this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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That's a common trope in dystopian settings.
The youngest people in the society don't understand that anything is even wrong. The rich folks have a vested interest in people being more afraid of foreigners and domestic terrorists than any government malfeasance. And the working class is so occupied with simple survival that they see no real opportunity to revolt... until something really falls off the rails, at which point the military moves in to suppress dissent with maximum bloodshed.
In those dystopia settings however, they never seem to have all the literature describing dystopia. We do here
Eh, it depends on the author. I've seen a lot of modern Post-Apocalypse/Cyberpunk stuff make comedic quasi-self-references by way of media-within-the-media (A piece of modern literature in the Fallout setting describing a "dystopian" world in the self-proclaimed utopian Vaults, for instance).
But the point of the media-within-the-media is often to illustrate how we fixate on the drama of dystopia without acknowledging the banality of social evils.
Right now, in the mostly-free-press parts of the world, I now think that dystopian scifi no longer serves as a warning of what not to do but instead acts as a numbing agent to increased oppression.
This is going to sound very Maoist or whatever but we need more utopian scifi like Star Trek TNG. We need utopian visions imagined for us so we have something to work towards.
It was so refreshing to watch the Chinese TV show for Three-Body where the world was at peace with each other and trying to solve this bizarre global mystery. Sure, the Chinese government was painted as much more competent than American & European governments but Hollywood does the same thing with the US government too.
1984 literally has a manifesto describing what's happening.
In fact, the brainwashing of the kids in 1984 to report on their parents having / reading / discussing "controversial media" is a major element of the dystopia. Those media are not explicitly named, but I don't think they have to be.
I feel like this describes pretty much every western society since we moved beyond tribalism.
I don't think tribalism was the apex of greatness people seem to think it was.