Speaker 1: Pushkin. If you feel like five out of six new books, movies,
Speaker 1: and TV shows are about how the world is ending,
Speaker 1: or they take place in the future where the world
Speaker 1: has just ended, then this essay is for you. It's
Speaker 1: about the history of dystopian fiction, and Jill Laport spends
Speaker 1: an argument about the relationship between real world political utopianism,
Speaker 1: disaffection and our fictional dystopias.
Speaker 2: So this piece was me try and understand, like you know,
Speaker 2: hunger game, squid games as a moment, as a response
Speaker 2: to the realization that my god, you know, the Internet
Speaker 2: didn't actually fix anything, and neither did Obama.
Speaker 1: Here's the essay. No we cannot stick around after for
Speaker 1: conversation with Jill about writing and reading dystopias.
Speaker 2: No we cannot. Here are the plots of some dystopian
Speaker 2: novels set in the near future. The world got too hot,
Speaker 2: so a wealthy celebrity persuaded a small number of very
Speaker 2: rich people to move to a makeshift satellite that, from
Speaker 2: orbit leeches the last nourishment the Earth has to give,
Speaker 2: leaving everyone else to starve. The people on the satellite
Speaker 2: have lost their genitals through some kind of instant mutation
Speaker 2: or super quick evolution, But there is a lot of
Speaker 2: sex anyway, since it's become fashionable to have surgical procedures
Speaker 2: to give yourself a variety of appendages and openings, along
Speaker 2: with decorative skin grafts and tattoos. They're being so little
Speaker 2: else to do. There are no children, but the celebrity
Speaker 2: who rules the satellite has been trying to create them
Speaker 2: by torturing women from the Earth's surface. We are what
Speaker 2: happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. The
Speaker 2: novel's narrator says, or North Korea deployed a brain damaging
Speaker 2: chemical weapon that made everyone in the United States, or
Speaker 2: at least everyone in la an idiot, except for a
Speaker 2: few people who are on a boat the day the
Speaker 2: scourge came. But the idiots, who are otherwise remarkably sweet,
Speaker 2: round up and kill those people out of fear. Led
Speaker 2: by a man known only as the Chief, the idiots
Speaker 2: build a wall around downtown to keep out the drifters
Speaker 2: and the stupidest people, the shamblers, who don't know how
Speaker 2: to tie shoes or button buttons. They wander around naked
Speaker 2: and barefoot, thanks in part to the difficulty of clothing
Speaker 2: there is a lot of sex, random and unsatisfying, but
Speaker 2: there are very few children because no one knows how
Speaker 2: to take care of them. The jacket copy bills this
Speaker 2: novel as the first book of the trump era, or
Speaker 2: machines replaced humans doing all the work and providing all
Speaker 2: the food. And and even if though if you leave
Speaker 2: the city it is hotter everywhere else, some huffy young
Speaker 2: people do because they are bored. Not to mention, they
Speaker 2: are mad at their parents, who do annoying things like
Speaker 2: run giant corporations. Their runaways are called walkaways. I gather
Speaker 2: they're not in a terribly big hurry. They talk about revolution,
Speaker 2: take a lot of baths, upload their brains onto computers,
Speaker 2: and have a lot of sex. But to be honest,
Speaker 2: they are very boring. Or even after the coasts were
Speaker 2: lost to the floods when the ice caps smelted, the
Speaker 2: American South, defying a new federal law, refused to give
Speaker 2: up fossil fuels and succeeded, which led to a civil
Speaker 2: war which has been going on for decades and was
Speaker 2: about to be over on Reunification Day, except that a
Speaker 2: woman from Louisiana who lost her whole family in the
Speaker 2: war went to the celebration and released a poison that
Speaker 2: killed one hundred million people, which doesn't seem like the
Speaker 2: tragedy it might have been, because in this future world,
Speaker 2: as in all the others, there's not much to live for,
Speaker 2: what with the petty tyrants, the rotten weather, and the
Speaker 2: crappy sex. It will not give too much away if
Speaker 2: I say that none of these novels have a happy ending,
Speaker 2: though one has a twist. Then again, none of them
Speaker 2: have a happy beginning either. Doestopias follow Utopia's the way
Speaker 2: thunder follows lightning. Lately the thunder is roaring, but people
Speaker 2: are so grumpy, what with the petty tyrants and such,
Speaker 2: that it's easier to forget how recently lightning struck. Whether
Speaker 2: we measure our progress in terms of wiredness, open mindedness,
Speaker 2: or optimism, the country is moving in the right direction,
Speaker 2: and faster, perhaps than even we would have believed. A
Speaker 2: reporter for Wired wrote in May of two thousand, we
Speaker 2: are as a nation better educated, more tolerant, and more
Speaker 2: connected because of not in spite of the convergence of
Speaker 2: the Internet and public life, partisanship, religion, geography, race, gender,
Speaker 2: and other traditional political divisions are giving way to a
Speaker 2: new standard wiredness as an organizing prin Nor was the
Speaker 2: utopianism merely technological or callow. In January two thousand and eight,
Speaker 2: Barack Obama gave a speech in New Hampshire about the
Speaker 2: American creed. It was a creed written into the founding
Speaker 2: documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can.
Speaker 2: It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed
Speaker 2: a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes
Speaker 2: we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck
Speaker 2: out from distant shores, and pioneers who pushed westward against
Speaker 2: an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can. Yes we can heal
Speaker 2: this nation. Yes we can repair the world. Yes we can.
Speaker 2: That was the lightning, the flash of hope, the promise
Speaker 2: of perfectibility. The argument of dystopianism is that perfection comes
Speaker 2: at the cost of freedom. Every new lament about the
Speaker 2: end of the republic, every column about the collapse of civilization,
Speaker 2: every new novel of doom, these are its answering thunder rumbole, rumble, kaboom, kaboom.
Speaker 2: A utopia is a paradise, a dystopia, a paradise lost.
Speaker 2: Before Utopia's and dystopias became imagined futures, they were imagined pasts,
Speaker 2: or imagined places like the Garden of Eden. I have
Speaker 2: found a continent more densely peopled, in abounding in animals
Speaker 2: than our Europe, or Asia or Africa, and in addition,
Speaker 2: a climate milder and more delightful than any other region
Speaker 2: known to us. Amerigo Vespucci wrote in extravagant letters describing
Speaker 2: his voyages across the Atlantic, published in fifteen o three
Speaker 2: as Mundus Novus a New World. In fifteen sixteen, Thomas
Speaker 2: Moore published a fictional account of a sailor on one
Speaker 2: of Espucci's ships who had traveled just a bit farther
Speaker 2: to the island of Utopia, where he found a perfect republic.
Speaker 2: More coined the term utopia means nowhere. Gulliver's Travels seventeen
Speaker 2: twenty six is a satire of the utopianism of the Enlightenment.
Speaker 2: On the island of Laputa, Gulliver visits the Academy of Legato,
Speaker 2: where the Sages, the first Progressives, are busy trying to
Speaker 2: make pincushions out of marble, breeding naked sheep and improving
Speaker 2: the language by getting rid of all the words. The
Speaker 2: word dystopia, meaning an unhappy country, was coined in the
Speaker 2: seventeen forties. As the historian Gregory Clays points out in
Speaker 2: a shrewd study, Dystopia a natural history. In its modern definition,
Speaker 2: a dystopia can be apocalyptic or post apocalyptic, or neither,
Speaker 2: but it has to be anti utopian. A utopia turned
Speaker 2: upside down, a world in which people tried to build
Speaker 2: a republic of perfection, only to find that the aid
Speaker 2: created a republic of misery. A Trip to the Island
Speaker 2: of Equality, a seventeen ninety two reply to Thomas Paine's
Speaker 2: Rights of Man, is a dystopia. On the island, the
Speaker 2: pursuit of equality has reduced everyone to living in caves.
Speaker 2: But Mary Shelley's eighteen twenty sixth novel The Last Man
Speaker 2: is not dystopian. It's merely apocalyptic. The dystopian novel emerged
Speaker 2: in response to the first utopian novels, like Edward Bellamy's
Speaker 2: best selling eighteen eighty eight fantasy Looking Backward, about a
Speaker 2: socialist utopia in the year two thousand. Looking Backward was
Speaker 2: so successful that it produced a dozen anti socialist anti
Speaker 2: utopian replies, including looking further Backward, in which China invades
Speaker 2: the United States, which has been weakened by its embrace
Speaker 2: of socialism, and looking further forward, in which socialism is
Speaker 2: so unquestionable that a history professor who refutes it is
Speaker 2: demoted to the rank of janitor. In eighteen eighty seven,
Speaker 2: a year before Bellamy, the American writer Anna Bowman Dodd
Speaker 2: published The Republic of the Future, a socialist dystopia set
Speaker 2: in New York in twenty fifty in which women and
Speaker 2: men are equal, children are reared by the state, machines
Speaker 2: handle all the work, and most people, having nothing else
Speaker 2: to do, spend much of their time at the gym.
Speaker 2: Obsessed with fitness describes this world as the very acme
Speaker 2: of dreariness. What is a dystopia?
Speaker 3: The gym?
Speaker 2: That's still true? In a twenty eleven episode of Black Mirror,
Speaker 2: Life on Earth in an energy scarce future has been
Speaker 2: reduced to an interminable spin class. Utopians believe in progress,
Speaker 2: Dystopians don't. They fight this argument out in competing visions
Speaker 2: of the future, Utopians offering promises, dystopians issuing warnings. In
Speaker 2: eighteen ninety five. In The Time Machine, HG. Wells introduced
Speaker 2: the remarkably handy device of traveling through time by way
Speaker 2: of a clock. After that, time travel proved convenient, but
Speaker 2: even Wells didn't always use a machine. In When the
Speaker 2: Sleeper Awakes eighteen ninety nine, his hero simply oversleeps his
Speaker 2: way into the twenty first century, where he finds a
Speaker 2: world in which people are enslaved by propaganda and helpless
Speaker 2: in the hands of the demagogue. That's one problem with
Speaker 2: dystopian fiction. Forewarned is not always fore armed. Sleeping through
Speaker 2: the warning signs is another problem. I was asleep before,
Speaker 2: the heroine of The Handmaid's Tale says in the new
Speaker 2: Hulu production of Margaret Atwood's nineteen eighty six novel, that's
Speaker 2: how we let it happen. But what about when everyone's
Speaker 2: awake and there are plenty of warnings but no one
Speaker 2: does anything about them. NK three by Michael Tolkien is
Speaker 2: an intricate and cleverly constructed account of the aftermath of
Speaker 2: a North Korean chemical attack. The NK three of the
Speaker 2: title has entirely destroyed its victims memories and has vastly
Speaker 2: diminished their capacity to reason. This puts the novel's characters
Speaker 2: in the same position as the readers of all dystopian fiction.
Speaker 2: They're left to try to piece together not a who'd
Speaker 2: done it? But how did it happen? Seth Kaplan, who'd
Speaker 2: been a pediatric oncologist, pages through periodicals left in a
Speaker 2: seat back on a Singapore Airline's jet on the ground
Speaker 2: at Lax. The periodicals, like the plane, hadn't moved since
Speaker 2: the plague arrived. It confused Seth that the plague was
Speaker 2: front page news, and some but not all, of the papers,
Speaker 2: Tolkien writes, they still printed reviews of movies and books,
Speaker 2: articles about new cars, ways to make inexpensive costumes for Halloween.
Speaker 2: Everyone had been awake, but they'd been busy shopping for
Speaker 2: cars and picking out movies and cutting eye holes in
Speaker 2: paper bags. The latest blighted crop of dystopian novels is
Speaker 2: pessimistic about technology, about the economy, about politics, and about
Speaker 2: the planet, making it a more abundant harvest of unhappiness
Speaker 2: than most other heydays of downheartedness. The Internet did not
Speaker 2: stitch us all together. Economic growth has led to widening
Speaker 2: economic inequality and illuming environmental crisis. Democracy appears to be
Speaker 2: yielding to authoritarianism. Hopes dashed is lately a long list
Speaker 2: and getting longer. The plane is grounded, seat backs in
Speaker 2: the upright position, and we are dying slowly of stupidity.
Speaker 2: Pick your pre dilemma. There's a new dystopian novel to
Speaker 2: match it. Worried about political polarization in American War, Omar
Speaker 2: l Acod traces the United States to sent from gridlock
Speaker 2: to barbarism as the state of the former Confederacy, or
Speaker 2: at least the parts that aren't underwater, refused to abide
Speaker 2: by the Sustainable Future Act and secede in twenty seventy four,
Speaker 2: Troubled by the new Jim Crow. Ben h Winter's Underground
Speaker 2: ail Lines is set in an early twenty first century
Speaker 2: United States in which slavery abides, made crueler and more
Speaker 2: inescapable by the giant, unregulated slave owning corporations that deploy
Speaker 2: their surveillance powers of modern technology, so that even escaping
Speaker 2: to the North on underground airlines hardly offers much hope.
Speaker 2: Since free blacks in cities like Chicago live in segregated
Speaker 2: neighborhoods with no decent housing or schooling or work, and
Speaker 2: it's the very poverty in which they live that defeats
Speaker 2: arguments for abolition by hardening ideas about race. As the
Speaker 2: books now narrator a fugitive slave explains, black gets to
Speaker 2: mean poor, and poor to mean dangerous, and all the
Speaker 2: words get murked together and become one dark idea. A
Speaker 2: cloud of smoke, the smoke stack fumes drifting like filthy
Speaker 2: air across the rest of the nation. Radical pessimism is
Speaker 2: a dismal trend. The despair this particular publishing season comes
Speaker 2: in many forms, including the grotesque. In the Book of
Speaker 2: Joan Lydia Yuknovitch's narrator, Christine Pizan is forty nine and
Speaker 2: about to die because she's living on a satellite orbiting
Speaker 2: the Earth, where everyone is executed at the age of fifty.
Speaker 2: The wet in their bodies constitutes the colony's water supply.
Speaker 2: Dystopia here is menopause. Her body has aged. If hormones
Speaker 2: have any meaning left for any of us, it is
Speaker 2: latent at best. She examines herself in the mirror. I
Speaker 2: have a slight rise where each breast began, and a
Speaker 2: kind of mound where my pubic bone should be. But
Speaker 2: that's it else of woman is left. Yukanovich's Pisan is
Speaker 2: a resurrection of the medieval French scholar and historian Christine
Speaker 2: to Pissan, who in fourteen o five wrote the allegorical
Speaker 2: Book of the City of Ladies and in fourteen twenty
Speaker 2: nine the Song of Joan of Arc, an account of
Speaker 2: the life of the martyr. In the year twenty forty nine,
Speaker 2: Yukanovich's Pisan writes on her body by a tortuous process
Speaker 2: of self mutilation, the story of a twenty first century
Speaker 2: Joan who was trying to save the planet from Jean
Speaker 2: de Men, another historical illusion. The insane celebrity who has
Speaker 2: become the ruler in the end de Men himself is
Speaker 2: revealed to be not a man, but what is left
Speaker 2: of a woman, with all the traces sad stitched up
Speaker 2: sacks of flesh where breasts had once been, as if
Speaker 2: someone tried too hard to erase their existence, and a bulbous,
Speaker 2: sagging gash sutured over and over where life had perhaps
Speaker 2: happened in the past or not, and worse, several dangling
Speaker 2: attempts at ad half formed penises, sown and abandoned, distended
Speaker 2: and limp equal rights for women, emancipation, reconstruction, civil rights.
Speaker 2: So many hopes dashed, so many causes lost. Pisan pictured
Speaker 2: a city of women. Lincoln believed in union, King had
Speaker 2: a dream. Yukonovich and el Akad and Winters unspool the
Speaker 2: reels of those dreams and recut them as nightmares. This
Speaker 2: move isn't new or daring. It is instead very old.
Speaker 2: The question is whether it's all used up, has parched
Speaker 2: as a post apocalyptic desert, as barren, as an old woman,
Speaker 2: as adult as an old man. A utopia is a
Speaker 2: planned society. Planned societies are often disastrous. That's why utopias
Speaker 2: contain their own dystopias. Most early twentieth century dystopian novels
Speaker 2: took the form of political parables, critiques of planned societies
Speaker 2: from both the left and the right. The utopianism of communists, eugenicists,
Speaker 2: new dealers, and fascists produced the russh novelist You've Gainy
Speaker 2: Somitian's WII in nineteen twenty four, Aldus Huxley's Brave New
Speaker 2: World in nineteen thirty five, Iinran's Anthem in nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 2: and George Orwell's nineteen eighty four in nineteen forty nine.
Speaker 2: After the war, after the death camps, after the bomb
Speaker 2: dystopian fiction thrived like a weed that favors shade. A
Speaker 2: decreasing percentage of the imaginary world are utopias, the literary
Speaker 2: scholar Chad Walsh observed in nineteen sixty two, and increasing
Speaker 2: percentage are nightmares. Much in postwar pessimism had to do
Speaker 2: with the superficiality of mass culture in an age of affluence,
Speaker 2: and with the fear that the banality and conformity of
Speaker 2: consumer society had reduced people to robots. I drive my
Speaker 2: car to the supermarket, John Updyke wrote in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 2: the way I take is super high, A super lot
Speaker 2: is where I park it, and supercuds are what I buy.
Speaker 2: Super Sudsy television boosterism is the utopianism attacked by Kurt
Speaker 2: Vonnegut and Player Piano nineteen fifty two and by Ray
Speaker 2: Bradbury in Fahrenheit four fifty one nineteen fifty three. Cold
Speaker 2: war dystopianism came in as many flavors as soda pop
Speaker 2: or superheroes, and in as many sizes as nuclear warheads,
Speaker 2: but in a deeper sense, the mid century overtaking of
Speaker 2: utopianism by dystopianism marked the rise of modern conservatism, a
Speaker 2: rejection of the idea of the liberal state. Rands Atlas
Speaker 2: Shrugged appeared in nineteen fifty seven and climbed up the
Speaker 2: Times bestseller list. It has sold more than eight million copies.
Speaker 2: The second half of the twentieth century, of course, also
Speaker 2: produced liberal minded dystopias, chiefly concerned with issuing warnings about
Speaker 2: pollution and climate change, nuclear weapons and corporate monopolies, technological
Speaker 2: to telitarianism, and the fragility of rights secured from the state.
Speaker 2: There were, for instance, feminist dystopias. The Utopianism of the
Speaker 2: Moral Majority, founded in nineteen seventy nine, lies behind The
Speaker 2: Handmaid's Tale, a book that is, among other things, and
Speaker 2: updating of Harriet Jacob's eighteen sixty one Incidents in the
Speaker 2: Life of a Slave Girl. But wrights based dystopianism also
Speaker 2: led to the creation of a subgenre of dystopian fiction,
Speaker 2: bleak Futures for Bobby Socksers. Dystopianism turns out to have
Speaker 2: a natural affinity with American adolescence, and this, I think
Speaker 2: is where the life of the genre got squeezed out.
Speaker 2: Like a beetle burned up on an asphalt driveway by
Speaker 2: a boy wielding a magnifying glass on a sunny day.
Speaker 2: It sizzles and then it smokes, and then it just
Speaker 2: lies there, dead as a bug. Dystopias featuring teenage characters
Speaker 2: have been a staple of high school life since The
Speaker 2: Lord of the Flies first came out in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 2: but the genre only really took off in the aftermath
Speaker 2: of Vietnam and Watergate, when distrust of adult institutions and
Speaker 2: adult authority flourished and the publishing industry began producing fiction
Speaker 2: packaged for young adults age twelve to eighteen. Some of
Speaker 2: these books are pretty good. M. T. Anderson's two thousand
Speaker 2: and two Ya novel Feed is a smart and fierce
Speaker 2: answer to the Don't be Evil utopianism of Google founded
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety six. All of them are characterized by
Speaker 2: a withering contempt for adults and by an unshakable suspicion
Speaker 2: of authority. The Hunger Games, whose first installment appeared in
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight, has to do with economic inequality,
Speaker 2: but like all YA dystopian fiction, it's also addressed to
Speaker 2: readers who feel betrayed by a world that looked so
Speaker 2: much better to them when they were just a bit younger.
Speaker 2: I grew up a little, and I gradually began to
Speaker 2: figure out that pretty much everyone had been lying to
Speaker 2: me about pretty much everything, the high school age narrator
Speaker 2: writes at the beginning of Earnest Klein's best selling two
Speaker 2: thousand and eleven YA novel Ready Player, One Lately. Even
Speaker 2: dystopian fiction marketed to adults has an adolescent sensibility, poudy
Speaker 2: and hostile Cory. Doctor Roe's novel walk Away begins late
Speaker 2: at night at a party in a derelict factory with
Speaker 2: a character named Hubert. At twenty seven, he had seven
Speaker 2: years on the next oldest partier. The story goes on
Speaker 2: in this way, with Doctor inviting grown up readers to
Speaker 2: hang out with adolescents looking for immortality, while supplying neologisms
Speaker 2: like spum instead of spam to remind us that we're
Speaker 2: in a world that's close to our own, but weird.
Speaker 2: My father spies on me, the novel's young heroine complains.
Speaker 2: Walk Away comes with an endorsement from Edward Snowden, Doctor's
Speaker 2: earlier novel, a YA book called Little Brother told the
Speaker 2: story of four teenagers and their fight for Internet privacy
Speaker 2: rights with walk away doctor pounds the same nails with
Speaker 2: the same bludgeon. His walkaways are trying to turn a
Speaker 2: dystopia into a utopia by writing better computer code than
Speaker 2: their enemies. A pot of merks and an infoteccoon pooorned
Speaker 2: everything using some zero day they bought from scumbag to
Speaker 2: fall info war researchers is the sort of thing they
Speaker 2: say they took over the drone fleet, and while we
Speaker 2: dewormed it, it sees the meccas. Every dystopia is a history
Speaker 2: of the future. What are the consequences of a literature,
Speaker 2: even a pulp literature, of political desperation. It's a sad
Speaker 2: commentary on our age that we find dystopia's a lot
Speaker 2: easier to believe in than utopia's. Atwood wrote in the
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties utopias we can only imagine dystopias we've already had.
Speaker 2: But what was really happening then was that the genre
Speaker 2: and its readers were sorting themselves out by political preference,
Speaker 2: following the same path to the same ideological bunkers as families, friends, neighborhoods,
Speaker 2: and the news. In the first year of Obama's presidency,
Speaker 2: Americans bought half a million copies of Atlas Shrugged. In
Speaker 2: the first month of the administration of Donald American Carnage Trump,
Speaker 2: during which Kelly and Conway talked about alternative facts. Nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty four jumped to the top of the Amazon bestseller list.
Speaker 2: Steve Bannon is a particular fan of the nineteen seventy
Speaker 2: three French novel called The Camp of the Saints, and
Speaker 2: which Europe is overrun by dark skinned immigrants. The duel
Speaker 2: of Dystopia's is nothing so much as yet another place
Speaker 2: poisoned by polarized politics, a proxy war of imaginary worlds.
Speaker 2: Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance. It's become
Speaker 2: a fiction of submission, The fiction of an untrusting, lonely
Speaker 2: and sullen twenty first century, the fiction of fake news
Speaker 2: and info wars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It
Speaker 2: cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn't ask anyone
Speaker 2: to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments.
Speaker 2: It doesn't call for courage. It finds that cowardice suffices.
Speaker 2: Its only admonition is despair. More, it appeals to both
Speaker 2: the left and the right, because in the end it
Speaker 2: requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination,
Speaker 2: asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose
Speaker 2: fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own left
Speaker 2: or right. The radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has
Speaker 2: itself contributed to the unraveling of the liberal state and
Speaker 2: the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism. This isn't
Speaker 2: a story about war Ella cod rites in American War.
Speaker 2: It's about ruin. A story about ruin can be beautiful,
Speaker 2: wreckage is romantic, but a politics of ruin is doomed.
Speaker 2: Twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: One of the things I found interesting about this essay
Speaker 1: is the I mean, obviously the title is a reference
Speaker 1: to yes we can, And I thought, I thought of
Speaker 1: the everything's been dystopia for the last decade or half decade,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, almost a decade, and it had never
Speaker 1: occurred to me to think of that as not a
Speaker 1: reflection of all the problems in the world, but rather
Speaker 1: a feeling of loss about what it seemed to be
Speaker 1: a utopian moment in American life. Is actually how you
Speaker 1: understand the rise of dystopias or this sort of dueling
Speaker 1: dystopia world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I read a lot of stuff about
Speaker 2: the history of the idea of a utopia and then
Speaker 2: the origins of what people call dystopian fiction, you know,
Speaker 2: which really goes back to Mary Shelley, not so much
Speaker 2: to Frankenstein because it's not apocalyptic, but to The Last Man,
Speaker 2: which is the only other novel she published, which is
Speaker 2: a good by the global pandemic in which everybody dies
Speaker 2: but The Last Man.
Speaker 3: And I had.
Speaker 2: Gotten really interested in the notion that every cultural phase
Speaker 2: of dystopianism, where like the prevailing mood is dystopian, followed
Speaker 2: a phase of really quite great hopefulness and even of
Speaker 2: significant kind of social or political engineering, economic engineering that
Speaker 2: we would associate with utopianism. I mean, the idea of
Speaker 2: a utopia. It has to be kind of a planned utopia.
Speaker 2: You don't like stumble across the utopia, like the Garden
Speaker 2: of Eden is not a utopia in that sense, Like
Speaker 2: utopia is something you create, and that's what you know.
Speaker 2: Gulliver's travels all kind of making fun of the idea
Speaker 2: of the the created, perfected world. So like enlightenment thinking
Speaker 2: is utopian, our constitution is utopian. Like it imagines that
Speaker 2: you could you could fix like if all humans are fallen,
Speaker 2: all men are fallen, if there's original sin, or you know,
Speaker 2: you have to kind of begin with Calvinism. But then
Speaker 2: you could engineer your you know, in this Panglossian way
Speaker 2: engineering way to a perfect world or the Bentham utilitarianism, right,
Speaker 2: but then like that never works, so it's always going
Speaker 2: to be.
Speaker 3: Followed by oh, oh, I guess actually there's still the
Speaker 3: evil found a way through the great perfect machine that
Speaker 3: we built, and it's spilling all over the place, and
Speaker 3: it turns out you can never really fix anything.
Speaker 2: So I think that I thought that was really interesting
Speaker 2: as a matter of like literary interpretation, and you can
Speaker 2: it doesn't feature doesn't run through all literature. It's really
Speaker 2: kind of a genre fictional thing. But if you know
Speaker 2: the dystopianism of the sort of HG. Wells, the socialist,
Speaker 2: anti colonialist science fiction writers of the end of the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth century, they're really they're
Speaker 2: understanding that both whatever was predicted as utopian about capitalism
Speaker 2: or socialism, both of those things are failing. So their
Speaker 2: critique of those engineered worlds is going to be let's
Speaker 2: work this through. What's going to happen next? All the
Speaker 2: evil is going to leak out of the perfect machine
Speaker 2: that we're building. And so I don't even how this
Speaker 2: assignment started. I think I was asked just like, read
Speaker 2: a roundup of a bunch of new works of science fiction,
Speaker 2: and they were all dystopian, and so I was like, well,
Speaker 2: I guess I have to understand the origins of Like
Speaker 2: han Urnt writes the origins of totalitarianism, and I write
Speaker 2: the origins of dystopianism. It's like, that's not super helpful.
Speaker 2: I'm not fighting the Nazis. But it's basically it's basically
Speaker 2: a critique of progressivism, right, because every it's the idea
Speaker 2: of progress that underlies all utopianism, the idea of perfectibility.
Speaker 2: So you know that you have all these like science
Speaker 2: fiction dystopians, and then the progressors are like, no, but
Speaker 2: bureaucracy will fix it, Like, Okay, maybe socialism didn't work,
Speaker 2: maybe capitalism unchecked doesn't work, but we have these new
Speaker 2: regulations and agencies and bureaus, and we have bureaucracy will
Speaker 2: fix it, and then there's another wave of, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: the kind of fifties science fiction about conformism, and it's
Speaker 2: basically kind of administrative state, deep state conspiracy theory stuff
Speaker 2: comes out of that, right, so it does make sense
Speaker 2: as a kind of warp and waafer whatever pattern that
Speaker 2: that is. So this piece was me try and understand
Speaker 2: like you know, hunger Game, squid Games as a moment,
Speaker 2: as a response to the realization that my god, you know,
Speaker 2: the Internet didn't actually fix anything, and neither did Obama.
Speaker 2: Like that that was like, oh shoot, so I guess
Speaker 2: the evil just leaks out, Like no matter what machine
Speaker 2: we build, the evil is just gonna leak out some
Speaker 2: we all over the floor like blood and a carpet.
Speaker 2: And the thing that I ended up feeling kind of
Speaker 2: badly about writing about this piece though now that I'm
Speaker 2: remembering it, was how juvenile that seems as a reaction,
Speaker 2: like it's just so black and white, the kind of
Speaker 2: way that like the cognition of a teenager or someone
Speaker 2: in their late teens and their early twenties often is like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: if everything's not going to be right the way I
Speaker 2: thought it was going to be great, then it all sucks.
Speaker 2: And and then you also see that the real marketing
Speaker 2: success of the dystopian science fiction and genre fiction is
Speaker 2: in ya books. You know, like that that Hunger Games
Speaker 2: world really is like that moment when as a teenager,
Speaker 2: like having if you had a happy childhood and as
Speaker 2: a little kid, it's like everything's great, Like my parents
Speaker 2: really love me, and I get to, you know, play
Speaker 2: basketball in my neighborhood and my grandma brings me cookies
Speaker 2: on Sunday and whatever. It is that like your child
Speaker 2: if you have like a very happy, secure childhood, and
Speaker 2: then you get to be a teenager and it's like
Speaker 2: Santa Claus isn't real and my dad's actually an asshole,
Speaker 2: and like suddenly everything goes from being bright to being
Speaker 2: very dark, and and then someone hands you the Hunger
Speaker 2: Games and it's like, you know what the big secret
Speaker 2: is all the adults suck And that's that's what that
Speaker 2: topy move is kind of in a way. And I
Speaker 2: will say like as a I was as a parent
Speaker 2: of three teenage boys at the time I was writing this,
Speaker 2: I was like, you know what someone has to say,
Speaker 2: Like it's not just black and white, and that's like
Speaker 2: the problem with that is a big problem with that
Speaker 2: kind of fiction or with those kind of oscillating You know,
Speaker 2: the same country that elected Barack Obama elected Donald Trump
Speaker 2: and may well elect him again, and you have to
Speaker 2: puzzle your way through that and find a way however,
Speaker 2: you know, if to you it's the same country that
Speaker 2: elected Donald Trump made the great mistake of electing Barack Obama, fine,
Speaker 2: but you still have to puzzle your way through that.
Speaker 2: You can't pretend that one of the elections was illegitimate
Speaker 2: and one was fixing everything and making America great and
Speaker 2: the other was fucking everything up. Like you have to
Speaker 2: just accept that even our polities, like our politics is
Speaker 2: not like all of each like you know, doesn't when
Speaker 2: these people are winning elections by tens of thousands of votes.
Speaker 2: It's the same country like you. So that's why I
Speaker 2: ended up within. No, we cannot because the at some level,
Speaker 2: the juvenile quality of reacting to Trump's election by saying, well,
Speaker 2: then the whole country sucks. There's a kind of it's
Speaker 2: all over, like there is no future. Yeah, that drives
Speaker 2: me a little nuts.
Speaker 1: There is something that you point out in the piece
Speaker 1: that utopia means nowhere and dystopia means an unhappy country,
Speaker 1: so it does feel like it's kind of baked into
Speaker 1: the premise of one of these yes from the beginning.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well I think that also people don't have
Speaker 2: and as a young person, especially in the ya kind
Speaker 2: of world, you have to figure out where your worldview is,
Speaker 2: Like do you believe in the fall of Man? I
Speaker 2: mean like like that's that's why you read books, like
Speaker 2: you have to deduce that from your experience of the
Speaker 2: world in your own reading. And it is really useful
Speaker 2: to go read Mary Shelley's Last Man, or go read Frankenstein,
Speaker 2: or go read Dickens, or go read James Balden, whatever
Speaker 2: you want to read, like it's you gonna piece together
Speaker 2: an understanding of humankind and the natural world and life
Speaker 2: after death. Or you know, you may inherit a worldview
Speaker 2: that's religious from your religious upbringing, and you may not
Speaker 2: inherit a worldview in exactly that way. Or you may
Speaker 2: struggle with the weird, secular commercial view you got growing
Speaker 2: up on YouTube, but you still have you have to
Speaker 2: have a view. I want to allow it to be
Speaker 2: defined by the mood of pessimism in our politics. I
Speaker 2: don't know that's pretty crummy, Like you really don't have it,
Speaker 2: Like everything looks bad in our politics, So I don't
Speaker 2: know I did. It's the books for grown ups that
Speaker 2: are just kind of cheap dystopianism did kind of piss
Speaker 2: me off on Maybe that probably comes through. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: was a little mean about some of those books.
Speaker 1: Probably Is there a dystopia that you like? Was there
Speaker 1: something from this most recent match of dystopias that you
Speaker 1: liked or did you turn to any during the pandemic?
Speaker 2: This is I say, like when I was a young person,
Speaker 2: just to be like candid, like when I read The
Speaker 2: Handmaid's Tale had a huge effect on me. I mean
Speaker 2: partly I was living in Cambridge where it is set,
Speaker 2: so you knew all the sites were recognizable, you know,
Speaker 2: and I was like, you know, volunteering at the Women's
Speaker 2: Center or whatever and hanging out at the feminist bookstore
Speaker 2: and it it really meant something to me. And I
Speaker 2: think it is a genuinely revelatory way of imagining the
Speaker 2: dystopia that falls from a certain kind of confidence about
Speaker 2: what feminism accomplished and did not accomplish it that moment
Speaker 2: in time. I love that book and I get what that.
Speaker 2: It actually helped me to think and sharpen my own
Speaker 2: ideas about how power operates in society. It didn't leave
Speaker 2: me feeling like, oh my god, there's nothing worth fighting for.
Speaker 2: It felt to me like a really useful cautionary tale.
Speaker 2: I think it's kind of a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant book.
Speaker 2: I think she, you know, She's at what, has written
Speaker 2: many really amazing pieces of fiction. But I love that.
Speaker 2: I love that book, and it really I read it
Speaker 2: at exactly the right moment. I was at the age
Speaker 2: when that kind of dystopianism can be especially powerful. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't like object to it. All told, I think
Speaker 2: what what I haven't myself come across is the sort
Speaker 2: of dystopianism or critically minded novel about tech utopianism that
Speaker 2: is helpful in that way, right. I think ultimately most
Speaker 2: of that sort of Corey Doctro and Corey Doctro adjacent
Speaker 2: kind of stuff really participates in the kind of tech
Speaker 2: guys as gods, even if it disagrees or wants to
Speaker 2: kind of call our attention to possible ill effects of
Speaker 2: loss of privacy or you know, whatever they want to
Speaker 2: paint it Dystoba, but it's actually kind of it's quite disempowering.
Speaker 2: There's an Isaac Asimov story from nineteen fifty five called Franchise,
Speaker 2: in which computers have gotten so good at predicting elections
Speaker 2: and figuring out a representative sample of the population in
Speaker 2: order to predict elections that it's not really worth having
Speaker 2: elections anymore. So every presidential election year, one person casts
Speaker 2: a vote, and that person has been chosen by the
Speaker 2: supercomputer as the most representative American at that moment in time,
Speaker 2: and then that person bears basically the burden of the
Speaker 2: presidency because it was that person's choice. And like, I
Speaker 2: love that kind of a tech science fiction endeavor that
Speaker 2: actually kind of caused attention to the sort of logical
Speaker 2: consequence of a way that a technology is moving and
Speaker 2: a kind of human capitulation to it is moving. I
Speaker 2: just don't know that I've seen that about our moment
Speaker 2: that felt to me the way like Handmaid's Tale felt
Speaker 2: to me when I read it about that moment. So
Speaker 2: I would love to see that. Like, I'm a huge
Speaker 2: science fiction fan, Like I love the genre, but I
Speaker 2: don't really love dystopianism unless it's helping me,