrate that the Internet has the propensity to result in both utopian and dystopic outcomes.
Abstract: The literature contains many examples of utopian predictions stemming from the widespread adoption of Internet technology, including extended democracy, personal liberation, enhanced powers of organization and coordination, and renewal of community. These are briefly described in this paper. However, more recently, researchers have begun to provide more critical, dystopian predictions for this technology, and these accounts are also summarised in the paper. Interestingly, researchers have tended to consider the utopian and dystopian outcomes as mutually exclusive, i.e., there is a tendencey to present extreme accounts which are entirely utopian or dystopian. It is suggested that both the utopian and dystopian visions are fundamentally flawed, in so far as they are founded on a predominantly technologically-determistic view. The paper draws on a comprehensive field study of the phenomenon in practice to illustrate that the Internet has the propensity to result in both utopian and dystopian outcomes. Thus, a central argument presented is that both utopian and dystopian outcomes can occur simultaneously, albeit in relation to different factors. The paper proposes a framework which illustrates the factors which influence the manner in which utopian and dystopian outcomes result.

15 citations


Book Chapter
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: The authors consider the extent to which the kinds of virtual utopias made possible by computer-mediated communications are connected to the actual individual and social realities of human participants, and make a distinction between the use of virtual utopian representations as merely escapist, self-indulgent fantasy on one hand, and as a useful, transformative media for reinventing the human condition on the other.
Abstract: People have generally been very ambivalent about the potential future roles of new technologies (and the internet specifically) and their possible effects on human society. Indeed, there has been a tendency for polarization between attitudes or perceptions of naive enthusiasm and cynical resistance towards the use of computers and computer networks, and for such related concepts as ‘the information superhighway’ and ‘cyberspace’. The projection of such ambivalent perceptions into naively utopian (or even ironically dystopian) images and narratives might be seen as the latest and uniquely global permutation of a basic function of human culture - that is, to imagine ‘a better future’ or represent ‘an ideal past’. This paper will consider the extent to which the kinds of virtual utopias made possible by computer-mediated communications are ‘connected’ to the actual individual and social realities of human participants. In other words, how important might it be to recognise a distinction between the use of virtual utopias (and utopian representations in any culture) as merely escapist, self-indulgent fantasy on one hand, and as a useful, transformative media for reinventing the human condition on the other? Whether we live in a Panoptic or democratic Net ten years from now depends, in no small measure, on what you and I know and do now. Howard Rheingold, Afterword to The Virtual Community (1994, p. 310)

9 citations


Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: Laurie Anderson as mentioned in this paper said: "Take a right where they're going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, take a left at what's going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they were thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it. And I said: This must be the place.... Golden Cities."
Abstract: Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he said: Well just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they’re thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can’t miss it. And I said: This must be the place.... Golden Cities. Golden towns (Laurie Anderson, Big Science, Warner Brothers, 1982).

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Martin's "The Strangest Place in Chicago" as discussed by the authors is a collection of poems that reconstructs the vanished city of the Mecca in a dialogical narrative of counter-memory that questions official historical accounts of the building.
Abstract: From the Chicago Loop, where sunlight off the lakefront strikes the shining towers, State Street runs straight south, wide, busy with streetcars and heavy trucks. Quickly the buildings get shabby--little stores selling auto parts, a junkyard crammed with rusting wreckage. The city is harsh: concrete streets, brick building walls, black steel viaducts. Beyond 22nd Street the faces of the people are black. This is the South Side Negro section. Here the street is quieter, the sun is hazy and dirty and pale ... --John Bartlow Martin, "The Strangest Place in Chicago" So begins a 1950 journey in Harper's magazine to "one of the most remarkable Negro slum exhibits in the world" (87), the Mecca Building on Chicago's South Side. This journey from shining towers to shabby tenements, where even the sun is dirty, follows what was becoming a familiar rhetorical path for describing deteriorating urban neighborhoods, the racialized discourse of urban decline. Perhaps no other building symbolized post-World War II urban decline more starkly than the Mecca Building. Built by the D.H. Burnham Company in 1891, the Mecca was at first celebrated as a boldly innovative architectural prototype for luxury apartment living. With its atrium courtyards, its skylights and ornamental iron grillwork, its elaborate fountains and flower gardens, the Mecca was a major tourist attraction during the Columbian Exposition. Beginning with the movement of Chicago's wealthy to the North Side at the turn of the century, however, and culminating with the economic devastation wrought by the Great Depression, the Mecca gradually became an overcrowded tenement. By 1950, the Mecca Building had become notorious not because of its architectural magnificence, but because of the poverty of its remaining inhabitants.(1) It was demolished in 1952 so that its final owner, the Illinois Institute of Technology (I.I.T.), could expand its new campus, designed by the renowned Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Before the Mecca Building was obliterated, it had become the subject of national media attention as a monumental example of urban decline, an example depicted in racialized rhetoric that foreshadows the discourse of urban decline in the 1960s. It also became the subject of an important collection of poems that begins with an epigraph from Martin's "The Strangest Place in Chicago," but contests the dominant discourse of urban decline, Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca. The title poem of this collection reconstructs the vanished city of the Mecca in a dialogical narrative of counter-memory that questions official historical accounts of the building. Rather than presenting a presumably disinterested "statistical report" on urban poverty, Brooks was interested in writing about the Mecca with "a certain detachment, but only as a means of reaching substance with some incisiveness." She aimed in her long poem to "present a large variety of personalities against a mosaic of daily affairs, recognizing that even the grimmest of these is likely to have a streak or two streaks of sun."(2) Brooks's representation of the Mecca resembles neither the utopian space its designers had envisioned nor the dystopian place its commemorators disparaged. Instead, "In the Mecca" interrogates the dystopian discourse of urban decline so often invoked to characterize postwar African American life; as such, it is an "incisive" intervention into the construction of African American historical memory. Robert Beauregard documents in Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities how the 1950s discourse of urban decline was becoming more racialized. The postwar years saw an increased migration of rural blacks to northern cities. Chicago continued to be a "mecca" for Southern blacks, but, as in other urban centers, the lack of housing and jobs for unskilled workers resulted in greater crowding in inner-city neighborhoods.(3) The demolition of deteriorating buildings and neighborhoods for redevelopment projects did not result in adequate new housing for the urban poor; slums instead grew larger and more concentrated with the absorption of people displaced by demolition, while dehumanizing large public housing projects themselves became slums. …

6 citations


Journal ArticleDOI
01 Dec 1998-Futures
TL;DR: Cyberpunk has been widely acknowledged as a form of popular fiction, which has done much to establish the potential of information technology in the popular imagination as discussed by the authors. Commonly these extrapolations are predicated on the shared diegesis of a dark future, that is a setting of urban decay and oppressive corporate capital.

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For example, the authors discusses the metaphors implicit in the names given to the region, the South Seas, the Pacific and Oceania, and relates their imagining in the early European expeditions of Balboa and Magellan, in Hodges' paintings done on Cook's second voyage in the 18th century, and in conceptualizations of Australian identity from the colonial period to the mid-20th century writing of historians such as Hancock, Barnard and Manning Clark.
Abstract: Little appears to have changed in the western imagining of the Pacific region since ancient times. While metaphors of redemption and condemnation, paradise and paradise lost, utopia and dystopia persist, Australia's place in the Pacific will remain elusive and insecure. The essay is in two parts. The first half discusses the metaphors implicit in the names given to the region, the South Seas, the Pacific and Oceania, and relates their imagining in the early European expeditions of Balboa and Magellan, in Hodges' paintings done on Cook's second voyage in the 18th century, and in conceptualizations of Australian identity from the colonial period to the mid-20th century writing of historians such as Hancock, Barnard and Manning Clark. The second half of the essay traces the repetition of the same metaphors in the theories of de Certeau and Baudrillard, and in the writings of contemporary Australian critics, including McKenzie Wark, Ross Gibson and Paul Carter.

01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: In this paper, a structural analysis of Bruce McDonald's Highway 61 (1991) is presented, which is easy fodder for a classic structural analysis given the radical juxtapositions it presents between the pristine rural Canadian north and the decayed urbanized American south.
Abstract: This article grows out of an introductory communications course where students were asked to undertake a structural analysis of Bruce McDonald's Highway 61 (1991). The film is easy fodder for a classic structural analysis given the radical juxtapositions it presents between the pristine rural Canadian north and the decayed urbanized American south. However, I wanted the assignment to uncover not simply the oppositional structure of the film but the way such oppositions are complicated by the film. As I will attempt to show in what follows, Highway 61 represents the border where cultural oppositions between American and Canadian cultures come to take on meaning. So much film scholarship in Canada has, and continues to be premised on a series of binary oppositions--centre/margin, loser/hero, masculine/feminine, victim/victimizer--each of which is informed by the central opposition of Hollywood Cinema/Canadian Cinema. The study of Canadian film has embodied two opposing views: on the one hand, there is a belief that Canadian cinema is potentially emancipatory in its ability to bind vast expanses together through the delivery of a shared and authentic vision of Canadian culture. On the other hand, there is a view of Canadian cinematic culture as one of technological dependency on the American film system, as the "locus of human domination both in terms of a dependent political economy and a concomitant loss of cultural heritage." (1) Thus, by embodying the two polar views of cinematic technology as at once liberating in its evocation of a shared Canadian cultural identity and harmful in its implantation of American ideology, the study and theorization of Canadian cinematic culture has tended to operate on a rather grand and abstract level. The two competing perspectives of technological dependency and technological humanism leaves us between the dystopian and utopian sensibility. Another approach has been suggested by Jose Arroyo who has argued that Canadian film scholars should not "avoid American cinema [or popular culture in general] but examine its role in Canada from a Canadian perspective. To study Canadian cinema in isolation from Canadian cinematic culture can at best result in a partial understanding." (2) Arroyo's insight is important especially in the context of the globalizing media and the cultural diasporas that make up Canada's cultural landscape. An analysis of Canadian Cinema can no longer assume that such a category is simply transparent and static but must be located in the context of a "Canadian cinematic culture." To take such a context into account means asking questions about popular culture in Canada, it means acknowledging that this culture is largely American. This does not signal an end to Canadian film scholarship but rather it brings another dimension, a complexity, to the analysis of Canadian cinema. Highway 61 interests me first and foremost because it is a film that is very popular with Canadian youth (certainly with most of the students I have shown it to). The film's distinctly Canadian popularity is, somewhat paradoxically, the result of its incorporation of American popular music. Before moving on to an analysis of the film, I wish to turn very briefly to the original Canadian road movie, Don Shebib's Goin' Down the Road (1970). Oh God said to Abraham "kill me a son" Abe said "man you must be puttin me on" God said "no", Abe said "what" God say "you can do what you wanna but the next time you see me comin you better run" Well Abe said "where d'you want this killin done" God said "out on Highway 61" Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose welfare department wouldn't give him no clothes They asked poor Howard where can I go Howard said "there's only one place I know" Sam said "tell me quick man I got to run" Oh Howard just pointed with his gun and said "that way down Highway 61" Well Mack the finger said to Louie the king "I got 40 red white and blue shoestrings and a thousand telephone that don't ring. …


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the author describes a singular urban experience that began while he was sitting in the window of a London coffee house and observed the "dense and continuous tides of population" streaming past his vantage point.
Abstract: WE ENCOUNTER ONE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE'S PROTO-DETECTIVES, THE narrator of his short story "The Man of the Crowd," as he recalls a singular urban experience that began while he was sitting in the window of a London coffee house On this occasion he was amusing himself with, alternately, poring over a newspaper and observing the "dense and continuous tides of population" streaming past his vantage point' His view of the urban throng, and especially his glimpse of one particularly fascinating city specimen, eventually prompt him to plunge into the streets of the great metropolis in pursuit of this mysterious character so as "to know more of him" His deeper, though unrecognized goal seems to be to make some sense out of the chaos of the new industrial city, with the object of his pursuit and surveillance as a kind of emblematic denizen of this unprecedented environment2 In what I assume is an unintended parallel, we first encounter Rick Deckard, the protagonist of Ridley Scott's 1982 dystopian noir-pastiche film Blade Runner, as he sits reading the newspaper and waiting for service at a curb-side "noodle bar" in a nightmarish future Los Angeles3 Like his mid-nineteenth century counterpart, he is confronted with a dense tide of motley humanity streaming by in front of him And soon he too will find himself compelled to wander the night streets of a great metropolis in the effort to resolve ambiguities that go well beyond the immediate circumstances of the case assigned to him One further parallel between these two

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: The authors examines the deployment of Hell as a cultural narrative; not simply as a theological concept but as a complex social structure which refracts ideology through urban space and city topography.
Abstract: Perhaps more than any other form, Thomas Nashe’s rhetorical style influenced the shape of Dekker’s prose and pamphlet writing. Yet unlike Dekker, Nashe never managed to locate himself as a writer in the new metropolis. Often his work was inflected by that sense of dislocation: ‘This is the lamentable condition of our times, that men of art must seek alms of cormorants, and those that deserve best be kept under by dunceschrw …’.1 Much can be understood about the place of metropolitan literature and culture by exploring the subtle differences between these two writers, in particular their nuanced expeditions into the meaning of Hell. This chapter examines the deployment of Hell as a cultural narrative; not simply as a theological concept but as a complex social structure which refracts ideology through urban space and city topography. In tracing the cultural contours of Hell, writers like Dekker and Nashe drew together the seemingly disparate strands of the city — theatre, plague, poverty, and prison — which tied life and literature so closely together.2 Telling the story of Hell enabled the writer to find a language through which to indict and criticize the social system within which he had to work. The writer was able to reveal the dark side and effects of metropolitan life, to make them topical, with the kind of verve and wit often denied him elsewhere.