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 over-power‎ 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 in‎different narratives of the crisis of capitalism (the Anthropocene, the global‎ monsters, the uncanny weather, metaverse, neo- or techno-feudalism).‎