https://archive.md/LxELg
"IF YOU have ever watched
Black Mirror or
The Last of Us – or read the
comic book
2000AD, where Judge Dredd was born – you have experienced the joy
and horror of dystopian science fiction.
Dystopia is a place where there is no mercy, no beauty and no hope. Its skies
are black with pollution and warlords rule the weak with violence and frenetic,
high-tech propaganda. Like Thomas More’s
Utopia, dystopia is a fantasy place.
Yet, over the past decade, many world leaders have treated dystopia as a
realistic vision of our future, one we should use as an inspiration for public
policies and scientific research.
Politicians describe immigrants as invaders and argue that we need to build a
Game of Thrones-style wall to keep them out. Scientists publish papers trying
to prove that people from one part of the world are less intelligent than
others, or that the solution to gun violence is more guns (at least in the US,
where I live). It sounds like the plot from a cringey old cult movie. We are
basically planning for a future where monsters stalk our cities and we shoot
our neighbours to survive.
Recently, I discussed this weird turn of events with Becky Chambers, author of
A Psalm for the Wild-Built and the
Wayfarers series, at San Francisco’s
Long Now Foundation headquarters. Chambers, whose most recent books are about a
future without poverty, pointed out dystopian visions are often treated as more
“grown up” than hopeful stories. It is as if we are expected to give up hope
when we become adults.
As a result, we are left paralysed, unable to imagine a way out of present-day
problems because our ruin seems preordained. Or, worse, we continue to do
things exactly as we have – extracting fossil fuels from Earth to feed
industry, extracting data from innocent humans to feed AI and extracting more
“productivity” from workers who are already stretched to their limits. Why not
just burn through everything, including ourselves, if the future is doomed to
be a blackened pit?
Well, I’ve got some good news for you. We don’t actually live in a magical
world where events are preordained. That’s why Chambers writes stories about
futures where hopeful signs exist right alongside awful problems. I call this
“topian” fiction – storytelling that is set in a place where neither good nor
evil rules supreme, and where people struggle with ambiguity the way we do
everyday. Without a robust sense of ambiguity, we can’t fix broken systems or
maintain systems that will always need improvement. If we can acknowledge that
nothing will ever be perfect, it puts us in the right frame of mind to face the
future."
The interview mentioned above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI6qAIJbjs0
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-trachoma-benin-mali-deforestation-brazil-seine-paris/>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
