Dystopian Futures: Agora

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Dystopian futures

What is a utopia?

What is a dystopian future?

Utopia vs Dystopia

Dystopia: an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives. 

Utopia: an imagined place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions.

What is the world coming to?

• The big question of dystopian works.
• Reaction to and criticism of your current societies & politics, and where it might be headed in the future.
• A dystopian work is a reflection of the society/political situation at the time of writing. A book from the 1950s can be radically different from a work of the 2000s.
• Older works focused more on public mistrust and suspicion, a police state, oppression by a one party government. 
• Modern works focus more on global warming, social media, inequalities (wealth, race, sex), religious extremism, pandemics,  government power

Do you know any examples of dystopian futures in literature, films, series etc.?

Genre of variety

As you can see, there is a great variety of dystopian worlds
and stories in our popular culture, from books to games. 
A lot of them focus on:

• oppression (religion, government, capitalism)
• (self-)destruction of humanity (nuclear, scientific, alien invasion)
• technology run amok (robot overlords, life is a simulation)
• pandemic catastrophe (incurable diseases, experimentation)
• wasteland post-apocalypse (survivalist, scarcity of resources)

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Why are dystopian futures relevant nowadays?

Handmaid's Tale

“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”

― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's survived from an unimaginably distant past. I lie in my single bed at night, with my eyes closed, and the name floats there behind my eyes, not quite within reach, shining in the dark.”

― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale