Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

Literature, Human Rights and the Cold War

Abstract: Despite the ambitions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, the establishment of global justice and freedom made little progress over the following four decades. One of the results was a significant strand of Cold War literature that documented the brutalising effects of industrialisation, totalitarianism and superpower interventionism and that advocated for those who, still marginalised by class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, felt excluded from the UDHR's conception of a common humanity. Taking up many of these themes, this essay analyses human rights literature from around the world, including examples of autobiographical testimony, political fiction, postcolonial poetry, dystopian drama and postmodernist fiction.

May I Have Your Attention, Please: - Building a Dystopian Attention Economy

Abstract: We analyze the scenario depicted in the "Black Mirror" episode "Fifteen Million Merits" from an economic point of view, focusing on treating the attention of a user or consumer as a commodity. We continue by sketching the technological requirements for building such an economic framework, looking at advertisement platforms, payment schemes, and surveillance technology. As we show, a lot of the technology already exists and we expect the gaps to be filled in the very near future. Additionally, we briefly discuss the impact on social and work environments. While we believe that a scenario as extreme as shown in the episode is unlikely, we think that certain facets of it could find their way into our society.

Le monde des spectacles dans la ville du futur : comment s’évader d’une société positiviste?

Abstract: In his two main futuristic novels, Le Vingtieme Siecle (1883) and La Vie electrique (1890), Albert Robida presents a dystopian society ruled by individualism, industrialism, and the search for profit. In this technological world, positivist values seem to reign while humanities appear as largely despised. Through the means of anticipation, Robida gives an acute satire of his historical moment. The present article considers the central importance of spectacles in Robida’s futuristic society: both their ideological function and their eventual use by future citizens as a means of evasion, a means to experience the freedom of aesthetic pleasure. Thanks to the “telephonoscope,” plays, operas, concerts and ballets enter each citizen’s daily life, but a closer look at the plays’ aesthetics and their industrialist production shows that they are very much a part of this consumer society. Far from providing an escape, futuristic spectacles are truly incarnations of society’s values. The logic of spectacularization and advertising thus extends to the whole society, mirroring the situation of the writer himself. (In French)

A Do-It-Yourself Dystopia: The Americanization of Big Brother

Abstract: The essence of life in an oligarchy like George Orwell presents in '1984' is that freedom of choice is virtually non-existent. But what happens when so many trivial and meaningless choices inundate a culture such as our own and freedom itself becomes devalued? In 'A Do-It-Yourself Dystopia', through a variety of essays, Steven Carter addresses this and other issues in a wide-ranging search for hidden oligarchies of the American self.

Deflating the overblown accounts of technology: a review of Don Ihde’s Ironic Technics : Automatic Press/VIP, 2008, $12, pp 72, ISBN-10: 8792130186, ISBN-13: 978-8792130181

Abstract: The field of philosophy of technology is populated by a variety of views of how the general technological character of society shapes and guides our lives. Debates have waged between dystopian accounts, which see technologies to generally have a negative impact, and utopian accounts, which predict that technological advance will solve our problems and improve our lives. Also, in contrast to both of these positions is an instrumentalist view, which argues that technologies merely serve their users’ ends, becoming positive or negative only with respect to the ends to which they are used. Against all of these general accounts sits Don Ihde’s Ironic Technics, a short collection of essays that highlights technology’s concrete specificity, variability, context dependency, and its tendency to defy prediction. Ironic Technics is composed of four independent essays, each addressing from a different angle the complex interrelations between technologies, users, and their cultural and historical contexts. Ihde has a penchant for upending established frameworks of thought that have become overextended in their claims about technology. He finds the counterexamples, unconsidered consequences, and hidden assumptions, which undermine totalizing accounts. Yet the book’s dividends do not come only in the form of negative arguments and deflations. Ihde traces a number of trends, ties together examples that seem at first unrelated, and develops some useful concepts along the way. As a whole, the book makes for a quick read, with its approachable style and abundant examples—from windmills, to medical imaging, to WMDs. Those working within the field of philosophy of technology will find the book to be a usefully concise version of Ihde’s counterpoint deflations of totalizing accounts of technology. Engineers and others working in technology design will find the book of particular use for its punchy and original thoughts. In the first of the four essays, entitled ‘‘Stupidity in the Knowledge Society,’’ Ihde analyzes a cluster of accounts of Western society which claim we have moved past an industrial mode and into one which primarily deals with the transfer of information. Examples of this line of thought include Peter Drucker’s notion of ‘‘the knowledge society,’’ Alvin Toffler’s ‘‘information society,’’ and the common ‘‘post-industrial society.’’ Ihde is suspicious of this move, stating ‘‘part of what I am trying to do, is to wean us from the current hype and tendency to overgeneralize and romanticize the new’’ (7). While he agrees that many features of our society have changed with the ascension of information technologies, he also reminds us about those which have not, and considers whether all changes have been exclusively for the better. His strategy in this chapter is to list a variety of technologies, historical moments, and philosophical views which at first seem unconnected— including Cold War nuclear simulations, WMDs, and Heidegger’s critique of technology—which he then gradually strings back together in their relation to the knowledge society. A central observation Ihde makes is that while the contemporary western world bears many features of a knowledge society, these features come in addition to—and not in place of—those of our industrial society. Our industrial society has not been replaced, and its problems, such as atmospheric pollution, remain. In addition, Ihde points out the ways that central features of the knowledge society, such as computing and the Internet, were born from military projects whose effects are still present, such as nuclear proliferation. R. Rosenberger (&) Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA e-mail: estragon10@yahoo.com