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.

The Future of Internet Governance: Dystopia, Utopia, or Realpolitik?

Abstract: The first discussions regarding issues that are now included under the rubric “Internet governance” date back to the 1990s. Discussions were formally brought into the arena of intergovernmental discussions in 1998, at the Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and continued in particular at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2005. Discussions have tended to be difficult, and little consensus has been reached, regarding a number of issues. The factors that make discussions difficult are financial, geopolitical, but also ideological. Some of the ideological approaches are idealistic and propose governance models that are new and innovative; other approaches are conservative and propose either to continue unchanged the current Internet governance arrangements, or to apply traditional intergovernmental mechanisms to at least some aspects of Internet governance. This paper concludes that an agreed international framework is needed in order to ensure that Internet governance can evolve to meet the interests of all concerned parties.

Between Dystopia and Utopia: The Post-Apocalyptic Discourse of Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between good and evil and hope and despair in Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. It is a novel that tells a classical, almost mythical story and throughout its discourse it touches contrasting yet related opposites: it is the story of man against the elements, and it is a matter of life or death; not only the life and death of its individual characters but of humanity as such. The article discusses how McCarthy's novel is playing with opposites as its discourse contains elements of utopia as well as dystopia. External space, the natural physical world, constitutes a strong dystopian element, while inner space, the psychological inner life of the characters, constitutes a utopian element. In other words, the opposition between the land and the two main characters is the novel's discursive centre.

Utopias, dystopias, and abjection: pathways for society's others in George Eliot's major fictions

Abstract: Bibliography: p. 250-270.%%%%Introduction – Female subjectivity, abjection, and agency in Scenes of clerical life – A questionable Utopia: Adam Bede – Dystopia and the frustration of agency in the double Bildungsroman of The mill on the floss – Abjection and exile in Silas Marner – Justice and feminist Utopia in Romola – Radicalism as Utopianism in Felix Holt, the radical – The pursuit of what is good: Utopian impulses in Middlemarch – Nationalism and multiculturalism: shaping the future as transformative Utopia in Daniel Deronda.%%%%Within a framework based on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, this thesis investigates how Utopian impulses are manifested in George Eliot's novels. Eliot's utopianism is presented first by a critique of dystopian elements in society and later by placing such elements in a dialogic relationship with utopian ideas articulated by leading characters. Each novel includes characters who are abjected because they have different ideas from the social norms, and such characters are silenced and expelled because society evaluates these differences in terms of its gender, class and racial prejudices. Dystopia is thus constituted as a resolution of the conflict between individual and society by the imposition of monologic values. Dialogic possibilities are explored by patterned character configurations and by the cultivation of ironical narrators' voices which enfold character focalization within strategic deployment of free indirect discourse. – Eliot's early works, from Scenes of Clerical Life to Silas Marner, focus their dystopian elements as a critique of a monologic British society intolerant of multiple consciousnesses, and which consigns "other" voices to abjection and thereby precludes social progress by rejecting these "other" voices. In her later novels, from Romola to Daniel Deronda, Eliot presents concrete model utopian societies that foreshadow progressive changes to the depicted, existing society. Such an imagined society incorporates different consciousnesses and hence admits abject characters, who otherwise would have been regarded as merely transgressive, and thus silenced or eliminated. Abjected characters in Eliot's fiction tend also to be utopists, and hence have potential for positively transforming the world. Where they are depicted as gaining agency, they also in actuality or by implication bring about change in society, the nation and the wider world. – An underlying assumption is that history can be changed for the better, so that utopian ideals can be actualized by means of human agency rather than by attributing teleological processes to supernatural forces. When a protagonist's utopian impulses fail, it is both because of dystopian elements of society and because of individual human weaknesses. In arguably her most utopian works, Romola and Daniel Deronda, Eliot creates ideal protagonists, one of whom remains in the domestic sphere because of gender, and another who is (albeit voluntarily) removed from British society because…

Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of Coum Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle

Abstract: "These people are the wreckers of civilisation", exclaimed the conservative Member of Parliment Nicholas Fairbairn in 1976. His outburst was meant to describe four artists and musicians - Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fani Tutti, Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter. What "these people" had done to deserve such an epithet, and what they were about to do, is the subject of this book. From the forword by Jon Savage: Wreckers of Civilisation recalls a time which despite volumes of print remains occluded, obdurate, even intimidating: that moment before the conservative reconstruction. To be awake in London in the late 1970s was to be plunged into turmoil: externally manifest in riot, internally within various forms of damage and depression and, if one felt brave or driven, extreme aesthetics. COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle mark the furthest reach of that impulse: even more so than Punk, they plunged into a technological and personal examination of the dark side - the forbidden, the taboo, the dystopian future on the doorstep. Today this might seem like science fiction or deliberate shock tactics, but then it seemed like reportage, front line dispatches from a convulsed country.