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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.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A brief intellectual history of the future can be found in this paper, which traces perspectives on the future since 1909, when the term "futurism" was coined in the publication of the 'The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.'
Abstract: This essay charts a brief intellectual history of the futures - both utopian and dystopian - conceived in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It traces perspectives on the future since 1909, when the term 'futurism' was coined in the publication of the 'The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.' The essay maps changes in the vision of the future, taking a chronological approach in noting developments in the discourse on the future. A prominent theme in pronouncements on the future is technological progress, first in relation to industrial technology, later in the context of post-industrial or information technology. A turning-point in this discourse can be isolated in the early 1970s, when ideas of technological progress begin to be challenged in the public sphere; from that date, environmental concern becomes increasingly significant in discussions of the future.

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The 1968 film Wild in the Streets as mentioned in this paper depicted a dystopian future in which youth were extended the right to vote at age fourteen, and with their newfound political power (and a little LSD hidden in Washington, D.C., drinking supply), they forced through a constitutional amendment lowering the age required for holding elected office.
Abstract: The 1968 film Wild in the Streets depicted a dystopian future in which youth were extended the right to vote at age fourteen. With their newfound political power (and a little LSD hidden in Washington, D.C.'s drinking supply), they forced through a constitutional amendment lowering the age required for holding elected office. Soon thereafter they promoted a rock star and megalomaniac to the White House, established compulsory retirement at age thirty, and confined all U.S. citizens to concentration camps at age thirty-five. The film, which became something of a minor cult classic, appears to contemporary viewers as more comedy than drama. Nevertheless, as outlandish as the script was, argumentation scholars should not discount its message. It spoke potently, albeit hyperbolically, to fears that have animated U.S. politics since the birth of the nation. Robert Ivie (2005) has referred to these fears as "demophobia" (p. 191). They are based on a caricature of the people as an irrational mob or disease threatening to undermine the stability of the nation's republican institutions, and they are stymied only to the extent that the qualities of irrationality and depravity are localized in the persona of a scapegoat. Wild in the Streets worked this way, by replacing generalized fears of "democratic distemper" (Ivie, 2005, p. 46) with a localized threat that could be more easily contained, if not purged. And at least one critic took the film seriously. Renata Adler (1968a) of the New York Times described it as an "instant classic" (p. 21) that sees with gay clarity ... the absolute tyranny at the hands of the young to which adults in this country seem determined, for fairly odd reasons, to subject themselves. What it knows is what every Brownie troop leader and new kid on the block used to know--that there is no more violent, demagogic, elitist, vicious and totalitarian society than a group of children. (Adler, 1968b, p. D1) Adler's tone was atypically vitriolic, perhaps, but there is little doubt that hers was a fear widely shared in her time. The relationship of U.S. democracy to youth is far more ambivalent than Wild in the Streets would suggest, however. In point of contrast, TIME magazine declared youth--the generation twenty-five and under--"Man of the Year" in 1966. This generation, TIME predicted, would "land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war" (para. 8). Although the sentence's coda suggested a degree of irony, the article offered, on the whole, an incredibly flattering portrayal of the young generation. Describing youth at various points as diverse, idealistic, skeptical, committed, alienated, and shrewd, the article had little to hold it together except for a profound sense of optimism in its subject. In reality, of course, youth are neither devils nor prophets; rather, they are (among other things) a screen upon which U.S. citizens project their hopes and fears for the future of democracy. And if Jeremy Engels (2011) is correct that U.S. democracy exists in a tension between demophobia and demophilia--between fears of democratic volatility and hopes that democratic deliberation can transform that volatility into consensus--then the way that the U.S. public culture talks about youth could say far more about democracy than it does about youth. Consequently, debates concerning the role of youth in the public culture offer an extremely productive site for diagnosing the health of American democracy, and for understanding the processes by which it balances hopefulness and fears of unrest. The congressional debate over the voting age, which occurred between 1942 and 1971, is ideal for these purposes, not only because it came to fruition at the height of the generation wars, but more importantly, because it was concerned less with the substantive qualities of youth than it was with the formal qualities of deliberation and judgment in a democracy. …

9 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore a set of paradoxes in digital services that they call Truth versus Lies, Long Term versus Short Term, Fair versus Unfair, Humans versus Machines, Return versus Risk, Coo...
Abstract: In this commentary we explore a set of paradoxes in digital services that we call Truth versus Lies, Long Term versus Short Term, Fair versus Unfair, Humans versus Machines, Return versus Risk, Coo...

9 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: In this article, a married Englishman of strong left-wing views, who has partly earned his bread as a journalist, arrives by train at a revolutionary city on the Continent, and wit nesses a society transformed.
Abstract: Consider the following plot scenario for a literary work. A married Englishman of strong left-wing views, who has partly earned his bread as a journalist, arrives by train at a revolutionary city on the Continent, and wit nesses a society transformed. Red flags are flying, the people are happy, a feeling of fellowship inspires him with hope for a better day, although the country is involved in a larger war which it is destined to lose. But in the city, the forces of reaction launch an attack against the revolutionary ele ments. Our hero participates in the street fighting, is later wounded, and having recovered is amazed to learn that his comrades are dead or impris oned, and he must flee for his life. He crosses the border in the guise of a respectable English visitor and escapes to the green fields of his home. But despite the failure of the revolution, his socialist zeal remains undimin ished.... The author of this piece was a man awakened to political con sciousness by his opposition to British imperialism, and was himself, among other things, a journalist and a revolutionary socialist. By the end of his life he had despaired of the imminence of the revolution and moved toward a greater accommodation with existing political institutions, but his belief in the necessity and desirability of the socialist ideal never faltered. Finally, his most famous and arguably greatest work was in the Utopian genre. This description, surprisingly at first sight, fits William Morris and his 1885 poem about the Paris Commune, The Pilgrims of Hope, as well as it does George Orwell and his Spanish Civil War documentary Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938. But short of drawing parallels where none exist, there can be no question of any direct influence by Morris upon Orwell. Morris is rarely mentioned in Orwell's writings, and when he does appear it is either as a "dull, empty windbag" and patron saint of "the outer-suburban creeping Jesus," in The Road to Wigan Pier (162), or, at a later stage of Orwell's political development, as a valuable reminder of socialism's "orig inal, half-forgotten objective of human brotherhood" ("Review: The Soul of Man" 428) and an admirable "Utopian dreamer" (qtd. in Crick, "Orwell" 18, from the 1946 review "What is Socialism?"). Orwell's positive refer ences to the concept of the earthly paradise and specifically to News from Nowhere in these reviews of the late 1940s show not only a surface famil iarity with but a newfound esteem for Morris's work, although general stabs at "wooly-minded Utopianism" (qtd. in Ward 40, from the 1948 Observer

9 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Nov 2014
TL;DR: The Realization of Multitudinous Humanity Observers of the urban scene in nineteenth and early twentieth-century fiction are recurrently confronted with what the American novelist Robert Herrick called "the realization of multitudinous humanity": the city defeats their powers of perception as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The Realization of Multitudinous Humanity Observers of the urban scene in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction are recurrently confronted with what the American novelist Robert Herrick called "the realization of multitudinous humanity": the city defeats their powers of perception. In William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), this experience is triggered by masses of immigrants. Gazing from an elevated train in Manhattan, upper-middle-class editorialist Basil March discovers slum dwellers with disquieting features - "small eyes,… high cheeks,… broad noses,… cue-filleted skulls." As Basil’s ethnic cliches cannot keep up with this diversity, he seeks comfort in Social Darwinist generalities; the streets, he ventures, are ruled by the "play of energies" in "the fierce struggle for survival." If Howells’s urban observer dared to immerse himself into the crowd, he would likely share the plight of Avis Everhard, the heroine of Jack London’s dystopia The Iron Heel (1908), whose perceptual distress is compounded with disgust and terror. Trapped in a riot of the Chicago underclass, Avis must thread her way through the "awful river" of a subhuman mob made up of "carnivorous… apes and tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts of burden." In other texts, the object of urban dread is industry. French science-fiction pioneer Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Fortune (1879) features gothic depictions of a city designed by German gun manufacturers: Stahlstadt is "a dark mass, huge and strange," whose "forest of cylindrical chimneys… vomit forth clouds of dense smoke." Likewise, north England towns in Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, Or the Two Nations (1845) are "wilderness[es] of cottages… interspersed with blazing furnaces." For Emile Zola, steam engines in coal mines are "vile beast[s]… gorged on human flesh." American investigative journalist Rebecca Harding Davis called manufacturing towns the "Devil’s place." This nightmarish apparatus of production sustains economic processes beyond human measure. American novelist Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903) map the gigantic economic traffic whereby wheat is produced and exchanged. Harvested from the "Titan" earth, wheat unleashes speculation frenzies displaying the "appalling fury of the Maelstrom." At the far end of these economic chains, Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise (1881) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) examine how customers fare in the urban market. In newly built department stores, Zola’s and Dreiser’s shoppers experience the "drag of desire" exerted by commodities with untraceable origins.

9 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20241
2023244
2022672
202192
2020142
2019141