The Future of Dystopia

Abstract

Dystopia, just as utopia, has always been immersed in political visions: utopia as an ideal society and dystopia as its opposite: ‘bad place’ – a futuristic, usually very near future, an imagined universe in which oppressive social control rules. However, utopia and dystopia cannot be absolutely separated, there is a constant threat of replacing good place by bad place, very often leading to the conclusion that every utopia either leads to dystopia or already is dystopia. Today, it often seems that the dystopian future has already arrived, the reality itself evokes dystopian imagination: the global warming and the catastrophes, the monstrous underside of various technologies that would ultimately overpower us – humans. Furthermore, both utopia and dystopia are narratives about how to govern the commons. Whereas in the past the commons appeared in different utopian visions of good governing, today most often the commons fleshes out in disfigured forms of dystopian narratives. In this essay I analyze dystopian imagination as a traumatic symptom of the commons, expressed in different narratives of the crisis of capitalism (the Anthropocene, the global monsters, the uncanny weather, metaverse, neo- or techno-feudalism).